After the interview, I started thinking...
What is a "healthy" church? I think a healthy church is a church that is actively loving God and loving others. A healthy church will have times of expressing culturally relevant worship together as a community. They will have times of challenging each other from God's Word. They will have times of fun and relaxing together. A healthy church will make the community/city in which it lives a better place. A healthy church will make it clear to everyone how much God loves the people of that city. They will work together to build a taste of the Kingdom of God in their community.
While this is a nice vision, the pragmatist in me now asks: "HOW?" If you are still reading, here are a few thoughts:
- This kind of "Christianity" has to be taught and modeled from the pastor and staff. People should hear stories regularly of how the pastor and his/her family have been involved in loving God and loving people. The staff ought to be able to share stories about caring for others and authentically worshiping God (individually and corporately).
- People need opportunities or venues in which to learn to live this way. While it would be great to say your neighborhood is your mission field, let's face it, 90% of the people in a church are scared to death to share their faith with their neighbors. So part of the role of the leaders of the church is to create opportunities to model and then let people practicing this kind of "loving out loud."
- People need safe places to remember how good God is. This happens when small groups of people do life together. This happens on Sunday mornings when corporately we talk about God and how He is working in our lives. This happens via email and phone calls between people who are in authentic relationships with others in their community of faith.
- People need to be inspired. This world is full of depressing and dark news. People need to know that the God they love is bigger than this world. They need to know that life is more than an accident of nature, but it has meaning and significance.
- People need to be prayed for and cared for. Ezekiel 34 challenges the "shepherds of Israel" to start truly caring for their sheep. The prophetic call to shepherd needs to be sounded again. Pastors and leaders need to care for the people of their congregation...really love them! When you do, you will pray for them, you will invest in them, you will teach them, you will inspire them to be more than they ever dreamed they could be.
Terra Nova may have "scored" well on some survey, but in reality, our health boils down to our people learning how to love - God and others. So far, they are amazing at this. My prayer is that we continue to grow in this. I can honestly say that I love this church (and I don't mean the building!). I hope I get to pastor here until I die!
Under the Mercy,
Jason
2 comments:
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Jason. Healthy Church/Unhealthy Church are interesting ways to describe our communities. I like all of your views on how a community can be healthy and I believe that list can continue on and on.
"Tasting the Kingdom" is what it is all about. It seems that hope is such a real word for this journey, and experiencing this alive with a community fosters deeper realities of what health is all about.
Micah,
I agree! I like "tasting the kingdom." That's a great metaphor. There is a sense in which our calling is to be professional taste testers - giving out free samples of the Kingdom to whomever will try it.
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