Metrics of Renewal, 1: Can We Measure Church Health?

It’s hard to know what a healthy person looks like these days.

Take Angelina Jolie for example. For many people, she is the picture of good health. Some tabloids occasionally accused her of being too thin. But most folks idolized her “healthy body.”

How little they knew! She has a genetic predisposition that almost guarantees breast cancer. Her mother died at age 56 from breast cancer. He aunt just died from the disease.

With this scary prognostication in hand, Angelina Jolie did something incredibly shocking. She underwent preemptive mastectomies. Next, she’ll have reconstructive surgery and then have her ovaries taken out for good measure. Talk about a radical cure for a disease she didn’t even have! She knew, however, that her apparent good health was not the complete story.

So who is healthy? And how do we know what good health actually looks like?

Here’s one obvious conclusion:

                        good looks ≠ good health

Of course, the opposite certainly isn’t true either, so I need to add this corollary:

                        bad looks ≠ good health

Simply put, it’s not so easy to know what good health looks like. It’s probably easier to spot bad health than good health. But can we really be sure that someone is as “healthy as a fish” just by looking at them? (They say this in Czech—guess it's good to have fish-like health.) So many things can mislead us or can be lurking beneath the surface.

But what about churches? Can we pick out a healthy church based on its appearance? Are there clear and verifiable metrics that can tell us whether or not a congregation is healthy?

In the same way that a person’s looks might not tell the full story, a church’s persona or outward appearance might give us the wrong impression.

For example, I know folks who have taken a ministry job at what appeared to be a healthy church. They were ecstatic with their opportunity to work with what looked like a “healthy group of elders” or a “wonderfully open-minded church.” After the honeymoon period ended, however, they began to discover the skeletons hiding in the closets. They started to realize that dysfunction lay just beneath the surface. Or they noticed that the church’s “God talk” wasn’t symptomatic of deep faith in a God at work in their midst but rather superficial language that masked self-centeredness.

So how do we pick out a healthy church? What are the metrics by which we can gauge vibrancy, vitality and renewal? We’ll think about this in the coming weeks.