Community of Health

How do you describe your congregation? Small, medium, large, mega? What about conservative, liberal, confessional, liturgical, contemporary? Is it dying, surviving, thriving?

Would you describe it as a community of health? Whether you are a lay person or a pastor, let me encourage you to consider your congregation as a community of health. Is it one? What would it take for it to be so.

Focus on the following five points.

First, help your congregation be a gathering of individual persons. See each person not as a part of a group or some sort of “identity”. Rather see each person as an individual person who bears, admittedly in a broken way, the image of God.

Groups drive the discussion these days. This person is a ___________ or a ___________ or a ___________. You fill in the blank. In identifying an individual by the group of which that person is a member nullifies individual personhood. Remember, God did more than create humanity; he created Adam and Eve, two individual persons. Each person is an individual for whom Christ died.

Why is this important? It is easy to write off or devalue whole groups of people; it is hard to ignore an individual person. My mother used to say, “Be nice to that person, that is someone’s little boy or girl.” Years ago I read a study about motels that had policies against renting to certain groups of people. It turns out that when an individual of that group asked for a room, often the policy was not enforced. The difference lay in the individual as a person. Human dignity derives from individual personhood.

Second, help your congregation build on the premise of shared weakness and brokenness. The common denominator is our need for Christ. Don’t look first or foremost to the assets that people bring to the table, but rather the areas of hurt, brokenness and need. Jesus does not build upon our strengths but on our weaknesses. He told Paul, “My power is made perfect in weakness.” A congregation is a community of health when it receives and cares for the weak, the “useless”, the hurting, the needy.

Third, help your congregation become devoted to the regular habit of thorough Bible reading. Jesus said, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples. You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” We meet Jesus in his word. We experience truth and freedom in his word. We receive power and direction through his word.

So much of life is lived without or even contrary to the words of the Bible. We should not be surprised that loneliness, purposelessness, addiction, sexual immorality and many self-destructive behaviors are prevalent in a seemingly affluent and prosperous time. Across the landscape we too often are a people unmoored from truth and enslaved by mammon and the flesh. The path to health runs through the Bible.

Fourth, help your congregation invest in a vigorous small group ministry. Many have said people need a “Cheers” in their lives, a place where everyone knows each other’s names and, very importantly, notices when someone is missing. In such settings we care for one another, share burdens, celebrate joys and experience the consolation of the Saints.

The Church speaks much about the real presence of Christ in Holy Communion. We probably should also think more about Jesus being really present in his word. But let us never forget the promise of Jesus to be present wherever two or three are gathered in his name. Small group settings within a congregation provide a great path to health because the Great Physician himself is present.

And fifth, help your congregation develop an ethos and reputation of serving others within your community. Too often the Church is accused of looking in judgment or with disdain toward others in the world. As Christ followers we can have the eyes of Jesus who looked out at the hurting and harried world with compassion. He saw individual persons as sheep without a shepherd.

As we freely receive, we freely give. As we experience greater health (body, soul, mind), we extend it to others. Certainly, we want others to have what we have in Christ. When we engage our communities with humble service, they will be drawn to Jesus and ask us to give an account of the hope that we have within. This spirit grew the Church in the beginning and through the years. It is what will grow the Church now.

It is time for Christians in America to quit worrying about and wringing our hands over “what’s going on these days”. We should quit obsessing over categorizing our congregations with labels like dying or thriving or liturgical or contemporary or any of a dozen other appellations. Here’s what our time and every time needs of the Church: that local congregations are communities of health.*

*For more (and deeper) thoughts on this see Andy Crouch’s The Life We’re Looking For. This post grows out of that work.