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! Introduction
When I turned 41, it was very important to me to have a physical check up.
You see, my father died when he was 41 and I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen to me at that age.
Most of us have at least some level of concern for our physical health.
We try to eat properly, get some exercise, remove stress and get plenty of rest.
We may test our blood pressure at the pharmacy.
From time to time, we may have a check up at the doctor.
The Bible calls the church “the body of Christ.”
Do we ever concern ourselves with the health of the body of Christ?
When addressing the churches in Revelation 2,3, God accused some of them of not being healthy.
The most direct accusation was to the church in Sardis in Revelation 3:1, “To the angel of the church in Sardis write: These are the words of him who holds the seven spirits of God and the seven stars.
I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead.”
Being dead, is not exactly being healthy.
These accusations suggest that we can’t get complacent, but that we need to think about the matter of the health of our church.
“Is ours a healthy church?”
When a doctor examines you, he has a whole bunch of tests that he does, blood pressure, heart rate, blood tests, “samples” and so on.
How do you find out if a church is healthy?
At one of the first meetings I had with the ministerial I asked this question of them and they came up with a list of things which would identify a healthy church.
There is a man in Germany by the name of Christian Schwartz, who has done research on over 1000 churches and has found that those churches which are healthy and growing have one thing in common.
They are healthy in 8 quality characteristics.
The interesting thing is that in the informal survey which I did with our ministerial, the same 8 quality characteristics were identified.
The 8 Quality Characteristics of a healthy church are the following: (overhead)
Holistic Small Groups
Empowering Leadership
Need-oriented Evangelism
Passionate Spirituality
Inspiring Worship Services
Loving Relationships
Gift Oriented Ministry
Functional Structures
This description of church health makes a lot of sense to me.
In all my years of being a pastor, I have often wondered, “how can we be more effective in the work God has given us to do.”
As I have thought about this, I came to understand the importance of small groups, of people working in their area of giftedness, of the importance of a worship service that inspires and so on.
Then when I discovered this research and the material that goes with it, it was as if my experience and my hearts desire for the church came together in a much more focused way.
Those of you who are farming know very well that you cannot grow grain.
In Mark 4:26-29, Jesus tells the parable of the kingdom, comparing it to a seed that grows up.
The farmer plants the seed and then really does little else to make the seed grow.
He simply waits for the harvest.
Indeed, he can’t make the seed grow, only God can make it grow.
Mark 4:28 says, “all by itself the soil produces grain.”
Yet as farmers, you also know that there are some things you can do to create conditions in which grain will grow well.
If you do nothing to control weeds, grain will have a hard time producing.
You can even destroy growth if, for example, you apply a herbicide instead of fertilizer.
Just so in the church, we cannot grow the church, but we can create conditions which will either promote growth or hinder growth.
By making sure that these 8 quality characteristics are present, healthy and growing in our church, we create conditions in which growth can happen.
The research which Christian Schwartz did found that in churches where these 8 quality characteristics were healthy, churches were growing.
The same truth is found in I Corinthians 3:6 where Paul says, “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow.”
We cannot grow the church, but by proper seeding and watering, we create conditions in which God can do what only He can do and that is to grow the church.
Later in the same chapter, now using the building imagery, Paul challenges the Corinthian church that each one needs to be careful how he builds.
It is possible for us to create conditions in which we hinder God’s work or on the other hand, we can create conditions in which God is given freedom to build His church.
I am sure that we want to be a church in which we create conditions in which God can work.
The ministerial is recommending that we as a church ask this question of church health.
We will be doing two things over the next few months to work in this direction.
Until the end of November, we will examine each one of the quality characteristics so that we understand that these are Biblical concepts and so that we understand why they make for a healthy church.
The other thing we will be doing is administering a survey to discover just how healthy our church is in each area.
Christian Schwartz has developed an instrument to gauge how healthy a church is in these areas, sort of a church blood pressure monitor.
Thirty leaders of the church will be doing that survey and learning how we as a church are doing.
After that, we hope to proceed with steps necessary to become an even healthier church.
!
Holistic Small Groups
We have assigned the 8 quality characteristics to different people to preach on over the next 2 ½ months.
They are not in any particular order and if you look on the bulletin board at the back, you will see when each will be covered.
The first one we will look at this morning is “Holistic small groups.”
!
I.
The Value Of Small Groups
When we read the New Testament, we realize very quickly that very much of it has to do with Christians relating to one another.
The phrase “one another” occurs thirty-six times between Romans and Revelation, referring to healthy relationships among God’s people.
As we examine how that works practically, we find that “much of the essence of true church life is worked out in small groups.”
It seems obvious to me that a church cannot do all of what it means to be the church as a large group.
You cannot be close enough to a whole church in order to share with all the members the things that are a concern to you.
A large group has a hard time holding individuals accountable.
In the whole church, it is hard to care for the specific needs of individuals.
In a large group, not everyone will have an opportunity to use the gifts God has given.
Let me try to illustrate this mathematically.
(overhead) In your relationship to a friend, there are two of you and there are two lines of communication - you to your friend and your friend to you.
Such a relationship is quite manageable.
If you are in a group of three friends, there are now six lines of relationship.
There is a formula which is used to find how many lines of relationship exist in a group.
A x a - a = lines of relationship.
So as we have already seen 2 people, 2 lines, 3 people, six lines.
So when there are 10 people, the group has to maintain 90 lines of relationship.
This is a lot, but it is still manageable.
However, with 250 people, there are 62,250 lines of relationship that need to be maintained.
At this point, it is clear that the quality of relationships will not be the same in all of those lines of relationship.
Since so much of church life has to do with “one anothering” it is obvious that a good portion of those relationships must happen in smaller groups within the church.
Besides making sense in terms of relationships, research has also demonstrated that “continuous multiplication of small groups is a universal church growth principle.”
(overhead) The graph shows the answer to the question, “I have a group in this church where I can discuss my personal problems.
On the left side are declining churches and on the right growing churches.
On the top are churches where small groups are high quality and on the bottom where they are low quality.
To a large degree, where caring groups are high quality, churches also are growing churches.
Being part of a small group in a church not only makes sense mathematically and has been demonstrated to be an effective part of a growing church, it is also a Biblical idea.
The first place that we see the wisdom of small groups is in the Old Testament.
When Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt, he was the leader of the people.
Of course, not everything went smoothly and not all relationships were good and Moses was handling all the conflicts and concerns of the people by himself.
When his father-in-law, Jethro, came to visit with him, he noticed that Moses was wearing himself out and wasn’t being effective.
He confronted him about the foolishness of what he was trying to do.
He advised him to divide the people into smaller groups with judges in charge of each group.
They in turn would report to leaders of sub groups and to leaders of tribes and finally, if necessary, Moses would be consulted.
The story is found in Exodus 18:13-23.
It teaches us the principle that smaller units are more manageable in terms of the functions of what it means to be the people of God.
When Jesus came to earth and began his ministry, we know that he did not do all his work alone nor did he relate only to the large masses which followed him.
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