Healthy, Growing Churches (1)

Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. Ephesians 2.19-22

Epistle to the Ephesians
Marius Victorinus (ca. 280-363)
“Jesus Christ and his teachings are the foundation for the apostles. The edifice built on this foundation consists in life and character and one’s conduct and discipline. The primary foundation…is to believe in Christ, hope in him and trust in God. This foundation is the teaching of the apostles, which is also heard in the word of the prophets. Note the order of this distinction, first apostles and then prophets. The apostles beheld [God incarnate]; the prophets received the Spirit. These are the saints mentioned above: those who saw and those who were inhabited by the Spirit. Hence the teachings of the apostles and prophets are indeed the teachings of Christ, which proclaim the foundation of all eternal hope.”

A pernicious error pervades Christian thinking in our day. We might call it “The Fallacy of Numbers.” A recent article in the Journal of the Evangelical Society surveyed “church growth” in the book of Acts, focusing exclusively on every reference to numerical increase of believers. I wrote the author and asked if he intended to do a study on qualitative growth of the church, to complement this work. He did not. Everywhere we look in the church today, the focus is on numbers. We measure the health of our churches by whether we’re adding people, increasing attendance, growing our budgets, and so forth, rather than by “life and character and one’s conduct and discipline.” But you will search the writings of the apostles in vain for any such measure of fruitfulness. In this series, we will examine the teaching of the New Testament concerning what constitutes a healthy, growing church, and work to establish a more Biblical and historical view of what we should be aiming at in our ministries. Because if the goal is not numbers, yet numbers are what we continue to pursue, then we’ve believed a lie, and our labors will be in vain unless we build the Lord’s temple as His Spirit directs.

What criteria do you employ to determine the state of your church’s health and growth?

T. M. Moore

Healthy, Growing Churches
Our assessment tool, Twelve Questions that Could Change Your Church, can help you discover the degree of unity and maturity that characterize your local church. Use it with your church leaders to discern the health of your church, then use it to plan the next phase of your growth as the Body of Christ. You can download Twelve Questions for free by clicking here.

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Except as indicated, Scripture taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Quotations from Church Fathers are from the Ancient Christian Commentary Series, published by InterVarsity Press.