Healthy small churches

Yesterday I shared a comment from one of my books that has not sold as well as I expected. Today I want to highlight the book that has sold the most copies of any of them I've published. That book is The Healthy Small Church: Diagnosis and Treatment for the Big Issues. Not only has the book sold well, it has allowed me to be invited to lead conferences and seminars for numerous denominational groups across the US and Canada.

Judicatory leaders have bought this book for every pastor in their region. A Lutheran church contacted me requesting 90 copies to give one to each family in their church, and then invited me to preach in their church one Sunday and conduct a workshop that afternoon. A Church of the Nazarene in Michigan bought copies for each family and used it as a mid-week study working through each of the 16 chapters. I later had the opportunity to preach in their church. I've had several pastors tell me their church has used the book to study the health of their congregation. I've been richly blessed knowing how this book has impacted so many churches.

Larry Mason, a former boss, once noted that the principles shared in that book were applicable to any size church, not just small churches. He's right, but I intentionally used smaller churches as examples simply because there has not been a lot of resources written especially for them. That is beginning to change as more people are recognizing the importance of smaller churches.

There is no exact definition of a smaller church. A church of 150 people in one denomination might qualify as a small church while in a different denomination that might be a fairly large church.

What I did in that book was to list several qualities I thought were critical to the health of a church. Some of those qualities included having sound theology, a fresh vision from God for the church, transformational worship, how acceptable the church is to change and its ability to handle conflict, the importance of spiritual leadership from their pastoral and lay leaders, a sense of community, financial health, being mission minded, and involved in outreach. Each of these areas, and others, had a separate chapter that explored what health looked like for that area. The final chapter offered review questions in each of the areas for a church to use to evaluate its health

Just as a person should have a physical each year to evaluate his or her health, I encourage churches to conduct an annual evaluation of its own health using these questions as diagnostic tools. You may find that your church is pretty healthy in some areas but not as healthy in others. You then know what you need to address so your church can be as healthy as possible.

We need every church to be healthy if we are to impact our world for the Kingdom of God. I encourage you to evaluate your church to determine how healthy it is and then determine to do whatever it takes to improve in those areas that might not be as healthy as they could be.