The New Testament does give a few attendance statistics, but what happened spiritually in the believers’ lives – or did not happen – stands out on the pages of Scripture as the ultimate standard for measuring success, according to Gene Getz in his book The Measure of a Healthy Church: How God Defines Greatness in a Church. Today we tend to measure the success of churches by attendance numbers, when we should really be using qualitative measures.
The call for more suitable ways of measuring church success has been resounding more loudly in the years since this book was published, and the measures most commonly now advocated are quality of discipleship and level of impact that the church has on the city in which it is located. Both of these are simpler than the author’s approach, which involves examining what the New Testament says about the church and deriving principles which should be applied. There are 33 principles in all, including:
- the degree to which true believers in the church are functioning as a family
- the degree to which believers have a true understanding of who the Lord Jesus Christ really is
- the degree to which all believers in that local community reflect the life and glory of the Lord Jesus Christ
- the degree to which God’s people are motivated to live righteous lives because they clearly understand and deeply appreciate God’s grace in having saved them
- the degree to which believers are manifesting faith, hope and love – but especially love
- the degree to which spiritual leaders are biblically qualified
- the degree to which believers in the local church are regularly experiencing fellowship with God and one another
- the degree to which the church is impacting the world and seeing people put their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation
These sorts of things cannot be measured as easily as the number of people attending, but they represent a more faithful and comprehensive list of factors relevant to the health of a church. It occurred to me on reading the book and learning a little about the author’s original church planting journey that the excitement is not really in measuring the prescribed list of factors – a complex and subjective task – but in searching the scriptures, finding what they have to say about the church, and then putting it into practice.