Healthy Church

My Church just finished a three week sermon series looking at what marks a healthy Church. I could list the marks that they gave, but really it wouldn't mean a whole lot without going into depth on what they really meant by each point. It was an interesting thing to think about, and I thought our pastors had a lot of good thoughts on the matter. If you're interested, our sermons are posted here. So far only the first of the three is up. Usually they seem to get around to updating it once ever couple of weeks.

Another thought I've had about Churches is the difficulty of what they try to do. Especially when I came out of LAUP, it was easy to be critical of Churches because they weren't giving the same hardcore teachings that I received at LAUP. When I think about it though, I'd be concerned if all of the teachings at a Church were on that level. A young Christian, for example, really needs discipleship to solidify the basics of Jesus. I wouldn't dream of putting someone through an intense study of Amos before they studied the Gospels. On the other hand, there's a lot of people that really need those deep and challenging teachings. I would also be worried about a Church that wasn't seeking to challenge people any further than a basic understanding of Jesus. After that, throw in issues of age and people that are all sorts of different places in life and come from all sorts of different backgrounds.

Don't get me wrong, I think LAUP, and other programs like it that are wonderful and I wish there were more of them. I'm just saying that when you take a group of people who are all in their college years, and further filter them down by requiring a certain amount of spiritual maturity, it's a lot easier to target discipleship at them. It just seems amazing to me that a Church body would ever be able to meet people at so many different places in life.