Is Your Church Healthy?

To pursue your congregation’s vision and calling well, it is essential to have a healthy congregation. In our Renewal Lab, we teach that at least two things are critical to church health:

• Grace – In healthy churches, we treat each other with the same mercy and kindness we have received from God through Jesus Christ.
• Permission – In healthy churches, people experience permission to take risks and explore change with joy and enthusiasm.

To many, it seems as if these types of environments are becoming rarer every day. Rather than being grace-filled, many churches are battening down the hatches. Rather than worrying about people on the outside who need to discover the love of Christ, we get worried that people on the inside are too fundamentalist, too woke, too red, too blue, etc.

• On the permission side of things, churches are often more fearful than permission-giving. There is no joy in risk-taking or change. Instead, there is deep fear of what will be lost. (People are not anti-change; they are anti-loss.) Fear and anxiety keep people from moving forward. They want to go back to where they believe it is safe.

Grace and permission, though essential for church health and moving forward with renewal, are rare commodities. Here are a few ideas about how to cultivate them.

How to develop churches of grace and permission

1. Celebrate Failure

• National Public Radio has a show called “Failure Lab” where people talk about their failures and what they learned from them. Too often, churches are nervous about admitting their failures. However, owning our failures and talking about them leads us to seek new pathways that can lead to better ministry and mission. As a pastor, we did a service based on Failure Lab and laid out to our congregation what we saw as some of the biggest failures in our church’s ministry and mission. It was very well received!

2. Build a Culture of Kindness

• What we celebrate, we get. Celebrate acts of kindness in your congregation, and encourage them to move toward one another and the world. This can be as small as honoring those who bring meals to new moms, praying for those suffering in the world, or preaching on God’s kindness toward us.

3. Articulate Clear Core Values

• Bill Easum says, “Core values provide the non-negotiable boundaries in which everyone in the church can minister. Individuals and teams are given autonomy to begin new ministries as long as they enhance the core values.” When we have clear core values owned by leadership and the congregation, people are free to pursue the mission boldly and try new things without fear.
• Dan Rockwell says, “Explain limits. Understanding limits is more important than understanding permission. Once limits are set, everything else is permission. Tell them what they can’t do.”

4. Create Clear Systems

• Our systems and processes are the way we either give or withhold permission. Looking at these parts of your church culture, are they designed for control or for permission?

5. Create an interactive listening culture

• Graceful churches (and graceful people) listen first and talk second. Listening first and asking wise questions opens us up to understanding other people, their hearts, and their motives.

6. Give people the benefit of the doubt

• Most people deal gently with themselves, giving themselves the benefit of the doubt and putting the best light on their actions, while viewing others’ actions with suspicion. Leaders need to cultivate a pattern of putting the best light on other people’s actions and then encouraging the entire congregation to do the same.

7. Choose Gratitude

• Research shows that gratitude is the single best predictor of well-being and a great first step toward creating a culture of grace and permission. Neal Plantinga writes that it makes us more faithful, joyful, healthy, and generous. We must consistently contextualize the struggles and worries we have within the bigger picture of deep joy and gratitude for God’s work in us.

When you evaluate your congregation today, how robust is your culture of grace and permission? Which of these ideas might help you live more fully into these ways of being healthy?