How do you know you are truly healthy? Do you go to the doctor, read the latest food book, climb a flight of stairs or look in the mirror? Do you just wait for others to inform you when you start looking sick?
Though we live in a health-crazed culture (scan the shelves of our local bookstores), many of us are remarkably unhealthy. We either lack the awareness of what “good health” really is or don’t care enough to change the way we live. Usually the pain of being unhealthy has to increase to intolerable levels before we are willing to change.
Similarly, churches can be unhealthy. We all know this, and most have suffered through unhealthy churches one time or another. Strained relationships, defunct leadership, and low-level anxiety are the norm. People come and go. Little kingdom work is done. Some unhealthy churches don’t seem aware of it. Or they simply ignore their deteriorating health, normalizing the pallid color and decreasing weight, until something finally snaps. And like a heart attack patient, the church is shocked into tending to their health by a sudden crisis.
What does this mean for us at Erickson Covenant? Well, we want to be healthy! We want to pursue God’s desire for us, allowing God’s diagnosis and lifestyle plan for health to mark out our way of being and doing “church.” As a church, we are pursuing a pathway of vitality, so that we become a healthy, missional church. But what are the vital signs of a healthy, missional church? What are we looking for? How can we get God’s perspective and prescription for our life together?
In order to explore this, we are launching a new message series “Vital Signs of Healthy, Missional Community.” We will examine ten vital signs, or missional markers, giving us a picture of what a truly healthy, vibrantly missional church looks like on the ground. As a community, we will let God’s picture of healthy missional set the pace for our pathway.
Come out to our Sunday gatherings and join in on the conversation (there’s always Q & A!). Go to our “Sermons and Podcasts” page and listen in. Let’s lace up those running shoes and start walking the pathway together.
~ Tom