How Do We Know that a Church is Healthy?

A growing church is not necessarily a healthy church but a healthy church is always a growing church. What determines if a church is healthy?

You can see by studying present and past Annual Church Profiles (ACPs). We seem to focus on numbers and numbers are important but we don’t always look at the right numbers and how they reflect the heart of a church. Another problem is convincing some of our churches to submit their ACP. The ACP is such a valuable tool but some churches look on as just another report. When all the churches in a community submit their ACPs, we can then take that data and compare it with demographic reports and have a pretty good idea of how effective we are at reaching the community. School enrollment for each grade level is readily available. I know of one church that had 90 children enrolled in a certain grade of their local school and felt that they were being very successful at reaching that grade until they found out that there were eight schools in that area, each having 90 students enrolled in that grade so even though they were doing a good work, they were not reaching but about 13% of the children in that grade. It is important to know the makeup of your community if you want to know who you are impacting.

The ACP is valuable for comparing statistics for present and prior years. Usually we focus on SS and Worship attendance and giving but what about Discipleship Training, Missions involvement, special missions offerings, enrollment by age group, etc. Associational work would be simplified if every church submitted their ACP each year.

Many churches in the Southern Baptist Convention have not baptized one person in years. That is sad because it means we are not even baptizing our own children. Without something like the ACP to track that information we forget how long it has been since we baptized anyone. A healthy church is a reproducing church. A healthy church is a church with a strong Discipleship Ministry that teaches people who to live out their faith. I’m afraid that statistics show that we have many unhealthy churches that need to be revived. Let’s pray that the church in America will wake up and get busy about the Father’s business.

Jim Ballard
Associate for Church Services
Kauf-Van Baptist Association
Texas