“How to Spot a Healthy Church” (Colossians 3:1-17), June 14, 2009
They’ll know we are Christians by our clothes.
Church health
It’s been about six years since I completed my Doctor of Ministry degree. The subject of my thesis was “healthy church growth among mainline churches in the Bible belt.”
My mind went back to that research as I opened this week’s sermon text. A piece of my study was on “healthy churches.” What qualifies a church to consider itself “healthy”?
You want to be part of a “healthy church,” right? But what does that mean?
I discovered two streams of thought in my reading of the literature on healthy churches. If you’re really interested, you may read my review of the literature on church health on my blog.
Books about church health fall into two general categories. One set of books focuses on what a church does – a church is healthy if it wins people to Christ, teaches the Bible, makes disciples, produces results? The other set of books focuses more on what happens inside the church – is it a non-anxious community of healthy relationships?
So which one is right? To respond to that question, I asked in my thesis, “If a champion marathon runner’s lab test shows a high white blood cell count, is she healthy? If the electrocardiogram of an overweight, inactive, fifty-year-old male reveals no sign of heart disease, is he healthy?”
The answer to both questions would be no, right? The runner is active, but shows signs of disease. The couch potato doesn’t accomplish anything physically, but the internal systems are working normally. Neither one is “healthy.”
Today’s sermon is a contrast with last week’s sermon, titled “How to Spot a Cult.” A cult is an unhealthy religious organization. Symptoms of disease include a suspicious origin, distortion of Christ, excessive control, and arrogant independence.
It seems logical to follow that sermon with one asking, “What are the signs of a healthy church?” Fortunately, that’s exactly where Paul takes the direction of his letter to the Colossians. He follows his warnings about the false teachers with his description of what a healthy church looks like.
What I’m getting ready to say virtually guarantees I will never run for public office or seek to be a justice of the United States Supreme Court. Because if I did, someone would scrutinize everything I ever wrote or said, including my sermons. And they would undoubtedly discover that on June 14, 2009, I gave the following four characteristics of a healthy church –
· A healthy church cares about seating
· A healthy church condones killing
· A healthy church communicates its dress code
· A healthy church celebrates its wealth
Perhaps I should explain.
A healthy church cares about seating (vv. 1-4)
Seating matters. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t sit in the same place in the sanctuary every Sunday. Where you sit in a classroom or a public assembly says something about you. If you sit close to the front or the middle, you are likely to be more assertive, higher in self-esteem, more imaginative, and in need of more attention. Or maybe that’s just the case with the people who come to church with you!
A healthy church welcomes and ministers to people no matter where they choose to sit and regardless of their personality. But a healthy church cares about another kind of seating.
Paul begins his description of a healthy church by saying, “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (emphasis added).
Paul’s theme in Colossians is that Christ is supreme. Whereas a cult centers its attention on the charisma, gifts, visions, insights, and rules of its leader, a healthy church looks up to where Christ is seated in the place of preeminence and authority.
Part of what happens when you come to church not just for worship but for study, fellowship, and service, is that we point you unapologetically, persistently, and joyfully to Jesus Christ as the only Source and Goal for meaning in life. Most of us spend most of our lives chasing after the wrong seating positions – sitting in a place of power and influence, sitting in a recliner or a lounge chair or a golf cart, sitting pretty with financial security or a happy love life.
We are here to remind you what really matters, and it’s not that. We are here to remind you that most of the goals you and I set our hearts on are either unachievable, unsustainable, unsatisfying – more happiness, higher pleasure, greater prosperity, improved health, longer life, increased knowledge, enhanced convenience.
A healthy church doesn’t encourage drinking salt water, which creates more thirst than it quenches. A healthy church cares about seating. It points you to Jesus Christ, who made you, loves you, seeks you, guides you, and helps you. He is seated at the right hand of the Father. He has made it through the highs and lows of human experience, and is waiting for us to join him in that eternal place where we’ll finally gain perspective on what matters.
A healthy church keeps reminding us to start now.
A healthy church condones killing (vv. 5-11)
OK, so this bullet point is slightly sensational. But everybody believes in killing. Where we usually disagree is about who or what needs to be killed when and why.
The Apostle Paul offers two lists of what must be killed in verses 5-10: sexual sins and relational sins.
A healthy church sets moral boundaries. Last week we learned that one of the marks of a cult is excessive control, especially in minutiae. Every detail of one’s life is to conform to cultic practice – is to be indoctrinated, observed, corrected, and, if necessary, punished. That’s a cult.
But Paul will not go to the opposite extreme and say, “Anything goes.” A healthy church does not pretend that behavior has no consequences – spiritually, personally, emotionally, relationally. We would be neither healthy nor loving if we allowed people to self-destruct without warning.
So Paul mentions these two categories of behavior that are particularly destructive because they are so easy to rationalize and so delusional in their initial gratification. These must be killed.
The first is sexual sin. He uses five words in verse 5:
· sexual immorality (porneia in Greek, from which we get our word “pornography”) – any form of sexual fulfillment outside marriage
· impurity – moral uncleanness, which goes beyond the sexual act and can imply crude jokes and what we call sexual harrassment
· lust – uncontrolled passion in the mind
· evil desires – Paul has to add the adjective “evil” because some desires are good
· greed – the craving for more intense and more varied sexual experiences, which is idolatry because it’s completely focused on self-gratification rather than on God’s intent for sexual expression, which is about expressing and deepening a life of commitment between a man and woman in marriage.
Paul gives a separate list of relational sins to kill in verse 8:
· anger – “smouldering and seething hatred” (N. T. Wright)
· rage – when the inner hatred shows itself in words and actions
· malice – a deliberate intent to harm
· slander (blasphemia in Greek) – spreading rumor, gossip, even truths with the intent of harming someone’s reputation
· filthy language from your lips – profanity, obscenity, probably used to reinforce slander because it adds passion and makes one less open to correction from those who hear
Paul condones killing all of those behaviors. “How?” you ask. First, by naming them as inconsistent with your Christian faith. Second, by refusing to rationalize any of them. Third, by inviting the help and power of the Holy Spirit in daily attention to these sins. Fourth, by associating in community with others who are on the same path. It’s far more difficult to make excuses for pornography, adultery, sexual harassment, anger, gossip, and profanity in community, isn’t it? When we want to harbor those behaviors, we withdraw or hide.
According to verses 9-11, a healthy church is a community which constantly reminds other members of the community that we tell the truth because we are in relationship (“each other,” v. 9) and in process (“being renewed,” v. 10). In a healthy church we don’t see each other as Jew, Greek, uncivilized (“Barbarian and Scythian” were pejorative Greek ways to describe people who were illiterate and uncultured), slave or free. We are just Christian, belonging to Christ (v. 11).
If none of these is sufficient to break free of sexual and relational sins, seek specific help from another Christian, a pastor, or a counselor. But kill those behaviors before they kill you.
A healthy church communicates its dress code (vv. 11-14)
Even stating this point causes me to remember my older brother, Jim, who as a teenager was the least conformist of the five children in our family. My mother was a traditionalist who believed that you show your respect by what you wear. In response, Jim sang a parody of the 1970s chorus: “And they’ll know we are Christians by our clothes, by our clothes, yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our clothes.”
Actually, in a metaphorical kind of way, he was right with the Apostle Paul in Colossians 3:12 – “As God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.”
Here is a glaring contrast not only between a healthy church and a cult, but between a healthy church and any other kind of church. I’m so glad Paul didn’t stop in verse 11 with this text. Had he done so, we would have assumed that what he meant to say with his list of sexual and relational sins is that we’re all responsible to see that every other member of the community kills their sins.
Not exactly. Not even close. While the healthy church articulates its moral boundaries, it acknowledges that we are all at different places in this journey. God is dealing with each one of us individually, and it is not for us to designate ourselves – or anyone else – as the church’s version of the Gestapo.
So we concentrate on putting to death our own sins, but when it comes to the sins and shortcomings of others, how should we respond? Again, Paul gives a list of five words –
· compassion – sensitivity, empathy; imagining what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes
· kindness – “the art of being a dear” (Lord Hailsham, 20th century British politician)
· humility – not demanding one’s rights; following Christ’s example (Philippians 2:5-11)
· gentleness – strength under control, a healthy sense of who you are and Who made you that way
· patience (makrothymia in Greek, “maximum heat”) – a deliberate, extended tolerance for the failings of others
Doesn’t that sound like a healthy church to you? I am sometimes almost fall-out-of-my-chair astounded at the attitude of those who recognize their own imperfections, but treat the sins of others with condescension, judgmentalism, and disdain.
But we should even be compassionate, kind, humble, gentle, and patient toward them, right? Verse 13 tells what to do about those in the community who don’t “get it” yet in one or more areas of our community standards. We “bear with each other” (13). Sometimes being in community means we will “put up with” people, situations, and behaviors we find repulsive – precisely because we realize they don’t get it yet. We forgive others (13) – the door is always open to reconciliation and restoration. Why? How can we not forgive when we have been forgiven much?
In a word, Paul says in verse 14, “love.” Paul could have just told them in the beginning to love each other – and that’s exactly how he, Jesus, and John said it elsewhere. But here Paul has introduced the application before he introduces the word. Compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forgiveness – that’s whatit means to put on love.
A healthy church celebrates its wealth (vv. 15-17)
Every society is conscious of wealth – who has it and who doesn’t, and how wealth affects social status, privilege, and power.
Paul wants every Christian to think of himself or herself as “rich.” Verse 16 says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom.”
The word repeated three times in this final paragraph is not “wealth” but “gratitude.” You can see the correlation, though, can’t you?
“Be thankful” (v. 15). “Sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts” (v. 16). “Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (v. 17).
A healthy church celebrates its wealth with gratitude. It is a place of peace (v. 15) – not because its people are perfect or its structure is biblical or its needs are all met – individually or corporately.
It is a place of peace because its members recognize and give thanks for their wealth in Christ. They are content to let God be God and don’t have to fix everything in everybody or in the church or in the world. They recognize, in fact, that things are inherently unfixable. We’re not going to get it right. Obama is not going to leave office and the world has solved everything from here to Cairo. Thompson’s not going to leave Corinth with all the problems fixed.
But we are at peace because he is. And so we sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, Paul’s way of affirming a variety of musical expression even in the first century. A grateful church is a singing church that lets its heart overflow into melody. I’m always a little disappointed when I see people not singing in church – whether it’s one song or a habit. It’s another one of those areas to apply compassion and patience – but in a healthy church music expresses what is in our hearts.
It’s up to you
Isn’t that the kind of church you want to be a part of? One that keeps its focus on Christ, puts to death sinful behaviors, lives in love toward each other, and expresses its joy and gratitude in great music?
Maybe you should go find a church like that. It’s the American way. Every church looks like that at first, so we go searching for a church that seems as healthy as possible – or at least as healthy as we are.
But the more we get to know any human institution, the more we discover its flaws. Just as “everyone’s normal till you get to know them,” every church is healthy till you get to know the people, right?
So maybe the question is not, “Where can I find a healthy church?” Maybe the question is, “What can I do to make the church where I am healthier?”
Amen to that.