Changing the guard

It's AGM time for many baptists, and that usually means a few elections of officers and deacons and elders. We've just had ours, and on Wednesday the new core leadership team, deacons, meets for the first time. There is obviously some continuity, but there are also some new faces too.

I'm sure we will go through all the phases of team development that those in leadership have experienced before. We will need to rework some of our meeting schedule to take account of the work patterns of the new team.

As I was thinking about this, and about what to say by word of welcome to the new deacons, I came across an article by Rick Warren about church health. His premise is that church growth will only come through church health. In other words a healthy church will naturally be a growing church. This connects with the idea of natural church development derived from extensive research in the area of church growth. This is not new, it's all in The Purpose Driven Church as I recall, and many more besides I don't doubt.

Whilst Rick Warren identifies 5 aspects of health (fellowship, discipleship, worship, ministry and evangelism), Christian Schwarz (author of Natural Church Development) outlines 8 quality characteristics (empowering leadership, gift-orientated lay ministry, passionate spirituality, functional structures, inspiring worship, holistic small groups, need-orientated evangelism and loving relationships). 

There is an immediate correlation between these two approaches, and the clearest connection is of course the assumption that if a church is healthy it will grow. That in turn surely makes the priority of the leadership team the health of the church rather than the management of the church. 

It just makes me wonder if we shouldn't be thinking about structuring our leadership team and our church around principles of church health rather than principles of church growth.