Check out this article

How Healthy Are Your Church Families?

How do you figure out the true health of your church? This is kind of a danger zone for pastors and leadership teams for two reasons: 1) we are prone to base it on anecdotal evidence or general feelings; 2) we tend to either use no metrics or misleading metrics. Additionally, unless you’ve only been at your church for a short time, say less than two years, you’ve grown accustomed to your surroundings and it’s now very difficult to see reality regarding your church’s health.

The traditional metrics (nickels & noses, butts & bucks, ABC—attendance, buildings, & cash) can only ever provide a skewed and shallow grasp of internal health. Though the talk for well over a decade now has been about our need to move to stories and other subjective metrics, none of these has yet usurped the throne from attendance and budget numbers. That still tends to be our default for purposes of categorization, comparison, and evaluation of church health.

One potent alternative may be carefully diagnosing and periodically recording the health of the families in your church. Over time, such diagnosing and recording will provide a baseline and elucidate the trajectory of the health of both your individual church families and your church body as a whole. Focusing on the health of your church families promises great potential for encouragement for the small church pastor who feels a sense of stagnancy or despair. And it might inject conviction and correction for the leadership team persuaded by their traditional metrics that all is well.

Some small churches may not have any families with kids or teens. If this is your church, you sincerely desire these families to join and you’ve been pouring your heart out for years in prayer over it. Although it may be tempting to assume that it’s because your town is so small, or your church isn’t big enough to offer the right amenities, or a more exciting church nearby is too strong an attractant, the reality is probably that your internal church culture is unintentionally and subconsciously designed for a church without younger families. Upending this culture for one that draws in younger families is a topic too involved for this post, but it probably needs to be square one. (This should also probably be square one if young adults are quitting church or if your church families are merely surface-healthy). Here are a few elements of what an attractant church culture would look like: expect younger families in everything you do and say and plan, pretend that younger families are already participants, provide accessibility for younger families to places of leadership and decision in your church governance, and adjust your sermons and sanctuary for the presence of toddlers.

Younger families offer an opportunity for any church to leverage intergenerationality for the spiritual maturation of all. Haydn Shaw, in his book Generational IQ: Christianity Isn’t Dying, Millennials Aren’t The Problem, And The Future Is Bright, illustrates that for the first time, five generations are represented in our churches. If our families are healthy, this can allow for much greater depth and breadth in everyone’s discipleship track. Having healthy families automatically bakes in the various age group affinities to match anyone who might be a guest at your church. Even if your church is unable to implement and staff programming for kids, teens, or young adults, these age groups will still feel at home because “there are other people like me.” This will foster that all-important sense of “I belong!”

Younger families bring all kinds of color and perspective to the spiritual maturity process, and consequently to church health. You’ll have a teen or grade schooler ask profound theological questions that you’ve never even thought about before. You’ll have children on the autism spectrum and young adults who are specially-abled who will give you deeper insights into the heart of God than could ever be possible without them. You’ll have adoptees and kids in the foster care system that will bring challenges to any prim, linear conception of discipleship. You’ll have marital disappointments and extended family dynamics that will train you church body in the intense relational character of the Trinity. The relative healthiness of the families in your church is a barometer that shows that faith works in the most complex and difficult circumstances. Younger families are often the strongest interface between the truth of the Gospel and the messiness of everyday life.

The shepherds of the flock are responsible to see to the health of the flock. We have to help our families in their striving to be healthy. It’s crucial that our programming and time expectations are designed to nurture family health. We have to be vigilant to kill off competition for younger families between church programs and expectations. Think about it: if we want families to eat dinners together, pray together, and spend time in worship and the Word together, we the church have to be the biggest protector of their time. We can’t build our programming with assumptions that the family can collectively be involved in church activities for more than two to four hours per week in most cases. If we can combine church family activities on a single night, especially if it’s a night that has infrequent school or extracurricular activities, we are directly coming to the aid of families wanting to be healthy. And we can bring much needed assistance to families when we speak openly, practically, and pointedly about specific family struggles such as use of technology, how to conduct appealing and meaningful family worship times, best practices in family conflict and confrontations, and so on. Parents must embrace primary responsibility for discipleship, accountability, and mentoring, but our churches can help them protect their time to do it.

Want a handy aid to establishing a baseline for the health of your church families, whether they be few or many, over an extended period of time? Check out the PULSE app.

Shawn
Written By:

Shawn Keener

Consultant
Shawn writes and consults in a variety of areas including: Revitalization

View more content from Shawn

Interested in connecting with or booking time with Shawn Keener? Use our getting starting form to let us know. We'll follow up with shortly.