Characteristics of a healthy church - part 1

I've been writing about our desire to be a healthy church. What are the characteristics of such a church body? What is our target? What are our goals? There are ten.

Today, we look at the first one. A healthy church actively seeks the Holy Spirit's direction and empowerment for its daily life and ministry.

We desire to be a church of God's presence.

As a Pentecostal church, this might sound obvious, but its something that we must continually reaffirm.

We desire that God's presence be felt so strongly that (and not to sound weird or goofy) even when people drive by the building on 127th and Ridgeland, they sense God's spirit, which is a spirit of love, mercy and forgiveness.

As an Assemblies of God church, when we think of God's presence, we think almost immediately of the spiritual gifts, or the gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as miracles, healings, messages in spiritual language and interpretation. We think of spiritual manifestations that we can physically recognize. And that's part of it.

But the number one way that God's Spirit is shown is how we treat one another and how we treat the world around us.

In order to facilitate this, a spirit of independence must continually be broken. We must place our egos and pride into the loving hands of our Father.

We must nail to the cross the "Its my way or the highway" kind of thing.

Our culture just naturally fosters an independent, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps type mentality, and that is something that a true Christian mindset continually combats. A spirit of control.

Control is a deadly force in church communities. I know of one church that asked their pastor to leave because he was introducing too many changes and offending the families that had for generations controlled the direction of the ministry.

Another church split because the "power families" did not like what the elders had decided about the music ministry. Another church still, which had a long history of conflicts that resulted in several pastoral leadership changes, lacked focus in ministry and were caught in the trap of "majoring on the minor issues" type thing.

That created a decline in attendance and nuked their community witness.

A true Pentecostal church is a church that is walking in the freedom of the Holy Spirit and has been broken - confessing and leaving their own agendas at the cross.

I would suggest that it is only when we approach God with an open, outstretched hand that we are ready to receive from him, the work and ministry of the Holy Spirit.

We are all merely, "beggars helping other beggars where to find bread."