THE LIFE CYCLE OF A HEALTHY LEADER/CHURCH

If you have been around me much you have heard me say this many times:

Healthy things grow

Growing things change

Change requires risk

Risk requires faith

Faith makes you healthy.

This is what I call the life cycle of a healthy leader, or for that matter, a healthy church.

For the next several blogs I would like to dissect these modules. So let's start with "healthy things grow".

We often use the early church as our picture of health. When you read the book of Acts you see two very profound things taking place. There was incredible numerical growth as well as spiritual growth. In other words we can safely say that the early church grew both in depth and breadth. More than 10 times Luke tells us that the church grew numerically because of the many conversions taking place. It was also critical to the early church to continue to be strengthened. The level of persecution and trials the early church endured required them to persevere and grow deeper. That is why Paul challenged the church in Collosse to be strong and vigorous in the truth so their spiritual roots would grow deep. You read the same thing in Acts 14 where Paul and Barnabas were strengthening the believers so that they would persevere in the faith.

The bottom line is this. In order for any leader or church to be healthy there must be evidence of fruit in two areas. One is that of conversion growth and the other of growing deeper in love with Jesus Christ.

So the question for you and your church is this: Are you healthy? If so, are you growing in these two areas?