Faith Today - January/February 2016

COVER STORY

WHAT IT
MEANS TO
THRIVE AS
A CHURCH IN
CANADA
Five things healthy
churches do well

BY JOEL THIESSEN

hriving churches exist in Canada.

In connection with a newly formed Flourishing Congregations Institute at Ambrose University, I am at the outset of a three-year study with three colleagues to define and understand what flourishing congregations (Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant and conservative Protestant) look like in a uniquely Canadian context.

We will look at how local congregations may move toward and maintain a flourishing community culture. One of our goals is to develop and deliver specific applications of findings, analyses and recommendations to various Christian traditions.

From the literature on churches that thrive, five interrelated features stand out. Intentionality binds them together. Like cultivating any habit in life, congregations do not flourish, develop or thrive without intentionally seeking to do so.

ceeding in ways the world calls
success, and end up feeling worse.
Or failing in ways the world meas-
ures failure, and feel worthless.
Please tell us again, and tell us
often, that the world is not enough,
and was never meant to be.

Inflame us afresh with the hope of the eternal. Help us to become all a little more like Stephen, or Paul, or Peter, or the saints of old, for whom heaven was the prize, and all else sheer gift, or distraction. Every effective Christ follower who’s ever lived was of earthly good precisely to the degree they were heavenly minded.

Help us to be like that. Tell us what waits.

I was thinking, when I woke up from the dream I told you about, how John wrote to seven churches. And Paul, by a weird coincidence (or not), also wrote to seven churches.

Not one of those churches was perfect. A few were close, but those ones struggled financially, or suffered brutal persecution, or were threatened with disunity, or heresy, or plain old discouragement.

But there’s no number eight. There’s no church, anywhere, at any time, that has been made perfect yet, that represents the fullness of Christ’s presence and God’s Kingdom without flaw or diminishment. All limp toward a reality that’s not here yet. All see through a glass darkly. All carry the glory in clay jars.