Church health

Bryan Moak, vice president of Church Strengthening for Converge MidAmerica, joins Converge church planting leaders Lee Stephenson and Danny Parmelee to discuss how your church plant can start healthy and stay that way.

1:18 Bryan recommends guarding the vision. "We start adding stuff that makes sense at first, and all of a sudden, we’re adding stuff that no longer makes sense to the vision. Once you start something, it is really hard to get rid of it. And things become sacred cows really quickly."

2:16 Bryan says to be careful about who you put in leadership. "Test leaders well before you put them into those positions."

3:33 Bryan talks about how a planter should approach a church that is considering replanting or even giving away its building.

5:44 Bryan discusses how Natural Church Development (NCD) can help you assess your church’s health.

8:07 Bryan says a church must be committed to prayer to be spiritually healthy.

8:35 If you take an assessment and then put it on a shelf and say, "Oh, that was interesting" and never doing anything with it, it’s not going to be effective. "What makes NCD effective is when you actually play it out and implement changes with what we say is your minimum factor — that thing that scores the lowest."

9:22 Bryan says it’s OK to want your church to grow, but you want it to grow in the right way, the God-honoring, gospel-centric way.

11:05 Bryan talks about holistic small groups as an example of a minimum factor.