Health-o-meter

Since before Day One of LHC, we have always known our mission was not to be a big church, but to be a healthy one. Of course, because we are located in a metropolitan area of >1.3 million people, if we are healthy, we will grow in size.

But, there are other metrics for the health of a church. The challenge is to identify the right ones and measure accordingly. Some of these objective measurables are readily apparent:
The # of people stepping into faith in Christ for the first time.
The # of people getting baptized as a statement of faith.
The # of people regularly tithing
The growth of existing ministries and/or birth of new ministries (or eliminating of ineffective ministries)
Some of the subjective measurables are equally important. They're just much tougher to evaluate accurately because they transcend quantifying:
The worship climate of a congregation
The working environment of the staff
Spiritual Development of the congreation
This last one is the one that I think is the stickiest to evaluate. How do you determine "spiritual development" when it is personal and universal, individual and communal, as well as mysterious and obvious?

What criteria would you suggest in evaluating the spiritual development of a particular church?

One Prayer

Yesterday, I suggested checking out Craig Groeschel's blog, and today's post is the reason why. In case you didn't scroll down past the video window, there's more information available at this site.

Bottom line, some of the greatest communicators and leaders in the Church today will each do a sermon called "One Prayer", the premise being this: If God would answer one prayer for the Church at large, what would you pray?

I believe that this move will make one of the biggest Kingdom impacts that our generation has ever seen. It's hard to believe that we get the privilege to be a part of this opportunity. Here are just some of the reasons that this will be great for Lake Hills Church:

1. It's a Kingdom thang. We'll get to participate and experience the joy of investing in something bigger than anything we could accomplish by ourselves.
2. The introduction of video teaching in our church--which we'll be using through our satellite campus(es)--using some of the greatest teachers and biblical communicators in the world.
3. Through a special offering, we'll be able to partner with hundreds of thousands of Christ-followers to make a significant difference in the world through missions.
4. Our church will be introduced to some incredible teachers who are also friends of mine that we couldn't possibly bring in all at once in person because of scheduling, expense, and logistics.

There's obviously more to come, but I wanted to let you know about it and be praying about it starting NOW.