What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—
practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you. (Phil. 4:9)
“Not enough is studied about how the body keeps well. Medicine treats symptoms and doesn’t get at causes. Studying disease is a backward way to do medicine. When you treat an ulcer, you’re not treating what caused it. Teaching such things to a patient should be ninety percent of the practice of medicine. It’s not—as done by most people.” So says family practice physician Sue Cochran, as reported by John McPhee in his 1986 book Heirs of General Practice. [1]
How does the church body keep well? What causes a church to flourish or collapse? Do you know how to tell the difference, spiritually speaking, between symptoms and causes?
Sometimes a man’s desire to pastor is stoked by experiencing a lack of health in a church. That is one way that God brings good from evil (Gen. 50:20). But, as in medicine, studying negative symptoms affords only a partial, unbalanced education. If all you know about what a church should be is, “Not like that one,” slow down. Reaction breeds overreaction.
A healthy church is
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