Four Marks of a Kingdom-centric Church

A church existing for the Kingdom of God will always be reminiscent of a heroic, rescue mission for one very loved and lost lamb.

What is important and what we find ourselves doing are often two very different things. We get that. We often drift away from significance in many realms of life. Drift is easy to start and hard to stop.

But what seems more troubling is when we actively measure our drift as calibrated metrics of success. Like an adolescent proudly declaring how many days he has not eaten a vegetable, the evangelical subculture still finds itself comparing and competing on frivolous metrics while neglecting that which is spiritually substantial.

The church growth hangover is tough to shake off.

Rewiring our long-established ecclesiastical hardwiring can be an exasperating procedure. Much of our spiritual muscle memory has been dedicated to the objective of growing a worship gathering—and it is not easy to train new muscles.

Rethinking and recalibrating this instinctive pattern can be a challenging assignment for those gutsy enough to attempt it. But for those who dare, they just might discover something more powerful than the most polished gathering. An ecclesiological upgrade that more resembles the first century than the twenty-first.

It starts with what we measure.

Physicians instinctively get this idea. They rarely look at a patient’s stature and predict his level of health. To a physician, ‘tall’ doesn’t mean healthy, nor ‘short’, unhealthy. Instead, they have a handful of significant metrics that they measure which are commonly called ‘vital signs.’

Vital signs are significant to a physician for quickly ascertaining the general health and wellbeing of a patient. These are not a comprehensive picture of a person’s health, but if something is awry in any one of them, major health complications ...