The Health Sequence
by Roger Jenks
January 1, 2003
The conference speaker was clear. "There are five essential questions of congregational life," said the Rev. Lloyd John Ogilvie, "five questions that must be asked and answered sequentially. If you skip any of them, the best that your church will ever do is limp."
With that opening line, I began to take notes.
When I returned from that conference, however, I kept those questions to myself. They guided me personally, but not the church as a whole.
Now, 20 years after speaking at that conference, Lloyd John Ogilvie is the chaplain of the U.S. Senate, and I'm in my fourth church. Yet when I came to my current pastorate, I decided our whole congregation needed the reprioritizing influence of those five, fundamental questions. I hoped the church would seek and take ownership of the answers. I didn't realize how dramatically these questions would transform us.
Many churches try hard to "do church" the best they know how. Yet those churches are often directionless (like we were), relying more on doing what's familiar than on what would help them grow. "The reason is," Ogilvie said, "that 95 percent of churches never ask themselves the first question."
Start with the end
Two years ago, at our annual all-church retreat, I instructed the entire church to stand in a circle. Then I took one little girl into the middle of the circle, handed her a rubber ball, and told her, "Throw this ball as hard as you can at the target." And then I stepped out of the circle.
The girl stood there, confused. She turned and looked, but there was no target. Nowhere to throw that ball "as hard as you can."
I explained to the church, "This girl is us. We don't have a defined place to pour our efforts. We have no target."
This set the church up for the first key ...
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