Is your Congregation Spiritually and Emotionally Strong?
It takes a while to clean out a 110-year-old church building. As the congregation I pastored prepared to leave their building, I was tasked with sorting through the pastor’s office. I filed, organized, and recycled. Sorting the hand‑written notes and cards brought me to tears. Each letter overflowed with love, affirmation, and encouragement. The congregation truly cared for one another—and for their pastors.
Among the piles, I uncovered a sheet from my first year. I had written a goal for the congregation: “Create a high‑trust community of GRACE.” I stared at the paper, stunned. When I wrote the goal, I meant it with a lower-case g: grace. But here they were, merging with a congregation named Grace—capital G.
God answered my hopes and dreams in ways I never imagined: both grace and Grace. A few weeks later, at the first service of the newly merged congregation, I told this story and preached:
“You are forming a high-trust community of GRACE—all caps. You’ll figure things out together. It won’t always be easy or clear, but there will be lots of laughter and some tears—and in the end, growth in love and grace.”
Fast-forward several years. As the Good Friday Collaborative began creating an assessment for threshold congregations, we knew that we needed to start by assessing how congregations experience God’s grace through loving and spiritually growing communities.
We call this Spiritual/Emotional Strength. Here are a few signs that your congregation is strong spiritually and emotionally:
You are rooted in your faith. Members spend more time in Bible study than in administrative committees, and the committees ground their work in key questions like, “Why God? Why the church? Why this church?”
You connect outside the church walls. You engage your community through mission projects. You invite others because you want people to experience the love of God— not because you want to keep the church going.
You embrace change. You are willing to try new things. You regularly experiment with possibilities. As circumstances change, you learn, adapt, and grow. You never get stuck in “this is how we’ve always done it,” because you are focused on God’s mission.
You relate to one another with love. In making decisions, you are not ruled by fear. When conflict occurs, you disagree without being disagreeable. You acknowledge hard truths without assigning blame.
You rejoice. You laugh together! You are grateful for the past without trying to recreate it. You are not anxious about running out of funds or people—because you know God will be with you.
If your congregation is strong spiritually and emotionally , then you will make it through—no matter what faithful next steps you choose. Spiritually/Emotionally Strong congregations have a range of options for the future. Depending on the church’s other strengths (in People, Finance, and Building), options may include revitalizing, relocating, redeveloping property, merging, yoking, or faithfully completing. These paths all require robust spirituality and the ability to address conflict, change, and uncertainty. Discerning the future is easier when a faith community has a joyful sense of God at work, healthy approaches to conflict resolution, and a willingness to adapt and experiment.
Spiritual/Emotional Strength does not mean a congregation can continue in exactly the same way it always has. I know this personally as the pastor of a “high-trust community of GRACE.” As a congregation, we cultivated deep relationships rooted in truth-telling, a strong sense of mission, and a willingness to try new things. Our bishop used to quip, “I’ve never seen a growing church that wasn’t having fun!” This was true for us — because even when we weren’t growing numerically, we were still growing spiritually. We knew our purpose.
Still, the church had People, Financial, and Building challenges. Fortunately, with each challenge, our joyful spirituality kept us faithful. I laughed each time the Trustees ended lengthy emails with:
“And this is why Jesus never had a building...”
When it came time to make hard decisions about the future—decisions that meant they would leave their building, identity, and even their name in order to follow God’s call—the same Trustees proclaimed:
“It wouldn’t be a tragedy if we left this building. It would be a tragedy if we stopped being a church doing the work of justice.”
With those words, the mission of God became our guide in all the decisions that followed. Spiritual/Emotional Strength opened up options until we became a new community of GRACE—all caps.
Would you like to see your congregation’s Spiritual/Emotional Strengths compared to your People, Building, and Financial resources? Download our Congregational Self-Assessment or—if you are a regional leader—the Judicatory Leaders’ Assessment.
