What to Look for in a Church

1.      What is being preached?

Ideally you find a church that practices expositional preaching—that is, they preach from a passage of the Bible and explain it. This is opposed to preaching on a topic and finding random verses to fit their theme.

Likewise, be sure the pastor(s) are interpreting the Bible correctly.

2.      How the church is run?

Does the lead/senior pastor all make the decisions and simply take input from the elders or congregation? Or do elders and the congregation make the decisions?

3.      How much money and energy is spent outside the church body?

Unhealthy churches spend most of their resources in house. They hire more and more staff so that the people are required to do less and less. This makes people into passive consumers of religious goods and services. In contrast a healthy church equips people to actively spread the Gospel and serve others.

A good church will be outward looking, investing in other churches and spending a significant amount of money on global missions.

A good church will also emphasize the need to serve the broader community.

4.      Who and what is influencing the pastor/staff?

You will be fed from the same source the pastor is feeding from.

5.      Is the church Gospel centered and can you grow in your understanding of the Gospel there?

Church should focus on the essentials and little time should be spent on other things. The dynamic of salvation, of the Gospel, (God offers a gift of grace that we accept in faith) should be present in every sermon (for it is present in every page of the Bible). Things like the rapture or end times can be brought up, but should not be discussed all the time because they rarely show up in the Bible (the word rapture doesn’t even appear in the Bible!). Focusing on the essentials makes it easy to invite friends (a discourse on the End Times may be bewildering, but the Gospel won’t be, no matter what passage you pick from scripture to exemplify it).

Church should be a place to invite the unbeliever, but it must be a place where you can grow in your own understanding. There should be Sunday school classes and the messages on Sundays should not be the same thing every week (this is where expositional preaching helps, without it pastors tend to preach the same thing over and over).

The goal of our faith is not improvement, but transformation. Sermons on better parenting, etc. may improve you, but only the Gospel will transform you. Everything the church does and says must be in reference to and centered in the Gospel.

6.      There must be opportunities to connect with others.

This is especially true if the church has more than a hundred or so people. There needs to be small groups or Bible studies—something where you can know people and be known by them—where you can hold people accountable and be held to account.