Pam and I have been listening to sermons by Pete Hise, pastor of a highly-evangelistic church in Lexington, Kent. We became aware of this church through someone we met at the ChurchMedia.net conference in June. I wrote earlier about this church, how they’ve had 1300 conversions during the past seven years. Anyway, we really enjoy Pete Hise’s messages. He’s very humorous, very informal, very engaging. He seems to have a lot of fun when he preaches.

We listened to three of his sermons a few weeks ago as we returned from vacationing in Michigan. In one message, Hise told about his annual month-long getaway…to a monastery! He eats and worships with the monks, while planning the coming year at his church–vision, sermons, etc. He mentioned one monk whom he described as the Simon Cowell of the monastery, the guy who decides whether or not a prospective monk gets in. Hise asked him, “What are some of the reasons you would not accept a person who applied to become a monk?”

The monk told about one young guy who seemed like a perfect fit for the monastic life. But before becoming a full-fledged monk, you spend several years as a novice (with a different colored robe). You see if the monastic life suits you, and other monks watch you.

As time passed, this novice kept dropping ideas about how to do things a little better. They could turn down the temperature a bit to save some money. During singing, they could bunch of a little to make it sound better. He had a number of such ideas. And when he came to the end of his novice period, he was told, “We’re sorry, but we don’t think this life is for you.”

This puzzled Pete Hise. “You mean you turned him down for offering suggestions?”

“No,” the monk told Hise. “He simply cared too much about this world.”

The monastic life is a life of denial–of possessions, of ambition, of sex. The monks live not for this world, but for the next world. That is what they set their minds on. This fellow so much wanted to improve the here-and-now. And that disqualified him. Now, you can argue why it’s not a bad thing to improve this world. But it does give something to think about.

My church has taken the Natural Church Development survey several times, and it’s a useful tool for identifying church weaknesses and strengths. But I’ve had some nagging doubts. The folks who developed the survey claim they studied healthy churches in all kinds of settings around the world, and that the survey is universally applicable. But when I take it, the questions always seem geared to a white suburban or smalltown American church. Would they really apply to a persecuted house church in China?

In particular, I didn’t remember any questions about how the church cares for the poor, the dispossessed, widows, homeless, prisoners, etc. The Bible is pretty clear that these are things a church must do. So how can a church be “healthy” when these areas are totally ignored?

Today I looked over an NCD questionnaire, just to see if my suspicions had any basis. There are 91 questions, and number 82 does ask you to give a response to the statement, “Our church does something about hunger in the world.”

But beyond that reference to world hunger, the survey makes no attempt to measure whether the church is doing anything for poor people, for people with AIDS, for single-parent families, for the homeless, for people in prison, for social justice, for immigrants, etc. There is not even anything about race, like whether or not your congregation contains people of other races and ethnicities. These issues may not matter (sadly) in American suburban churches, but they certainly matter in most of the non-Western world. Yet, if your church does help poor people, fight injustice, and seek racial integration, the NCD survey won’t give you any credit for it.

While not dealing with those issues, the survey does ask, “Despite my church activities, I still have sufficient time for my hobbies.” It’s nice that the survey is concerned about my hobbies. I might propose a statement like, “My hobbies get shorted, because I’d rather give my time to church work” That seems like a better indicator of health.

If this survey were truly international in scope, there would be questions like:

• Our church remains strong in the face of persecution.
• We lovingly reach out to victims of AIDS.
• People of various races feel at home in our church.
• We are an advocate for social justice.
• We help people around us who live in poverty.

But no, the NCD survey evidently doesn’t require that a church worry about the homeless, the dispossessed, the prisoner, the stranger, people of other races. You can receive a healthy score without doing any of those things, and you can feel good about yourself. If we measure what we consider important, then the NCD survey considers our hobbies more important than poor people. Yeah, Jesus would agree with that.