Last week, I discussed the importance of a church’s immune system. The immune system works to protect the health of a social system. The church may have a number of diseases it’s fighting off that they’re not even aware of! The immune system senses these diseases and sounds an alarm to warn us. But when we hear the alarm go off, warning us that something is threatening the vitality of our church, what do we do?

As “social system doctors” we must learn the difference between finding the symptoms versus the signs of a disease in our ministries and churches. To be effective “doctors,” we’ll need to listen for the symptoms and really look for the signs so that we can identify what’s going on. First, let’s talk about the symptoms (and I’ll get to signs next week).

A symptom is subjective evidence of a physical disturbance as observed by the patient, such as a person feeling pain in the lower back or having a headache. A sign goes much deeper than that. A sign is objective evidence of a disease as observed and interpreted by a physician¹. Our next step in becoming social system doctors is to listen. We need to listen to the church as they explain or complain of the symptoms they feel.

Community-Based Participatory Research is a discipline that teaches us how to listen, both to individuals and focus groups, and take the time to ask “please tell me about your experience,” “how does that make you feel?” or “what do you see as a challenge?” My point is that to discover the symptoms of the church, it requires taking the time to listen to the members of the body, including all ages and types of people. And it requires being open to hearing things that may not be positive.

So, what are some common symptoms? Here are some that I’ve heard quite frequently:

• “My church is having trouble with its 2nd generation; there’s a disconnect between the older and younger generations.”
• “My church isn’t growing.”
• “My church is boring.”
• “When we visited that church, no one spoke to us.”
• “My church is not a safe place to talk about problems I am having.”

Just the act of being willing to listen to these symptoms can open the door to change.

What are you hearing?

1 Definitions from the National Institute of Health, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/mplusdictionary.html)