How to Find a Good Church

You have read the post about when to leave a church. This is the other half, and it is the harder one. Leaving is easy to want. Knowing what to walk toward is the part nobody teaches you.

First, kill the fantasy. There is no perfect church, and if you found one, the moment you joined it you would ruin it, because you would be in it. So stop shopping for flawless. You are not looking for perfect. You are looking for healthy. Different thing.

Here is what healthy looks like. Not the building, not the band, not the coffee. Watch what the newborn church actually gave itself to: "They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer" (Acts 2:42). The word, each other, the table, prayer. Watch for those, not the lighting.

One, the Bible actually gets taught. Not the pastor's opinions with a verse stapled on top. Not a TED talk with a Bible cover. You want a man who opens the text and shows you what it says, so you leave knowing God's word better, not just feeling something. Paul warned about the day men would only tolerate what tickled them: "For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires" (2 Timothy 4:3). A good church tells you what is true, including the parts you did not come to hear.

Two, the gospel is the center. Grace, the cross, Christ crucified for sinners. Not a self-help series, not a political rally, not "God wants you rich and happy." If you cannot tell from a month of sermons that you are a sinner saved by grace and not by your own performance, keep looking.

Three, real people who actually know each other. You are not looking for a show to attend. You are looking for a body to belong to: "and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another" (Hebrews 10:24-25). That assumes people close enough to spur each other toward good. You cannot get that from a seat you slip into late and leave early. A good church has a way in, and men who notice if you disappear.

Four, they take sin seriously enough to deal with it. A church with no spine, that never confronts anything, is not loving. It is negligent. You want elders who would come after you if you were walking off a cliff, and who you would want to. That is not harshness. That is a family that will not watch you drown and call it grace.

Two warnings. Do not build a church around one charismatic man. If the whole thing rises and falls on the personality up front, it is a fan club, and fan clubs collapse when the man does. And do not choose by comfort. The question is not "do they play my music." It is "will they tell me the truth and help me follow Jesus."

Last thing. Once you find one that is faithful, even if it is unimpressive, plant. Commit. Stop sampling. A plain church you belong to and serve in will grow you more than a perfect one you watch from the back row. The goal was never to find the church that fits you. It was to find a faithful one and become part of it.