It’s hard to know what a healthy person looks like these days. Take Angelina Jolie for example. For many people, she is the picture of good health. Some tabloids occasionally accuse her of being too thin. But most folks idolize her “healthy body.”

How little did they know! Jolie has a genetic predisposition that almost guarantees breast cancer. Her mother died at age 56 from breast cancer. Her aunt died from the disease.

With this scary forecast in hand, Angelina Jolie did something incredibly shocking. She underwent preemptive mastectomies. She went on to have reconstructive surgery and then have her ovaries taken out for good measure.

Talk about a radical cure for a disease she didn’t yet have! She knew, however, that her apparent good health was not the complete story.

So who is healthy? And how do we know what good health actually looks like?

Here’s one obvious conclusion: good looks ≠ good health

Of course, the opposite certainly isn’t true either, so I need to add this corollary: bad looks ≠ good health

Simply put, it’s not so easy to know what good health looks like. It’s probably easier to spot bad health than good health. But you can't tell just by looking at someone that they’re as “healthy as can be.” Many things can mislead us. Disease can lurk beneath the surface.

What about churches? Can we pick out a healthy church based on its appearance? Are there clear and verifiable metrics that can tell us whether or not a congregation is healthy?

In the same way that a person’s looks might not tell the full story, a church’s persona or outward appearance might give us the wrong impression. For example, I know folks who have taken ministry jobs at what appeared to be healthy churches. They were ecstatic with their opportunity to work with what looked like a “healthy group of elders” or a “wonderfully open-minded church.” After the honeymoon period ended, however, they began to discover the skeletons hiding in the closets. They started to realize that dysfunction lay just beneath the surface. They found that the church’s “God talk” wasn’t symptomatic of deep faith in a God at work in their midst, but instead was superficial language that masked self-centeredness.

This points toward the need to look deeper. We need new metrics for observing and measuring church health. In the old days, we used to look at numbers: attendance and money. In more recent days, we tend to measure theological fit or worship style.

But are any of these actual indicators of health? What about the ability to listen to others who are different from ourselves? What about a church’s proclivity for producing thinking Christians? How about measuring a church’s aptitude for tolerating diverse thought within its membership? Or how about a leadership structure that empowers people to go and do rather than to run everything through a top-down system?

If we truly understand the dangerous sicknesses lurking below the surface in some churches, we might be more willing to undertake some radical cures for the sake of our long-term health. Good health in a human body is not just what you see on the outside. In the same way, good health in a church goes far beyond the things we tend to measure. I pray that the Lord will increasingly grant us eyes to understand what true health is.