How can you tell if your church is healthy?

Plenty of church experts have ready answers to that question. And many of those answers can be useful if it's understood they apply only in certain conditions. But too often the easy-answer folks get carried away and claim their one-dimensional yardsticks can be applied across the board.

Of course, such overgeneralizations aren't restricted to churchmen. It's a common failing of theorists in any discipline.

For example, economist K. E. Phillips, after examining the economic history of the modern Western world, noted that whenever inflation was high, unemployment was low, and whenever inflation was low, unemployment was high. This pattern was so persistent that in 1958 Phillips proclaimed it a law of economics.

Thus, in the 1970s when unemployment rose to high levels, the theorists claimed that if inflation were allowed to drift upward, the unemployment rate would fall as a consequence. Unfortunately, for the first time in history it didn't. And the ...