What Healthy Church Solutions Offers

By Larry Barker

Director of Church Planting and Church Health

Healthy Church Solutions is the church resource ministry of BMA America. Our mission is to help strengthen existing churches to become who God intended them to be. 

The status of the church in North Americas is pretty alarming and warrants our attention. We are told that 85% of American churches are either plateauing or declining. If these stats are true and we apply them to the number of BMA churches, there are only 180 to 200 churches that are healthy and actively moving forward on the mission of God.  

It’s so important for us to examine our spiritual health and our churches.

One way we strive to encourage pastors, leaders, members, and churches desiring to strengthen the ministry God has entrusted to them is through Healthy Church Podcast. There are now 59 episodes that drop on Tuesdays at our website https://healthychurchpodcast.com or on apps such as Spotify and others.These weekly episodes talk honestly about what it means to be part of a healthy church. There are no perfect churches, but by God’s grace we can begin to dialogue about what changes can be made in our lives as leaders and in our churches. 

Another way we are working hard to encourage pastors is through twice-a-month pastor Zoom calls where we zero in on topics that are close to the hearts of pastors: prayer, discipleship, navigating a pandemic, leadership, and more. The goal of these Zoom calls, which have included pastors from more than ten states, is to create a culture of sharing ideas, asking questions, and giving helpful content to pastors and leaders through right-on-time training. In our last two calls we discussed multiplying disciples and multiplying leaders. 

The third way we encourage leaders is through our pastor encouragement videos that come out every two weeks on our Facebook pages. We have heard from many of our pastors and three BMA Executive Directors: John David Smith (Missions), Donny Parrish (Lifeword), and Steve Crawley (Ministers Resource Services). These videos remind leaders that they are not alone in this journey. Knowing that we cannot expect a healthy church if leaders are not spiritually healthy, Healthy Church Solutions is focused on the individual leader’s soul care. 

You cannot give what you do not possess, and leading on empty will eventually lead to burnout or worse.  

Healthy Church Solutions has also been working diligently to once again offer you a venue to get away from the hustle and bustle to be refreshed and recharged. You are invited to join us September 27-29 in Dallas, Texas, for our very first ReCharge conference. BMA America is committed to resourcing you and providing a spiritual oasis. The entire time we are together we will be pouring into you through speakers, singers, and testimonies (including a BMA pastor who almost died from COVID) that we believe will inspire and revitalize you. (Click on the link above to receive information and to register.)

Healthy Church Solutions has also been working to build a resource library through a partnership with Right Now Media. Through our Church Dynamics Training alone we have resources to help churches learn how to develop and improve their systems, which are reproducible and interconnected processes by which a church actualizes its values and achieves its mission through quality control and growth engines. There are free trainings on the following systems: Reproductive, Outreach, Assimilation, Worship Service Planning, Spiritual Growth/Discipleship, Pastoral Care, Ministry Placement, and Finance. There are also trainings to help in the areas of pastoral transition, dealing with discouragement, evaluating your church’s ministry, and dealing with difficult people and time demands.  

If you are looking for training on one-on-one discipleship, we have that through Steve McCoy and Small Circle, and we continue to offer Activate, the revitalization arm of Healthy Church Solutions, which includes a church health survey. A Bible-based discovery process, Activate is led by the Holy Spirit, driven by the pastor, supported by a team within the church, discipled by the Pastor’s Huddle, and coached by Activate staff.

We agree with Mark Clifton’s mission statement: “We are committed to decreasing the death rate of existing churches while simultaneously increasing the birth rate of new churches!”  It is not an either/or choice, but rather a both/and solution.  In Made for More he states, “The role of the local church is to be the mobilizing home base. This empowers all disciples to discover their personal calling and then deploy them to express the fullness of Jesus into every corner of culture and into every sphere of society.” 

This is the heart of your BMA America leadership, and we desire to serve you and your church through Healthy Church Solutions.