I was asked to share my thoughts regarding an article in an issue of the United Church Observer last year. I had no choice but to admit I would find it hard to be "objective" about the article--on "healthy" congregations--since it included an upbeat profile of the congregation in which I serve, Knox United Church in Parksville, B.C.

As someone who has long worried about the health of congregational life within the United Church, I can only be delighted to observe renewed attention being paid to it. For too long, it was easy to worry that congregations were the United Church's forgotten cornerstone. From my perspective, the increasing recognition that sound congregations are foundational to denominational soundness is cause for celebration.

That having been said, it is hard to ignore the tricky paradoxes that are at work any time we attempt to measure the "health" of a congregation. Indeed: those who regard themselves as United Church conservatives ought to be especially sensitive to those paradoxes.

Central to the conservative impulse is the recognition that healthy institutions--including the health of the institutional church--far from impeding human freedom and growth, make an incalculable contribution to both. And yet, central to the conservative impulse, insofar as the institutional church is concerned, must surely be a desire for the institution to reflect in a faithful (rather than a merely incidental) way, a gospel that is the church's true treasure and sole foundation. And therein lies the rub!

The recipient of 2 Timothy--the second of the New Testament's three pastoral letters--is admonished against being "ashamed"(2 Timothy 1:8). Ashamed of what? Ashamed of "the testimony about our Lord", ashamed about "me his prisoner." In other words, Timothy is urged not to give in to the shame that would be an obvious temptation, as a leader of a religious movement which--with its imprisoned apostles and its crucified redeemer--would have looked, to the eyes of many of Timothy's contemporaries, like the "fringiest" of cults!

I fear that it can be hard for us to put ourselves in Timothy's shoes. For all the travails the institutional church has faced these past 40 years, contemporary Christians nevertheless remain the inheritors of a surprisingly successful religious "enterprise". In ways that Timothy's skeptical, non-Christian neighbors would never have imagined possible, the gospel became a culture and institution shaping reality, planting deep roots in virtually every corner of the globe. We have inherited--especially in Europe and North America--a movement that was, for so long, so well established, so impressively institutionalized, that it requires a Herculean effort on our part to recall how vulnerable to shame the first generation of Christian leaders (like Timothy) would have been in the face of their neighbor's ridicule and contempt.

And yet, ironically, I think it is critical for us to "get in touch" with that reality: the reality of the oddness of the gospel, the reality of the scandal of the cross, without which our life as a church, including our life-in-congregation, can so easily degenerate into self-congratulatory smugness. Indeed! If the customary indicators of congregational health--congregational success--have any meaning whatsoever, they derive that meaning from a storyline that profoundly challenges any conventional understanding of what "success" and "health" actually mean: a storyline that runs against the grain, not only of the culture of ancient Rome, but against the culture of modern-day Madison Avenue. A story that reaches its climax with a good man's death on a cross, his arms outstretched in an unforgettable gesture of anguished love.

Which defines the central spiritual challenge all of our congregations now face, as we seek to embrace an understanding of congregational "health" that embodies the shared remembrance of a God who is odd? The shared remembrance, not only in word but in deed, of the God whose story is an inherently odd and oddly disturbing one, capable of challenging all of our customary notions: including our notion of what a healthy congregation might actually look like.