What's Your Apgar Score?

A big thanks to a new friend serving a nearby church who gave me a tool (APGAR) that can be used to assess the health of a particular church.

Named after an anesthesiologist (Virginia Apgar) in the 1950s who devised a score to help save babies who were born malformed or too small or just blue and not breathing, she gave nurses a way to rate the health of babies at delivery. These newborn scores led medical personnel to become more intentional in doing what was needed to improve the infant survival rate. Thanks to this scoring system, instead of 1 out of every 30 babies dying at birth, today it has dropped to 1 out of 500.

Translating this to the health and vitality of a local congregation, a scoring system has been developed that does not focus primarily on how many attend worship, but on five key areas of health. There are two variations on using an Apgar scoring system for a church (based on Acts 2 or Revelation 2.) Both of these use a point system of 0, 1, or 2 (2 being the strongest.)

Acts 2 (Apgar)

A - Apostolic Teaching/Worship

P - Power - Wonders/Miraculous Signs

G - Generosity - Giving

A - Association - Fellowship Gatherings

R - Reproduction - People coming to Christ

Revelation 2 (Apgar)

A - Apostolic Faithfulness - Sound Theology

P - Patient Endurance - Strong Faith

G - Godliness - Pursuit of Holiness/Sanctification

A - Active Service - Involved in Outreach & Missions

R - Repentance - Humility & Willingness to Repent

I'm going to have our church leadership team give scores using both of these assessments to see how we're doing on our Apgar church health. It would be interesting to have several churches do this separately and compare the results.