If the church exists to care for its members, then a congregation whose members are well cared for has succeeded. If the church exists for something else, then a congregation can be kind, warm, attentive, and fail.
Hebrews says it can fail. And the failure it names isn't lack of love. It's lack of reproduction.
The passage read whole
Hebrews 5:11 through 6:12 is a single argument, and it's almost always quoted in pieces. Take it whole.
It opens with a complaint:
Of whom we have many things to say, and hard to be uttered, seeing ye are dull of hearing. (Hebrews 5:11)
Dull is nothroi — sluggish, torpid. Then the standard by which the writer judges them sluggish:
For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat. (5:12)
Read the standard. By this point in their lives, they should have been teachers. Not: they should know more. Not: they should have grasped deeper doctrine. They should be able to hand it on. And their failure is described as still requiring elementary instruction themselves — consumers of milk when they should have been producing meat for others.
Then the mechanism:
But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil. (5:14)
By reason of use. Exercised. The Greek is gegymnasmena — trained, as an athlete trains. Maturity is a capacity built by repetition, not a body of knowledge acquired by listening.
Then the instruction: let us go on unto perfection (6:1), followed by a list of elementary things the writer proposes to leave behind — repentance, faith, baptisms, laying on of hands, resurrection, judgment. Notice: the list he's leaving is doctrinal. So going on doesn't mean learning more advanced doctrine. He has just classified doctrine as the foundation. Going on is the movement from being taught to being able to teach — a movement in capability, not content.
What he commends them for
This is the part almost nobody notices, because the warning passage sits between the two halves and everyone stops there. Having called them sluggish, and having issued the sternest warning in the letter, the writer says:
But, beloved, we're persuaded better things of you, and things that accompany salvation, though we thus speak. For God isn't unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister. (6:9-10)
He commends them — and look at what for. Not their doctrine. Not their attendance. Ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister. Service, present tense, continuing.
So the passage's own account is this: what these people are doing right is serving one another. What they're doing wrong is that they haven't become able to hand anything on. They aren't failing at compassion. They're failing at reproduction.
A congregation can be in exactly that condition: kind, serving, really caring for one another — and producing nobody who could carry it anywhere else. That congregation is a ward. It's a good ward. And Hebrews calls it sluggish.
The cure is a person, not a curriculum
The final verse prescribes the remedy:
That ye be not slothful, but followers of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises. (6:12)
Slothful is nothroi again — the same word he opened with, closing the loop. And followers is mimetai. Imitators.
The prescribed cure for sluggishness is imitation of particular people. Not better teaching. Not a deeper curriculum. Imitation — which requires that somebody's faith and patience be visible to you, over time, in conditions where those qualities are being tested.
The same writer says it again with an added detail:
Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God: whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation. (Hebrews 13:7)
Considering the end of their conversation — the outcome of their way of life. Watch a life all the way to its result, and imitate that. This is a formation method with a duration requirement built in: you can't see the outcome of a way of life in a series or a conference. You see it over years, in someone you have been near.
Paul gives the same method to Timothy: the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also (2 Timothy 2:2). Four generations in one verse — Paul, Timothy, faithful men, others — and the criterion at every link is able to teach. The work spreads by people who watched somebody, became like them, and are now watchable themselves.
What turning outward does to a person
There's a reason the design insists on this, and it isn't only about the spread of the work. It's about the members.
Sustained focus on one's own state is, in the clinical literature, a risk factor. The pattern of repeatedly turning attention onto one's own distress predicts the onset, severity, and duration of depression more reliably than almost anything else studied. And a ward, by its nature, makes people patients — beings whose own condition is the subject, whose own progress is the measure.
The other direction is better than most people expect. A study following older couples for five years found that giving support to others predicted reduced mortality; receiving support didn't. A study of volunteering found the same benefit — but only for people whose motives were other-oriented. Those who volunteered for what it would do for them showed no benefit at all.
Jesus said it first: It is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35). Not more virtuous. More blessed — better for the giver. The research now says the same thing: the benefit of serving doesn't come from the activity. It comes from the direction of attention.
That means a community that keeps people focused on their own healing has withheld the mechanism — and done so while being kind and attentive, which is why nobody notices.
The necessary caution
None of this licenses telling a distressed person that their problem is self-focus and that they should go help someone. That's cruel, frequently false, and a standard way well-meaning Christians harm the unwell. Some people must receive for a long time before they can give anything.
The design's own order supports the caution. Comfort one another and bear ye one another's burdens mean somebody has to be carried — and the carrying isn't a failure of the design. It's the design. The problem isn't people being carried. The problem is an arrangement in which nobody ever stops being carried, because there's nothing to get up for.
Ward and training locus, side by side
A ward's members are patients. A training locus's members are apprentices.
A ward measures how its members are doing. A training locus measures what its members can now do.
A ward's attention runs inward. A training locus's attention runs through the members and out.
A ward's success is a stable, well-cared-for population. A training locus's success is people leaving to do the work elsewhere — which means a training locus regards a certain kind of departure as an achievement, and a ward regards all departure as loss.
This is the most useful test in this article. Ask what your congregation would say if a capable, committed, well-formed family announced they were moving to a place with no church, to build one. A ward experiences that as bereavement and subtly discourages it — through the sadness in the response, the questions about whether they have really thought it through, the observation that they're so needed here. A training locus experiences it as the point, says so, and sends them with money.
Every congregation knows which one it is, immediately, without being told.
The Hebrews standard, applied
How many people in your congregation could teach the elementary things to somebody else? Is that number higher than it was two years ago? That's the passage's own criterion of maturity, and it's countable, and almost no congregation knows its own figure.
Name one thing you do well — hospitality, teaching, visiting, administration. Name the person you're currently making able to do it without you. If there's no name, you're running a ward in miniature, and the thing will end when you do.
Ye ought to be teachers. The standard has never been withdrawn. The church is a training locus, not a ward — and its healing is for deployment.