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. The church it rebukes had love enough. What it lacked was reproduction.
The passage read whole
Hebrews 5:11 through 6:12 is a single argument that is 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 writer gives the standard by which he 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)
By this point in their lives, they should have been teachers, which is a different standard from knowing more or having grasped deeper doctrine. They should be able to hand it on. Their failure, as he describes it, is that they still need elementary instruction themselves and are consumers of milk when they should have been producing meat for others.
The mechanism comes next.
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 the way an athlete is trained. Maturity is less a body of knowledge acquired by listening than a capacity built by repetition.
The instruction is let us go on unto perfection (6:1), and with it comes a list of elementary things the writer proposes to leave behind: repentance, faith, baptisms, laying on of hands, resurrection, judgment. The list he's leaving is doctrinal. He has just classified doctrine as the foundation, so going on doesn't mean learning more advanced doctrine. Going on is a movement in capability, from being taught to being able to teach.
What he commends them for
Almost nobody notices this part, 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 are persuaded better things of you, and things that accompany salvation, though we thus speak. For God is not 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)
What he commends them for is neither their doctrine nor their attendance. Ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister. The praise is for service, in the present tense and still going on.
By the passage's own account, then, there's nothing wrong with these people's compassion. They do right to serve one another, and where they fail is in reproduction, since they haven't become able to hand anything on.
A congregation can be kind and serving, really caring for one another, and still produce nobody who could carry it anywhere else. That congregation is a ward. Hebrews calls it sluggish even though it's a good ward.
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, so he closes the passage with the word he opened it with. And followers is mimetai, imitators.
For sluggishness he prescribes the imitation of particular people instead of better teaching or a deeper curriculum. Imitation 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 means looking at 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, because 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). That one verse holds four generations (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
The design insists on this for the members' own sake as well as for the spread of the work. 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, whose own condition is the subject and 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). People tend to hear that as more virtuous, but blessed means better for the giver. The research now agrees with him, and in the studies the benefit of serving came from the direction of attention rather than from the activity.
So a community that keeps people focused on their own healing has withheld the mechanism. Because it does this while being kind and attentive, 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 advice is cruel and frequently false. It's also 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. Far from being a failure of the design, the carrying is the design. The trouble 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, and a training locus measures what its members can now do. A ward's attention runs inward, while 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, so a training locus regards a certain kind of departure as an achievement where a ward regards all departure as loss.
The most useful test in this article is to 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. You hear it in the sadness of the response, in the questions about whether they have really thought it through, and in 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. You can count it, though almost no congregation knows its own figure.
Name one thing you do well, such as hospitality, teaching, visiting or 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. 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.