Church Is Simple. No, Really

Recent commercials for an office-supply store feature an “easy button” that, when pushed, provides a simple solution to an everyday problem. Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger seek to provide an equally simple solution for ministry leaders.

Simple Church, which is thicker than the title suggests, makes the case for a simplified approach to ministry based on the discipleship methods of Jesus. Instead of multi-level outreach strategies and programs, Rainer and Geiger propose a leaner process based on four concepts: clarity, movement, alignment, and focus.

The book is based on research of over 400 churches classified into two strata. The vibrant/growing strata consisted of churches that had demonstrated at least 5 percent growth in worship attendance for three consecutive years. The non-growing churches, by contrast, had less than one percent growth over the same three-year period.

All participating churches completed the Process Design Survey, which measures the simplicity of their ministry structure. The authors’ conclusion: “Churches with a simple process for reaching and maturing people are expanding the Kingdom.”

“People are hungry for simple,” they write, pointing to Apple, Google, Southwest Airlines, and other corporations whose success demonstrates that “simple is in.” Rainer and Geiger advocate a similar approach to discipleship.

They believe too many churches suffer from “ministry schizophrenia,” which “occurs when churches and church leaders are not sure who they are” and respond by implementing an array of programs from different church models.

The simple church model avoids this by streamlining the discipleship process, which begins with clarity, defined as “the ability of the process to be communicated and understood by the people.” Rainer and Geiger compare the role of a ministry leader to that of a builder who follows a clear blueprint. They call for an end to ministers as “travel agents” who only point to brochures but don’t have a clear plan for reaching the destination.

The second aspect of a Simple Church is movement, defined as “the sequential steps in the process that causes people to move to greater areas of commitment.” The key is removing the unnecessary programs that cause congestion in the church. A thriving church will only allow programming that is strategic, sequential, and results in movement toward the end goal. In these churches “change in the lives of people is expected,” write Rainer and Geiger, and people are looking for the next forward step.

Once the outcome is clear and the congestion removed, it is time for alignment, “arranging all ministries and staff around the same simple process.” According to Simple Church, this requires a high level of accountability to ensure that silos or mini-empires are not allowed to develop that undermine the discipleship process. The process does not need to look a certain way, but it does need to be implemented consistently throughout the organization, in every ministry.

While all of the four Simple Church elements are counter-cultural in lots of ministry circles, the final key, focus, may be the hardest to implement. According to Rainer and Geiger, focus involves “saying no to almost everything,” a mindset that contradicts many leaders’ tendency to say “yes” to virtually every idea if it might help someone find meaning or growth.

While the Simple Church plan sounds appealing, reality shows that the process is not always so, well, simple. Competing values and visions, coupled with church authority shared by multiple leaders, makes it difficult to streamline and reduce programming in the way Rainer and Geiger advocate.

In addition, Simple Church makes the assumption that spiritual growth will occur in a church experiencing numeric growth. But most of us would agree that it is very easy to confuse the order. In Rainer and Geiger’s model, church leaders could easily slip into the illusion that numeric growth equals spiritual growth.

Despite some of its unanswered questions, Simple Church is an engaging read that provides hope and focus for leaders feeling overwhelmed by complexity and stagnation in their congregations.