Simple Church

In my first blog post, I mentioned I would talk about it later. It’s later. On that camping trip, I did finish reading Simple Church: Returning to God's Process for Making Disciples by Thom S. Rainer and Eric Geiger. The target audience, it seems, is the every busy, program loaded, church leading, non-itinerant ministry pastor or church leader. (How’s that for a mouthful!) That is not to say I did not learn some things from the book, though.

The subtitle reveals the theme of the book, process. Process is not something new to me. I live and breathe all kinds of processes at work and have even help develop quite a few. I get process. The authors are introducing process to pastors and church leaders who have not had the opportunity to experience “process”.

Their process for making Disciples is Clarity-Movement-Alignment-Focus. In a nutshell, it is to be clear about your Church’s discipleship making goals, define a simple process to explain your church’s discipleship process, and implement it (Clarity). Keep people moving through the steps in the process (Movement). Align all your church ministries to the process (Alignment). Don’t be sidetracked by anything that is not the process and learn to say NO (Focus). Of course, the idea here is to create a unity to the discipleship process among the church members at every level, worship, small group, service ministry, building policy, generational, etc.

I did see some of Wesley’s Methodism concept in it, along the lines of Christianity is a life long process moving toward perfection, setting up the class meetings, etc. But I do not think Wesley had published process illustrations and alignment charts nor graphed the membership levels in the various process steps.

There was a lesson in making sure your church ministries are not busy using precious resources chasing after cherished pet projects that are not working. Nor should new projects be starting that are not supportable given your existing membership. After all, it does take a kernel of existing members to grow a ministry. If all your members are already producing fruit, can a new ministry succeed without another ministry wilting?

Beyond all that, I think discipleship is too messy to be defined in a simple process. The discipleship process seems to be an individual thing guided along by the Spirit. When the Spirit is leading Yes We Can is in order, even if the process says no. Bsides, God already defined the ultimate process.