The Simple Church

One of the great things about being on the road is the opportunity to do some reading while in transit. During our recent trip to Cleveland (TN), I saw a book at Pathway Bookstore that caught my attention. The Simple Church by Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger.

To be honest, most of the writing was done by Geiger and Rainer was his mentor in a research project. Although they do a well grounded statistical study, Simple Church is an extremely readable and sensible book about church growth.

Geiger and Rainer found a statistical relationship between growing churches and the simplicity of a church's process of discipleship. Below is a brief outline of the book. In the second half of the book, one chapter is dedicated to each of the four points.

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A simple church is designed around a straightforward and strategic process that moves people through the stages of spiritual growth. The leadership and the church are clear about the process (clarity) and are committed to executing it. The process flows logically (movement) and is implemented in each area of the church (alignment). The church abandons everything that is not in the process (focus).

• Clarity – the ability of the process to be communicated and understood by the people.
• Movement – the sequential steps in the process that cause people to move to greater areas of commitment. (It is how someone is handed off from one level of commitment to a greater level of commitment.
• Alignment – the arrangement of all ministries and staff around the same simple process. Without alignment, the church can be a multitude of sub ministries. In this case, each ministry has its own leaders who are only passionate about their specific ministry. They rarely identify with the entire church but are deeply committed to their own philosophy of ministry. As a result, everyone is competing for the same space, resources, volunteers, and time on the calendar.
• Focus – commitment to abandon everything that falls outside of the simple ministry process. That often means saying “no.” Focus does not make church leaders popular.

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