Sunday, September 12, 2010

Simple Church by Thom S. Rainer and Eric Geiger


Simple Church: Returning to God's Process for Making Disciples 
Title: Simple Church: Returning to God's Process for Making Disciples by Thom S. Rainer and Eric Geiger

Pages: 257

How it was obtained: It was given to me by the lead pastor.

Time spent on the "to read" shelf: 0 days.

Days spent reading it: 2 weeks.

Why I read it: As a part of church leadership we decided to read through this book and brainstorm through some ideas about discipleship.

Brief review: Clarity. Movement. Alignment. Focus. These are the four basic principles that the entire book revolves around. The simple argument of Simple Church is that our discipleship process needs to be simple. That's all there is to it. The rest of the book was filler on how that objective is accomplished. We need to have clarity, in other words we need to know what we want to accomplish. We need to have movement, people need to grow, they need to know what the next step in the process is. There needs to be alignment between the different areas of the church. A youth ministry should follow the same process as the adult ministry, etc. Keep everyone on the same page. The hardest element is focus. Cut all the clutter. Are you doing fun things that serve no real purpose? Cut them. Do you have programs that are just there, but not really helping people move forward in their walk? Cut it.

I appreciated the thoughts I found in Simple Church. I think some churches will embrace the message, while others will struggle to reduce the clutter that years of different programs have created. I think this book helps us rethink how we are processing our disciples through our churches. It was certainly worth going through, but I think the churches that need it most will struggle the most to implement the changes the book suggests. I definitely recommend to senior pastors and elders in churches that need some clarification on what they are doing.

Favorite quote: "First Church gives a lot of announcements. People are invited to everything. The Sunday we are here, they announce eight different things. All with passion. All with the "this will change your life and you must come" tone….There is a lot of activity. A lot of busyness. And a lot of complexity. All of it can be justified by the right spokesperson. It just does not fit into a big picture. There is no big picture, no process that guides the ministry."

Stars: 4.5 out of 5.

Final Word: Simple. (Too easy!)

2 comments:

Rob said...

Something inherently appeals to me about the whole idea of simple church.

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