APPLYING SIMPLE CHURCH
Simple Church is a great book with a powerful premise. It is basically that simple, and therefore effective, church's have a clearly defined process for making disciples. And this means a complete process from the moment before a person accepts Christ, to the growth into Christian maturity. According to the book you are not a Simple Church, if you just have a bunch of hodge-podge Bible studies, small groups, and Sunday School classes randomly selected according to the whims and interests of your people. You are an effective Simple Church if you know where you are taking your people spiritually, and have a specific path to take people there. And even then you are not quite a Simple Church, until you have removed everything that is extraneous to Simple Church discipleship.
The four parts of Simple Church life is: Clarity, Movement, Alignment, and Focus.
Here is how this works out in our experience:
CLARITY -- how you define your end-product goal. We spent a year as a staff in defining our discipleship product. We did this by developing 27 character and behavior traits that we seek to achieve as a church. We've put these into three categories of Head (beliefs), Heart (attitudes), Hands (behaviors). Each of the 27 traits reference a particular Biblical trait which defines a mature disciple. We worked these through our entire leadership team, Board, Staff, and ministry leaders.
MOVEMENT -- defines your plan for moving people from non-Christian to mature Christian. And what is required here is that you actually have a plan; just hoping you have enough Bible studies and small groups to help people grow, is not a plan. You need to know what you will teach them at each level, and why, and what will be next. Here is how we are doing it at Crossroads: We have developed a three-stage process that includes Main Street (worship + evangelism), Community Circle (growth and loving care), and Ministry Way (service). These are tied in to our logo, and our purpose statement. Our purpose statement covers the five basics of Worship, Evangelism, Growth (discipleship), Loving Care, and Ministry service. And the Movement is tied in to our logo as a church. Our logo represents Main Street (going up the vertical beam of the cross), and around the heart for Community Circle, and then back along the horizontal cross beam for Ministry Way.
ALIGNMENT -- defines the process of making sure that every ministry in the church contributes somehow to the spiritual growth development process that you have defined in your Clarity and Movement stage. Here is how we are addressing the issue of Alignment. We used to have (and still do) a collection of small groups started by various people focusing upon various topics of interest. It is your usual hodge-podge of Christian discipleship selection. We still have that, as we left the old system in place; but now we are developing a new system that begins with just four key small group discipleship experiences. Those four discipleship groups are: Alpha - the well known seeker sensitive introduction to Christianity; Connections - a group focused on developing relational skills, and then using those skills to love seekers into the Kingdom. The third discipleship group is Foundations - which covers the basic Christian discipleship habits (Scripture, prayer, meditation, fasting, silence, etc.), and finally, the fourth is Shape, which introduces people to their spiritual gifts and where to serve in the local church.
The way we make this happen is that after our membership class ("On ramp"), we encourage everyone of the people in the class to take either Alpha or Connections. That is our alignment portion.
The final stage is FOCUS. This is where it gets interesting. Focus means that you as a church only promote those ministries which specifically help this process. This means that you must either ignore or eliminate any ministries which conflict with your stated purpose as a church. Most churches have a wide array of ministries which do not contribute toward their stated maturity goal (if they even have one). What we have chosen to do is simply focus on the ministries that contribute toward our stated goal, and allow the rest to continue on as long as they do not interfere with the stated goal.
We are about 15 months into our Simple Church plan. We took a full year planning it, and communicating it to the leaders. Then we did a sermon series in the spring to introduce it, and then another one in the fall to launch it. We also tried one sample Alpha class last year to test it out. Now we have launched this Fall with both an Alpha Class and a Connections Class, and are on track to ramp up all four by the time we finish out this ministry year in the Spring. So far, so good.
Learning and applying Simple Church is not so simple. It has been complicated and confusing, and challenging, but very, very good, as we wrestle with what it means as a church to have a clean and simple process for making disciples.
Blessings in Christ,
Dr. Bill
The four parts of Simple Church life is: Clarity, Movement, Alignment, and Focus.
Here is how this works out in our experience:
CLARITY -- how you define your end-product goal. We spent a year as a staff in defining our discipleship product. We did this by developing 27 character and behavior traits that we seek to achieve as a church. We've put these into three categories of Head (beliefs), Heart (attitudes), Hands (behaviors). Each of the 27 traits reference a particular Biblical trait which defines a mature disciple. We worked these through our entire leadership team, Board, Staff, and ministry leaders.
MOVEMENT -- defines your plan for moving people from non-Christian to mature Christian. And what is required here is that you actually have a plan; just hoping you have enough Bible studies and small groups to help people grow, is not a plan. You need to know what you will teach them at each level, and why, and what will be next. Here is how we are doing it at Crossroads: We have developed a three-stage process that includes Main Street (worship + evangelism), Community Circle (growth and loving care), and Ministry Way (service). These are tied in to our logo, and our purpose statement. Our purpose statement covers the five basics of Worship, Evangelism, Growth (discipleship), Loving Care, and Ministry service. And the Movement is tied in to our logo as a church. Our logo represents Main Street (going up the vertical beam of the cross), and around the heart for Community Circle, and then back along the horizontal cross beam for Ministry Way.
ALIGNMENT -- defines the process of making sure that every ministry in the church contributes somehow to the spiritual growth development process that you have defined in your Clarity and Movement stage. Here is how we are addressing the issue of Alignment. We used to have (and still do) a collection of small groups started by various people focusing upon various topics of interest. It is your usual hodge-podge of Christian discipleship selection. We still have that, as we left the old system in place; but now we are developing a new system that begins with just four key small group discipleship experiences. Those four discipleship groups are: Alpha - the well known seeker sensitive introduction to Christianity; Connections - a group focused on developing relational skills, and then using those skills to love seekers into the Kingdom. The third discipleship group is Foundations - which covers the basic Christian discipleship habits (Scripture, prayer, meditation, fasting, silence, etc.), and finally, the fourth is Shape, which introduces people to their spiritual gifts and where to serve in the local church.
The way we make this happen is that after our membership class ("On ramp"), we encourage everyone of the people in the class to take either Alpha or Connections. That is our alignment portion.
The final stage is FOCUS. This is where it gets interesting. Focus means that you as a church only promote those ministries which specifically help this process. This means that you must either ignore or eliminate any ministries which conflict with your stated purpose as a church. Most churches have a wide array of ministries which do not contribute toward their stated maturity goal (if they even have one). What we have chosen to do is simply focus on the ministries that contribute toward our stated goal, and allow the rest to continue on as long as they do not interfere with the stated goal.
We are about 15 months into our Simple Church plan. We took a full year planning it, and communicating it to the leaders. Then we did a sermon series in the spring to introduce it, and then another one in the fall to launch it. We also tried one sample Alpha class last year to test it out. Now we have launched this Fall with both an Alpha Class and a Connections Class, and are on track to ramp up all four by the time we finish out this ministry year in the Spring. So far, so good.
Learning and applying Simple Church is not so simple. It has been complicated and confusing, and challenging, but very, very good, as we wrestle with what it means as a church to have a clean and simple process for making disciples.
Blessings in Christ,
Dr. Bill
Labels: Alpha, Church Health, Discipleship, Simple Church, Small Groups
posted by Dr. Bill at
5:23 PM
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