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

SMALL GROUPS: What's your Hospitality Index?

When it comes to small groups there is a constant tension in most groups between outreach and intimacy. Imagine, if you will a continuum, and at one end of the line is complete intimacy & togetherness, or fellowship. People know and love each other. They are sharing their burdens with one another, loving one another, confessing their sins to one another, etc. Basically, they are fulfilling all of the 'one anothers' that Scripture commands us to fulfill. It is the perfect small group, right?

There is, however, another important dimension to small group life, and it is found at the very end of that famous set of verses about small groups in Acts 2:42-47, "and the Lord daily added to their numbers". That's right, I'm talking about 'outreach'. No small group in the Scriptures lives and dies unto itself; the focus must always be upon those who are not yet walking with the Lord. They look in, and as the Bible says they "see how they love one another", and they want a piece of that. They want in. This is the built-in tension of the Hospitality Index.

At this point, every small group is faced with a choice. It does something like this, "Hey guys, I have this friend from work, and I was telling him about our group, and he's going through a rough time right now, and I was wondering if he could maybe join us once." Or, maybe the Director of Small Groups puts out an ad in the church newsletter and says that if anyone wants to join a group, to give him/her a call, and s/he will set them up with a group. Then s/he calls various groups to try to place a new person. How will the group respond? Their willingness to accept others into their group is a measurement of their "Hospitality Index".

The Hospitality Index is in constant tension. As I said, imagine a continuum. When a group begins, they are all about inviting people to their new group. So they would be way over on the Outreach side of the line. But then as the weeks go on, they get to know each other, and they begin to open up and start sharing about their lives. As they do this, the group's Hospitality Index slowly begins to move more and more closely to the Intimacy side of the continuum. Then one week, one of the members breaks down and starts crying about issues at home. At that moment, the Hospitality Index takes a big leap towards Intimacy. And so it goes. Generally, the longer the group is in existence, the more the Hospitality Index is over on the Intimacy side. Or said another way, the less hospitable they are. Oh, they gladly welcome each other, but not strangers. Because that would ruin the incredible fellowship they are currently experiencing.

Generally, if a group goes 18 months without adding anyone new, they never will. They will then either slowly implode as a group, and eventually die. Or they will calcify and become a clique that never welcomes another person into their mix.

The question is, what does your church do with new people who are interested in small groups? How do you get them into the small group system? An understanding of the Hospitality Index will help you to make the right decisions.

There are two steps which you can do to address this on-going tension in the Hospitality Index. First, you could create groups in which every "small group covenant" has a built-in clause that "this groups shall remain open and available to newcomers; that anyone is free to invite a friend into this group any week". What that does at the outset of the group as it begins is that it sets a standard or a boundary on the Hospitality Index. It says that the door will always be open for newcomers. How does this affect the Hospitality Index? Well, if the group has been slowly moving towards greater Intimacy and away from Outreach, it causes a jump back towards the Outreach side as soon as someone new walks in the door; "hey everyone, this is my friend from work that I told you about...". They welcome him, but they also clam up for the night. And they stay safe and don't share too many intimate details with the group (like they used to), until they get to know this new guy, or until he leaves. That's the HI index. So, creating Open Groups, based on the small group Covenant is one option.

There is another option as well: you could start all of your Newcomers in one group. That is, as everyone is going through the Membership Class, you could build in small group type sharing as a part of your weekend or six-week class. Then as the class goes on, they start forming up their own small groups. Then you just make sure that you seed into each of those groups, during the membership class, someone capable of leading each one. At the end of the class, you announce new groups with the leaders, and many of the newcomers will hop on board. This method is also compatible with the HI index.

So there are two methods of dealing with the natural tension in any group between Intimacy and Outreach. They are both important and Biblical needs which must be addressed, and a sensitivity to the Hospitality Index will help you do just that.

For the Kingdom,


Dr. Bill

COACHING: Quality not Quantity

I am usually all for growth in all of its forms, whether it is a larger church, better attended Bible studies, or a greater quantity of small groups in the church. But when it comes to coaching, I have been convinced of the opposite; there is great virtue in starting small and not going for it all in one shot.

Bob Logan, whose organization is helping us to get coaching started in our church has worked with many churches and denominational organizations. And one of his great learnings is that many people try to start coaching in their organization in a big way, and it is almost always a mistake. You must start small and you must achieve quality before you go forward. It is more important that you develop quality coaches, by giving them a top-notch coach training experience, than it is to train a lot of people at once.

Now the natural response of pastors in large churches, is that 'if we start small, it will take forever; do you know how large our church is?'. This is natural, but it is a mistake. Coach training takes time to learn well, and it takes very close and intense learning with a coach who already knows how to do it. It is such a subtle art, that it is too easy to think you've 'got it', when you really don't. Coaching is not like consulting, nor counseling, where you can say whatever is on your mind. The true beauty of coaching is that you are trying to help the coachee to say what is on his or her mind. The Proverbs say that a man's thoughts are deep waters, but a man of wisdom will draw them out. That is the challenge and beauty of coaching. It must be learned well.

So here is what we are doing at our church. We have a church of 750 people, but just three of us received off-site training in coaching. From there, we are developing an in-house coaching experience in our own church. But we are starting with just 7 other people. So, if we are successful in our coaching efforts this year, and we have no attrition, we will have 10 trained coaches at the end of this year. (Our coach training is 9 months long.) So we will have just 10 people out of a church of 750. The goal is quality not quantity. But if you do the math, you can see that if each of these 10 newly trained coaches train two others, that we will begin to develop some good coaching momentum in just a couple of years. And it is very important to keep quality control over the whole experience, or else the coaching movement in your church will break down due to poorly trained coaches.

That is the major goal for us: quality not quantity. We are willing to pay the price, because we believe that if those being coached, experience the true power of coaching in their own lives, and the natural life transformation which is caused by quality coaching, that they themselves will also be more committed to providing a quality coaching experience for others. And if we can touch the lives of God's church in a quality way and bring about life change, the whole church will be stronger and healthier. And that will bring glory to Christ.

In His Service,
Dr. Bill