Simple Church
From Neoredemptive
| Simple Church: Returning to God's Process for Making Disciples | |
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Thom S. Rainer and Eric Geiger
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| Book Review Policy |
Synopsis
Presentation of a statistical research study demonstrating a correlation between church growth and deliberate, simple church structures oriented around disciple-making.
Doc's Take
I have two critiques to make of this book, and they are largely stylistic. The heart of its message -- churches need to be deliberate about making disciples and need to avoid making themselves and their processes unnecessarily complex -- needs to be shouted from the rooftops (steeples?) with great regularity, and the study upon which this book is based provides statistical backing to this long-held intuition.
In tandem with their hypothesis that church vibrancy and church simplicity correlate, I propose that leaders of vibrant churches are simply more likely to "agree" with church health survey statements whereas comparison churches' leaders tend to more evenly distribute their agreement and disagreement. I say this because, in every bar graph I've seen so far, the "agree" end of the spectrum has always aligned with the simplicity hypothesis while the "disagree" end has represented disalignment with ecclesiastical simplicity. I suppose I should probably read the appendices that detail the survey methodology more clearly before I diss that too much though.
My main complaint with the book is the way the flow interweaves its statistical core with thin presentations of fragmentary theology, incidental stories, and dramatizations with fictitious characters. I freely admit that it is first a matter of taste, but I don't tend to like books that jump between presentation of raw statistical results, ethnographic case studies, personal illustrations, innocuous allegories, and theological tangents. While this certainly may make the book more enjoyable for the casual reader, for me it confuses the strengths and weaknesses of each of the components of the argument. I would prefer to see a more even presentation -- the results of a complete set of questions, followed by case studies and stories, followed by analysis, generalization, and suggestions for application, or perhaps an actual development of a theology of discipleship beyond simply "it's good", presented either at the beginning of the book (to better inform what to look for in the presentation of the study) or at the end (to better interpret the sum of the results).
But, as I said, my complaints are largely stylistic. Rainer and Geiger's conclusion is worth hearing and worth repeating.
