When people encounter our church, the subject of Simple Church comes up. Interestingly, Simple Church seems to defy categorization. Trying to slot our approach into a prevailing model has created a lot of confusion for people seeking to understand what we are doing. (I have even written that we don’t have a ‘model’.) Admittedly, the confusion also exists among our own people about how to categorize and communicate what we do and why. I’ve decided to attempt to clear up the confusion!
I’m equally comfortable (and uncomfortable!) slotting Simple Church into micro church, house church, Disciple-Making Movement (DMM), small group, connect group, or even good old-fashioned “Bible study,” but it’s not quite any of those.
At its core, Simple Church is a means to accomplish five primary goals that work in a reproductive cycle together:
Evangelize the lost
Make disciples
Develop covenant relationships
Raise leaders
Plant churches to repeat the cycle
Here is our official working definition of Simple Church:
Simple Churches are small churches where people can build relationships focused on being disciples of Jesus. Through Simple Church, everyone is invited to discover Jesus, be discipled, and ultimately learn to disciple others in fulfilment of the Great Commission.
You’ll notice that Simple Church’s core emphasis is relationships. It’s not a program, event, or system. Simple Churches form a relational environment that includes other Simple Churches, enabling people to discover Jesus, journey toward maturity in Christ, and build covenant relationships that let the mission Christ has called us to flourish.
To put it another way, Simple Church is an attempt to distill all of the components of “full-size church” into the smallest reproducible unit that we can.
To help make sense of Simple Church, especially for this platform’s audience, it helps to compare and contrast it with related concepts. (Note: I offer these as a way of comparison to draw out some of the unique characteristics of Simple Church. There is value in lots of different strategies; we are not the silver bullet!)
How Is Simple Church Different from Connect/Small Groups or Other Variants?
Typically, connect/small/life groups are a relational assimilation strategy for a church. They primarily help people build relationships within a larger church. Generally, they don’t have a specific leadership-development emphasis, and they rarely integrate into a broader church multiplication strategy.
In contrast, our Simple Churches are how we plant churches and also serve as our most important leadership-development environment, where every committed member (ideally, at any rate) is instilled with the core skill of planting a church.
Simple Church shares the relational strategy with traditional small groups, but rather than an assimilation strategy, most newcomers to our church start by attending the smaller Bible study (huddle) setting for Simple Church before attending a large-format gathering.
How Is Simple Church Different from House Church or Micro Church?
Typically, house or micro churches operate from a somewhat minimalist or deconstructionist angle on church. Eschewing large gatherings, these smaller churches emphasize staying small in their primary gathering format and omit large sabbath gatherings. (Of course, this is a broad brush, and not all house church movements operate this way). The shared vision and mission with a larger network for micro/house churches range from tight to non-existent.
In contrast, one of Simple Church’s core convictions is that good and beauty come from large-format Christian gatherings where preaching, worship, and fellowship with those outside our social sphere are central. While there is beauty in the small, the large also has irreplaceable beauty!
How Is Simple Church Different from a Bible Study?
A Bible study, although fantastic, is typically a short-term program that emphasizes both content and individual formation. In this regard, a Bible study typically operates as a program offered by a parachurch or church.
The core differentiator is that Simple Church emphasizes long-term covenant relationships. Simple Church only stops meeting when it multiplies, and some Simple Churches may exist for years on end. Although Simple Churches study the Bible, they emphasize serving the youngest/newest believer in the group, with minimal emphasis on adhering to a particular plan of study, curriculum, or format.
How Is Simple Church Different from Disciple-Making Movements (DMM)?
Simple Churches share the most characteristics with DMM strategies around the world. Like DMM, Simple Church emphasizes evangelism, disciple-making, and multiplication. Interestingly, Simple Church is not a pure DMM strategy, and to my knowledge, DMM movements around the world generally do not have a strong track record in the post-Christian West, where cultural assumptions about church run deep. My research suggests DMM tends to succeed in non-Christian contexts where no Christian memory shapes assumptions about what church ought to look like.
Simple Church differs from DMM movements by emphasizing the collective gathering and the formal organization of the church into a large body of covenant relationships. DMM movements, at least in my experience, place less emphasis on covenant relationships and collective gathering, opting instead for disciple-making and evangelistic speed.
Conclusion
So, perhaps you can see the quandary: Simple Church has elements of all of the above strategies but is also somewhat different. Next week, I will write about what Simple Churches actually do by introducing the Acts 2 Culture and Simple Church Triangle frameworks.
Although Simple Churches are at the heart of pretty much everything we do at LIFT Church, they are only the means to accomplish the five goals listed above: evangelism, disciple-making, leadership development, and church planting in the context of covenant relationships. If we ever find a better way to do those four things, we’d happily change strategy!