In their Broadman & Holman book, Simple Church, Thom S. Rainer, president of LifeWay Resources, and Eric Geiger, Executive Pastor at Christ Fellowship, encourage churches to “return to God’s process for making disciples.” In their research, Rainer and Geiger discovered that the healthiest churches in America tended to have a simple process for making disciples. In their book, they define a Simple Church as follows:
A congregation designed around a straightforward and strategic process that moves people through the stages of spiritual growth (discipleship).
The research indicated that the discipleship process in America’s healthiest churches included the following four (4) simple church concepts:
- Clarity. Clarity refers to the ability of the process to be communicated and understood by the people.
- Movement. Movement refers to the sequential steps in the process that causes people to move to greater areas of commitment.
- Alignment. Alignment refers to the arrangement of all ministries and staff around the same simple process.
- Focus. Focus refers to the commitment to abandon everything that falls outside of the simple ministry process.
In the upcoming weeks, we will deal with each of these concepts individually. For more information on this topic, please see….