Add Lightness and Simplicity: Dumb Church Means Dumbing Up Not Dumbing Down

Add Lightness And Simplicity

An engineering friend of mine who helped plant our church (and is one of its current elders), gave me this engineering maxim one time: “Add Lightness and Simplicity”.

And of course it’s counter-intuitive like all engineering maxims seem to be! You cannot ADD lightness. You can merely take away heavy things to lighten whatever it is you are producing. And you cannot ADD simplicity, you must strip something away in order to reduce the complexity.

My friend went on to say that the best machines, the ones that flow well and work the longest, are those in which lightness and simplicity have been thoughtfully added. It helps to know that the industry my friend works in is the high performance racing car industry (don’t we all want that kinda job!).

And of course in his industry it’s essential that the cars stay light and simple in order for them to achieve optimum manoeuvrability. It may be that lightness and simplicity aren’t the same for a racing car as they are for a tractor!

Yet it’s a fine balance. Take away too little and the car may be too heavy to compete. Take away too much and you may end up with a fatal crash. There’s a certain “Goldilocks” aspect to it all.

Yet the point of the maxim stands: Anything that does not need to be there in order for the product to achieve maximum performance for the task for which it was assigned, does not need to be there. Anything extra will be a distraction or, worse, a hindrance to the actual task.

When it comes to the Dumb Church idea that I wrote about (which you can find here) the aim is the same:  to add lightness and simplicity. The approach is the same as the racing car. Anything that does not need to be there should not be there.

Dumb Phones

In my post I likened the need for Dumb Church to the return of the dumb phone. When it was first invented the dumb phone was just a crazy new gadget. But now? It’s a dinosaur. Yet it’s back. Why? Not because of a Luddite desire for less tech. Not because of  a reactionary “chuck it all out” approach that pays no attention to the purpose.

No, it’s because its promoters have decided that the smartphone was hindering the most important performance of all – our performance as healthy human beings.  We had shaped our tools, and then they shape us. And they concluded that the smart phone was shaping us poorly.

Since its inception the smartphone has promised us better versions of ourselves (just watch the ads). But we would have to conclude that they have not delivered. Our smartphones have shaped us in clearly unhealthy ways, left us with poor habits, encouraged little actual retention, and have amped up already growing levels of isolation and rewarded bad online behaviour.

Worse still, they are locking us in to confirmation bias and echo chambers on the social media apps that we devour on the bus, on the toilet, in bed, at the dinner table.

Despite their ubiquity and apparent necessity, they are increasingly not fit for purpose – if the purpose is healthy, well-connected, well-informed, kinder human beings. And the promoters of dumb phones believe that they can help return us to our purpose.

So too the Dumb Church. In order to achieve its goal, the dumb phone added lightness and simplicity. Some things  – many things as it turned out – had to be taken away. But whatever was taken away had to in line with the purpose. Would the dumb phone be lighter and simpler if the ability to make an actual phone call was removed? Clearly! But that would defeat the purpose!

So too for Dumb Church. There was a movement twenty years ago, for example, that was convinced we needed to do away with regular preaching and replace it with a more bar-stool Ted-Talk approach to how we taught at church. It certainly looked lighter and simpler.

But let’s admit it. It also proved more dangerous! Yes, you could strip away the preaching of the Word each week in the church gathering and it would certainly make the rest of the service, and certainly the week of your preachers, much lighter and simpler.

But as we know from Scripture itself, like brakes in the sports car, the clear exposition and teaching of the Word by those gifted to teach seems, somehow, to be a constant non-negotiable safety feature when it comes to training, reproving, and equipping! Remove that and spiritual wreckage is almost inevitable.  So let’s learn from what I believe was a poor experiment on adding lightness and simplicity by many well-meaning but misguided folk.

However, if we are to take Dumb Church seriously at all, then clearly we need to decide what we can strip away (that’s the speed component), and what we must retain (that’s the safety component).  In other words we need an inventory that ensures what we decide to add in terms of lightness and simplicity is fit for purpose.

This will require some “back-to-the-drawing-board” moments. It will require some deep thinking. It will require some clarity and prayer. The points of Dumb Church is not the dumb down the church, but to dumb up the church!

So on one hand we need to refrain from reactionary fits of pique, and burn it all down because we’re all too busy or too tired and we just want life to be simpler or lighter. And on the other hand we need to be brave enough to take a scalpel (or a chainsaw!) to some things that while they might even be good, are have been good at one stage, are  weight that we do not need to bear going forward.

The Two Greats

That of course, brings us to to the question: What is the purpose of the church? Well we could put that a lot of ways, but I am currently reading Karl Deenik’s book Gathered Together: The Beauty of Living As God’s Church.  Karl helpfully narrows down the point of the church to the “greats” that we are probably familiar with:

The two ‘Great Commandments’ map out for us the task of God’s people: love God with all our being, and love our neighbours as ourselves, especially in the church, but also in the world. But aside from those two Great Commandments, there is another element that is rightly identified as a key part of what the church does. It’s what is referred to as the ‘Great Commission’.

So far, so good. You have probably heard that many times. Love of God and others. Mission to the world. The fact is, however, that while those in themselves are simple, we have done a good job in many church cultures of busying up people, adding a whole lot of seemingly necessary bells and whistles onto your racing cars – er, our churches. And then when we do add something else in, we are often too fearful or near-sighted to take something else out.

My own experience of household church when we went to live in the UK in 2006 was supposed to be an experience of how to do church with a lighter footprint. But sadly for me, and for many others, there was a weight of expectation and a constant churn and busyness that did not reflect that desire. Zeal seemed to add things in. And when things were dropped very little reason was given for it.

When it came to the point that members were assessed as to whether they were adequately committed to the ten values that the church network held, and then being asked to consider leaving if they were not hitting at least six of them, something had gone wrong. Something was not light. Something was not simple. And something was certainly not beautiful.

And perhaps you too have experienced churches that are strong on both of those two biblical “Greats”  – Commands and Commission – but that somehow felt heavy and complex too. That somehow, like those smartphone ads, promises something that it is not delivering. That doesn’t feel fit for purpose.

What I like about Karl’s book is his acknowledgement, even in the midst of a well-thought out and deep study of the identity and role of the church, that the blueprint for the church in the New Testament is a lightness and simplicity blueprint.

Here’s Karl:

The New Testament offers a surprisingly lightweight model for church life: it doesn’t seem to have run a great multitude of church programs, rather it gathered together for people to be built up by the gospel in order to then scatter and take that gospel with them into their daily lives.

That Karl has to use the word “surprisingly” is primarily because as Christians we have come to assume that the New Testament offers a heavyweight model. And that’s partly because we view the New Testament through the lens of our own church experiences.

Now that may lead us to the circular argument, “How long is a piece of string|?” How light is light? How simple is simple? It might also lead to the accusation that somehow I am trying to re-enact some fabled expression of early church that did not actually exist or even if it did, not for very long.

Perhaps so. But a cursory glance at the New Testament will tell you that you could achieve a lot of the “one another”, “towards God” and “towards outsiders” stuff quite simply and quite lightly. Much simpler and lighter than most of us do now.

Take An Inventory

So what would be the first steps to take in order to ‘dumb up” your church? How might we determine whether our church needs to add lightness and simplicity in order to make it the best fit for purpose?

Well, put your engineering hat on. It would be to take an inventory surely! It would be to sit down and assess whether or not your church is fit for purpose over the next thirty years to achieve the dual “Great” task with as light a footprint as possible. A lightness and simplicity blueprint would take seriously the manouevrability and safety of the body of Christ in the location in which you live.

Given the complexity of the cultural times we are in, the upheavals financially, socially, culturally, relationally, an integral task of the leadership in our churches in the near future will be to determine how to add lightness and simplicity in order to achieve both of these things.  We are in a period of rapid discontinuous change.

We are in a period of declining net wealth, high property values in the West, workplace changes, a rapid rise in AI, legislative pressures, polarisation and political churn. These things affect all of us and they will quite naturally change the way we are able to do church.

We don’t add lightness and simplicity as a concession that allows busy people to “slack off” (that’s always a fear of the church staff, and it’s never a fear of the lay people), we do so in order to help us achieve maximum manoeuvrability and maximum safety.

Just like the phone, we want to dumb up not dumb down, in order to attain a greater purpose.

Next stop – The Dumb Church Inventory.

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Dumb Church Inventory Ideas: that’s where we will go in the next instalment of this series. But before that my next blog post will be the follow up to the one about the young man coming to church for the first time which you can find here

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