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.

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.

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.

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