Deliberate Simplicity: How the Church does more by doing less
Dave Browning (Zondervan, 2009)
The title caught my eye, so I bought a copy. It was worth it.
Although there are aspects of Browning’s take on church that make me feel uncomfortable, most of his basic premises are ones I agree with.
Browning leads a church movement that consists of dozens of small groups, who also meet together at “worship centers”.
Deliberate Simplicity
Browning explains the choice of this phrase by noting that the “deliberate” part refers to design (being thought-out) as well as drive (“done intentionally”). “Simplicity” describes the manner in which the church carries out its mission – simply. In other words, in clear, intelligible, understandable, plain, natural, unembellished and unpretentious ways.
Minimality (keep it simple)
Dave Browning outlines the first key element of his approach to church life in this chapter. Minimality means simplicity, which gives focus. It enables a church to be very deliberate in its attempt to give energy to the most important matters. For Browning’s church, this means focusing on three things – worship, small groups and outreach. (Each of these is rather undefined, so it would be interesting to see what he means by them.)
Taking a minimalist approach does mean making choices – not just regarding what to do but also what not to do.
Much of what he writes in this chapter resonates with me. For example:
Deliberate Simplicity advocates restricting the activities of the church instead of expanding them. It calls for less programming instead of more…working smarter instead of harder…Minimality is how less turns out to be more.
Such minimality is, according to the author, a call to simplicity at the doctrinal as well as practical level. While I applaud (and agree with) his belief in majoring on the majors and minoring on the minors, I did wonder how this actually works out in practice for his community.
Further on in the chapter, Browning suggests that “smallness should be valued”. Referencing out of the wider culture’s reaction to the “big is better” mantra, he suggests that often small things produce “moments of disproportionate impact” – the small things do matter. He quotes Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world…Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”, and then notes that:
The movement away from big to small, from centralized to decentralized, and from passive to participatory has reached us.
Intentionality (keep it missional)
A very intentional mission focus is the second of the anchors the author identifies as being a mark of a deliberately simple church, like his own.
I liked Browning’s answer to a woman’s inquiry “Isn’t the church for those of us who are believers?” He replied, “No, the church is not for us. The church is us, but it’s not for us. It’s for the lost.”
I also identified with the author’s contention that the natural progression of an organization’s life is inward, rather than outward. Because of this, Dave Browning feels that “A big part of a pastor’s (read: leader’s) job is to keep the church swimming upstream, because the natural current takes us to a place of inward focus.”
However, I did feel quite a bit of unease reading this chapter. I think it was because of two sneaking suspicions which kept gnawing away at me the more I read. The first had to do with a sense that in spite of stating that “Outreach is a broad concept, encompassing all the loving expressions we extend, from giving someone a cup of cold water to personally sharing our faith in Jesus”, Browning’s general picture of mission seemed to mainly just equate with evangelism. There was little, if any, reference or examples of a more holistic understanding of God’s redemptive work.
The other source of my unease was the repetitive examples the author gave regarding his church’s approach to “outreach”. They seemed to focus around a “worship center” and to emphasize a strong “Come” or attractional focus. (Though he does state later in the book that a “Go” posture is what they’re attempting to take.)
Later in the book the author reinforces this mindset by suggesting:
The time to plan for the next wave of people is before they come, not after. If you don’t have the classes, teachers, parking, or seats for your church to double in size, you probably won’t need to worry about it. The 80 percent rule has said that a room feels full at 80 percent, but my experience is that the pressure will build in the parking lot or bathrooms long before that.
It reminded me that American culture is very different on so many levels to our own Kiwi culture. Inviting, attracting people to a “church service” fits much better with the North American psyche than it does with our own.
Reality (keep it real)
Authenticity is the theme of this chapter. Browning calls this “keeping it real” his “eleventh commandment”. Candor is a key part of this – “candor works because candor unclutters.”
In a Deliberately Simple church, we want our energy to go into experiencing and expressing the grace of God, not into impression management.
What you see is what you get. This real sincerity “…stands in sharp contrast to a Christian subculture whose motto appears to be, ‘Fake it ‘til you make it’ or ‘The show must go on.’”
I like the substance of an “advert” Browning’s church created for newcomers:
Do you know what’s special about us? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. If you are looking for a perfect church, where people talk, act, and dress perfectly, you are going to be severely disappointed with us. At CTK you’ll find real people, with real problems, real blue jeans, and a real God who we’re learning to love. What you won’t find is: extra reverb so that we sound ‘holier than thou’ music written during someone else’s lifetime, harsh judgmentalism implying we don’t struggle but you do. We found out that we’re all made of the same stuff. There’s nothing special about us. So bring your story, your pain, your questions, your sense of humour. You’ll fit right in.
As Browning notes: “Deliberate Simplicity calls for an understated approach. No hard sell. A relative lack of hype.” And this translates from matters of substance into matters of style – which for their church means a lot of informality and a very utilitarian approach to the buildings/settings they congregate in.
All this is done, the author suggests, so that the church might be able to focus on helping each other to love God and love others.
Multility (keep it cellular)
Now there’s a new word for me! Multility. According to the author it’s, “a commitment to multiples of some thing, instead of a larger version of that thing.”
Multility contends that more is better than bigger. Multility is growth by cell division, the replicating model of organic systems. Organic systems are implicitly self-sustaining and reproducible. They multiply through germination, reproduction, and mitosis.
Drawing a (somewhat artificial?) distinction between programs and ministries, Browning mentions that “While there are a limited number of programs that a Deliberately Simple church may initiate, there are an unlimited number of ministries that individuals may initiate. While corporate programs are discouraged, individual ministries are encouraged.”
Browning states that they don’t like the word “control” but prefer to use the word “empower”. For “…authoritarian cultures spawn passivity and create codependency.” Alternatively, a “permission-giving culture” (to use an old term out of the eighties) helps leaders have faith not only in God but also in people and encourages them to be “prosumers” instead of “consumers”. Furthermore, Browning notes that:
In our context, the role of the pastors and staff is to create and sustain an environment where the people of the church (the real ministers) can carry out their ministries with minimum obstacles and maximum fulfillment.
I say “Amen” to all of that. Nothing new or revolutionary here – but it’s great to hear this kind of approach expressed in other contexts.
Building on this theme of multility, the author explains his preference for decentralization over centralization by noting that:
Some may look at CTK (his church) see that it is small pieces loosely joined, and conclude that we prefer small over big. We don’t, actually. We prefer more over bigger. That is, we want to reach an unlimited number of people…but we feel that the best way to do this is to be in an unlimited number of places.
Using John Wesley’s strategy as a model, Browning writes about how building a network of small, loosely connected, interdependent groups, is an “architecture of participation”. It’s a web of relationships, a tribe.
Velocity (keep it moving)
My unease with some the underlying elements of Browning’s theology grew significantly in this chapter. Early on he states:
Hell is hot, and forever is a long, long time. We have a responsibility to reach as many people as we possibly can, as quickly as we possibly can…If there is no hell, then there is no reason for us to exist…The church holds the hope of the world in its hands…What is going on in my church is the most important thing happening in the community.
Mmm. That’s starting to sound a little like old time “revival” preaching to me. And while I have sympathy with his activist bent, it also smells a little presumptuous – a rather inflated view of the church’s role in God’s mission. Plus, built on my concerns from earlier chapters, there’s an underlying unease with the narrowness of Browning’s understanding of mission.
While his challenge in this chapter to be adventurous, take the initiative and employ risky faith, resonates, the examples and general flavour of how we should do this fits more with that of a church growth manual.
Numbers seem more important to Browning than I would feel comfortable with. Goal setting is one thing – but it’s the type of goals he suggests that I find disconcerting.
Growth (as in numerical growth) is indicated as:
An expectation for leaders at CTK (his church) is ‘that you will be growth oriented and plan on serving twice as many people as you presently do.’…We start behaving like a church of one hundred when we are a church of fifty, like a church of one thousand when we are five hundred.
Even so, there are comments that moderate these tendencies, such as:
We don’t go out to save the world, and then ask God to join us…We are junior partners with almighty God.
I also find encouraging his emphasis on their flexibility that is able to make decisions and change course quickly, and on the relationship between action and reflection. Explaining their approach, Browning notes:
We were meeting in more than one location long before we gave thought to being a multilocation church. We have a predisposition toward action. We have not thought our way into a new way of acting; we have acted our way into a new way of thinking. The action-reflection model contends that action is the starting point for reflection and therefore fundamental to the learning process.
And in sharing his thoughts on institutionalism he states: “One of the best antidotes to institutionalism that I see in our story is decentralization.”
Scalability (keep it expanding)
Browning’s last chapter revolves around his sixth articulated principle – scalability. That is, “capable of being scaled – a succession or progression of steps or degrees.”
In other words, how easily can what we are about, be disseminated, transferred to another context and replicated or repeated?
The extent to which this has occurred in Browning’s own CTK network is, he states, at least partly attributable to an “arrows out” theology – another way of expressing a “Go” or scattered approach to church life – rather than a “Come” or gathered one. I like what he says about this:
There are two tensions in a church – outreach and nurture…Left to ourselves, Christians quickly circle the wagons. We build towers and walls. We look to be blessed instead of being a blessing.
Browning picks up on Brian McLaren’s idea of “unterror cells” (in his book Everything Must Change) to suggest that if we saw our faith communities as a global network of unterror cells, plotting and seeding goodness and hope, subverting injustice, apathy and terror, we might really, with God’s empowering, transform the world around us.
The book finishes with an emphasis on the importance of growing and multiplying leaders for such a movement – particularly what he calls “pastorpreneurs” – “kingdom-minded leaders who have a heart for people and the ingenuity to reach them.”
Overall
There’s some great insights in Deliberate Simplicity. And it’s obvious that the author has thought carefully about many things and has a clarity about what he’s involved in that’s refreshing. However, I still can’t shake the feeling that at times it’s a little like an innovative church growth manual, albeit with a predictable starting point. For example, he notes:
It is possible to start a Deliberately Simple church with next to nothing. It can be done with a borrowed sound system, a rented community hall, a pastor-on-loan, and a pieced-together worship team.
Of course, this maybe unfair to Dave Browning, as there are other statements that point to a very different way.
The constant and almost exclusive use of business examples to make his points also disturbed and irritated me. It only adds to a question regarding Browning’s overarching theology – to what degree is it embedded in a results-oriented, business-model, dualistic activism? I can’t answer this question by reading his book – there’s just too many (at least what seem to me) contradictory or flip-flop statements.
Without an opportunity to chat with him, or to observe more closely what his words look like in practice, it’s hard to pin down just exactly what he believes and lives.
So I’d like to meet Dave Browning. There’s clearly much he could teach me. Maybe a trip to Washington State is needed!
Finally, while feeling uneasy about aspects of Browning’s paradigm, I want to finish this review by affirming the “what if” questions he notes halfway through the book. They’re worth any institutional church reflecting on:
What if a church became more outward focused than inward focused?
What if, when a church outgrew its location, it started up in an additional location instead of building a bigger building?
What if a church grew in an unlimited way – by multiplication instead of addition?
What if a church took the resources it had been allocating toward buildings and put them into leader development?
What if a church could aspire to become a movement instead of a ministry?
What if…?
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