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| Simple Church: Returning to God's Process for Making Disciples | 
 enlarge | Authors: Thom S. Rainer, Eric Geiger
Publisher: B&H Books
Category: Book
List Price: $19.99
Buy New: $12.81
You Save: $7.18 (36%)
New (27) Used (12) Collectible (1) from $12.15
Avg. Customer Rating:  74 reviews
Sales Rank: 1471
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.1
ISBN: 0805443908
Dewey Decimal Number: 248
EAN: 9780805443905
ASIN: 0805443908
Publication Date: June 1, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
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Product Description
The simple revolution is here. From the iPod design to Google’s uncluttered homepage, simple ideas are changing the world. Multi-awarded #1 national bestseller Simple Church guides Christians back to the simple gospel-sharing methods of Jesus. No bells or whistles required. Based on case studies of 400 American churches, Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger prove the disciple-making process is often too complex. Simple churches thrive by taking four ideas to heart: Clarity. Movement. Alignment. Focus. Simple Church examines each idea, clearly showing why it is time to simplify.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 69 more reviews...
 Church Strategic Planning Made SIMPLE! June 29, 2006
105 out of 121 found this review helpful
For any congregation struggling with strategic planning, this book will be a God-send! Until reading this title, all books dealing with strategic church planning were hard-to-understand, hard-to-follow, and even harder to communicate to others. Rainer and Geiger now finally have made church strategic planning simple. In less than 250 pages, the authors have presented an extreme makeover process to take a congregation from a bloated, burnt-out organization to a streamlined, sleek spiritual body.
The steps described here are simple, but far from easy and painless.
For any pastor or church leader who is planning strategically, this book is a must-read!
Concise and practical September 7, 2007
76 out of 87 found this review helpful
Well, it would be awfully ironic if the book wasn't easy to understand. Fortunately, the authors do with the book exactly what they are calling leaders to do with their churches. They outline a simple structure for streamlining churches and letting loose the baggage that slows churches down.
The process is...simple (sorry to repeat). Churches should seek clarity, alignment, movement, and focus. Clarity is the singleness of purpose, stated in a single phrase. Movement is making sure there is a process of spiritual development that runs through the ministries of the church that fulfills the purpose. Alignment is the process of making sure that all the ministries of the church cannel people through a similar movement to fulfill the purpose. And focus is the challenging process of saying "no" to everything that distracts the church from its purpose. The authors have decided on this clear process as a saving grace to churches, repeat it fluidly, and walk the reader through all four steps.
The theory is based on a study of a number of churches that were considered thriving and many that were not. The authors say that their data shows highly significant difference between thriving churches that simplified and complex churches that did not.
The only part of this book, or the genre, that ought to give the reader pause is that the authors presume that ministry requires a strategic process through which people are funneled on the way to spiritual growth. While that is the reality of modern, institutional church management, it seems to overrule the fluid and organic (if not disorganized) ministry of Jesus and the disciples while co-opting their names. This is not a major critique of the book, just the observation that business management principles are governing the church whose founder had very little to say about business management.
Nonetheless, for those of us who find ourselves dealing with the necessities of management, this book is an essential read. It's well-written, accessible, and offers the bird's eye view that a lot of churches miss.
 simplistic June 7, 2007
74 out of 101 found this review helpful
In this extremely simple and simplistic book, the authors make a simple proposal: effective and vital churches are simple, whereas complicated, cluttered, and over-programmed churches are much less vital. At first they had a hunch about this thesis based upon informal empirical observations about churches they noticed. Later, they did a statistical study that, they contend, verified their hypothesis. Finally, and this will come as no surprise, they found their thesis in the Bible. Simplicity, they contend in the subtitle to this book, returns us to "God's process for making disciples." After two thousand years the truth is out.
Appealing unapologetically to corporate models like Google and Apple, according to Rainer and Geiger, "simple is in, complexity is out. . . complexity is not welcome." Keeping to their word, they offer an extraordinarily simple recipe for effective churches. First, they have a strong suspicion that most churches do not need a mere tweak here or there; they believe that most churches need a radical makeover. They need to start with clean sheet engineering. Next, they only need to follow four counsels: clarity, movement, alignment, and focus. Bingo, presto-chango.
A friend gave me this book to read, and I was later surprised to see that it has been hailed as a leading book of the past year in the areas of church and pastoral studies. I suspect that it has tapped in to several overlapping realities-- the difficulties ( = complexities!) of pastoring well; the palpable frustrations that pastors experience when they don't; churches that are, in fact, poorly organized, needlessly complicated, and lacking focus; and the natural longing on the part of these pastors for some direct advice about what to do with this sad state of affairs.
Despite the promises and rhetoric, this book, like every other technique and gimmick, will disappoint. No real nuanced definition of what constitutes an "effective" church is given, except, perhaps, for increased attendance. The marks of vitality that the authors return to over and over look suspiciously similar, generic, and already exist in most churches-- get parishioners to attend worship, study the Bible, join a small group, and learn to serve. Their study is narrowly limited to what they call "evangelical" churches, whatever that broad category might mean. With the size of an average church in America hovering at around 100 people, it's easy to imagine how a pastor will feel about a case study of a church that grew to 16,000 members in ten years. Finally, I myself have never experienced the Christian life or church as simple, and it strikes me as a false hope to suggest that it is. For an alternative viewpoint on pastoral call and identity, I recommend Henri Nouwen's little gem called In the Name of Jesus; Reflections on Christian Leadership, in which he construes the three temptations of Jesus (and Christian ministers) as the temptations to be relevant, spectacular, and powerful.
A Strategic Triumph! August 3, 2006
62 out of 70 found this review helpful
Some books come along that join the conversation at exactly the right moment. This is one of those rare books that emerges at the exact moment the wave is cresting. If you put the ideas of this book together with The 7 Practices of Effective Ministry and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive you will have the ideas and the language that could lead to a really wild ride.
Where the 7 Practices talks about Clarifying the Win; Thinking Steps, Not Programs; and Narrowing the Focus...Simple Church gives us Clarity, Movement, Alignment and Focus. Together, these two books render a wonderful blend of ideas that run along like members of a relay team.
What I'm finding most helpful about Simple Church is the introduction of a simple, four word metaphor that will define a new conversation on your team. You'll find yourself not only underlining and marking it up but running down the hall to share the same one-liners that I found.
Caution: Don't read this unless you're able to give it some time. You won't be able to put it down.
A 5-Star Book July 15, 2006
55 out of 72 found this review helpful
This book takes Andy Stanley's concept of the simple church, applies research, broadens the scope, and comes out with something that is new, fresh, and relevant to the evangelical church of the 21st century. If you are a student of church growth theory, halt all conversations until you have had a chance to work through this book. This may be the wave of the future. However, someone now needs to enter the conversation with a health dose of theology and see how pragmatism and theology mix, but that is the subject for another study.
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