Two Kinds of Simple Church, Part 2
Jonathan Dodson
Continued from Part 1.
A Theological Basis for Simplicity
There is a black and white simple church that calls things the way they see them. There is a gray simple church that is willing to do mission in the mess of life, far from the safety of doctrinal and traditional towers. The gray simple does not abandon theological conviction or absolute truth, but works to convey their conviction in ways that are digestible and contextual.
But why simple? Lamin Sanneh offers a staggering simplicity in this phrase: incarnation is translation. By this he means that in becoming flesh, Jesus translated divinity into cultural form. Theologians have debated the complexity of this phenomenon for centuries. Consider Philippians 2, as an example. Whatever you make of the incarnation, it communicates a single, simple reality. God is translatable, just as the Bible is translatable. God was touchable in Jesus: he ate, he slept, he walked, he talked. In many respects, he communicated the complexity of divinity in simplicity, so that even common fishermen could catch on. This is the task of the church—communicating the complexity of the gospel in simplicity so that our people can catch on.
Simply Gray
Oliver Wendell Holmes captures the search for gray simple very well: "I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity the other side of complexity."
As a church, we are constantly striving for the other side of complexity. In fact, I am in the process of reducing our core values to three statements. My original prospectus for Austin City Life has undergone a hundred revisions, most of them in space and time, not paper and ink. This is primarily because we are trying to faithfully adjust our methodology to our missiology, and to be the church that follows the Spirit through unplanned change and unchanging gospel conviction.
We will be releasing a new 2.0 website this year that attempts to communicate our vision and mission as a people even more simply. We are refining and maintaining a simple discipleship structure along which our church can grow. Our missional spaces are increasingly strategic and well-defined. I hope we never tarry in this task of simple church, for the sake of making the incarnation translation.
