Lets all KISS

Simple

What is church life or Christian life meant to be?

Or all of Life for that matter

Is it meant to be all that it is?

Complex? Intertwined? Layers? & Systems?

Well in a word yes, those things are meant to be there.

How much or how many of us do need to know about them,
well then that's another story.

As a kid growing up, did you know the rules of your home?

You learn them by being there no one sits down and say, by the way here are the rules.

You learn them by being part of the family; I remember being told things as I became aware. It was simple this is what we did.
When my kids came along we didn'’t have rules, they came as they were necessary.
We started with teenagers so a lot faster than in most homes. Only as things happened did we do things.

Over the last 20 or so years, church has changed I believe we give out far too much information.

For example I was in a church in southern Sydney; they decided to set up a care program. Having everyone integrated into a small group, the leadership spent lots time & effort to map out plan to do it had pastors going all over the place finding out what was needed. They drew up the plan, and then started preaching about it 6 weeks about what we were going to do! How it would work & what it would mean.

Now that is all well & good, but does the congregation need to know all the ins & outs?

Leaders yes, but average member I don'’t thinks it has gone on from there we just about preach everything to death. The people are sick of it before it even begins what are we doing?

Are we making it more complex!

There is a principal which is called KISS

KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID

Now is that what we are doing?

I don'’t think so we need to feed our people all the information, yes the basics.
This is what it is; this is what we think it looks like.
However as we work with whatever it is we are doing there will be some variation as we work it out.

After that leader possible here is the information or where to find it

Let'’s spend our time working smarter, not harder
I getting the feeling that this sort of thing is a bit of a trap.
In that when you start giving information you need to give more & more.

Look at the internet billions & billions of pages of information & growing!

The gospel is simple, Jesus came He died for me, I need to accept this or reject this, in a nut shell. Yes in some ways that is an over simplification but, simple none the less.

We as a part of what we do we need to think about the consequences of going down an information path.
Information begets more information

Even in politics which has got to be the most complex best going around when they give a speech it is done in a language that we all get. Budget time for example the speech is a reader’s digest version of what is going on. It you want the detail you need to read the paper itself.

Where is all this going well really my personal belief is this we need to bring it back to basics.

That our Sundays and other general meetings need to be places where we can reach the lost.

Leadership meeting can have elements of information but let’s not get bogged down in doing good!

Simplicity I believe is a key, most peoples lives are so complex that we need to help them become simplified
Remember KISS!