Introduction to Simple Church Life

Our Introduction to Simple Church Life

After fifteen years of earnestly striving to plant churches through out the greater Boise and southwest Idaho area the Lord gave me the desire of my heart. In serving as missions committee chairman for our Treasure Valley association of churches I had helped organize a series of meetings for the spring of 1994 to encourage the multiplication of churches. Our hope was to see our churches multiply and thus propagate evangelism and discipleship activities to reach our area in Christ. We had asked church planting experts to come to our area from all over and meet with churches, missions committees, pastors and associational leaders. These efforts followed many years of earnest prayer toward a church planting movement locally. As the intensity of the week of meetings proceeded my heart and mind raced to keep up with what God was doing. Many of the familiar obstacles to church multiplication continued to crop up in meeting after meeting. Where will we meet and who will lead? The general mindset of people continuously returned to the cost of a meeting place and the expense of providing a trained minister to lead the effort. Many dedicated Christians within a variety of church affiliations understand that the resources to accomplish the harvest are in the harvest. However the difficulty of providing the up front resources continued to create barriers. During the series of meetings I was absorbed in the intense challenges of building peoples faith to the point of trusting God to provide all the necessary resources.

I found myself traveling down the Oregon Trail backwards. I mean from west to east. I was returning from Ontario, Oregon where I had been meeting with a missions committee of a church that I had helped start. I was on my way to Boise where I was pastor of a newly started church. I was to meet with one of the oldest churches in our association concerning church multiplication. I was traveling down Interstate Highway 84 passing through Caldwell, Idaho where I had earlier dropped off some participants to meet with the missions committee of a church of long familiarity. Caldwell had been my home and where I served as pastor for nine years. As you may recognize from your studies in American history I was traversing the approximate path of the Oregon Trail but in reverse from west to east.

Suddenly the Lord broke in to my heart and mind. I saw a vision. I saw a mental picture of a small group of people setting around a kitchen table partaking of the Lord’s Supper together. Immediately the thought came to mind, “this is a sweet church.” Suddenly I saw church in new light. If little were to be normal then multiplication is not complex. Instantly everything, all the challenges of church life, all the concerns about church multiplication became simple, so simple. I understood for the first time in my Christian life that church and church multiplication is simple, very simple. I recognized that simplicity is at the heart of church multiplication.

I recalled the historic path of church history down through the ages. I remembered the gradual change that came to the simple church of the first century over time. Dedicated buildings, singular leadership and hierarchical structure came centuries later. The dominant form of church life in the fifteen century would have hardly recognized one of those first century groups. The sixteenth century brought radical change in the mutated form of church life. Yet in the following centuries as the new normal stabilized the prominent forms of church life remain complex. The complexity is to the point of encumbrance in the area of multiplication.


The little kitchen table group is reminiscent of the little groups that spread Christianity across Asia Minor like prairie fire during the first century. Over the next few weeks and months I came to realize that God had answered my prayers. He had shown me the path to multiplication of churches and Godliness though out my area and through out the world. I realized that it was the same plan that our Savior had modeled with the twelve. It was the same as Paul and the others modeled in the first century. I had traveled eastward all the way back down the Oregon Trail to St. Louis and further all the way back to the Atlantic across the ocean and trough Europe into Asia Minor. I returned to the church of the first century to discover the purity and reproducibility of simple little churches. Those were churches that required no dedicated buildings. In early churches the requirement for their multiple leaders was merely a walk with Christ. The primitive churches had a structure no more complicated than a family. Multiplication was a normal part of life in the little groups. Early churches were small enough to meet around a kitchen table in sweet intimacy with each other and eyes focused unwaveringly on Jesus. The purifying effect of those close knit little groups on the lives of each individual was inescapable. The potential for multiplication was limited only by the vision and the faith of the participants. I determined under Divine leadership to take the simple path to church multiplication and to trust Him for the results.