There has been a massive over-complexification that has taken place in modern [Western] “Christianity” that needs to be seriously and radically addressed.<\/p>\n
All throughout the Bible, God is portrayed as a God of exactness, precision, detail, and immense variety.<\/p>\n
He is also portrayed as a God who is very simple – infinitely<\/a> powerful, wise, knowledgeable, and perfect: yes, God is all of those things. But He displays those infinite perfections in intentional simplicity.<\/p>\n God’s directives for praise and worship are both viscerally powerful, and intensely simple: “make a joyful noise<\/a>“, “praise Him<\/a>“, “extol Him<\/a>“, “sing<\/a>“, “shout<\/a>“, “pray<\/a>“, “lift hands<\/a>“.<\/p>\n Nothing in that list requires any special skills, training, or knowledge that is not to be had by all of God’s people.<\/p>\n Where, then, does complexity in the church come from:<\/p>\n I’m sure part of this is due to the entertainment culture and mindset that pervades modern Western culture: we have our iPods, our smart phones, laptops, TV, radio, internet, Playstations – and we think we are supposed<\/em>\u00a0to be entertained all the time. We have entitlement programs from the government, and we think it’s someone else’s job to take care of us.<\/p>\n We have seminaries to train our young men to be pastors, and we think if you haven’t gotten your degree from a seminary, you’re somehow “less” of a pastor than a man with a Doctor of Divinity.<\/p>\n One prime area I see this displayed is in the overtly complicated and highly specific church budgets with dozens upon dozens of line items: staff salaries, pastoral salaries, building maintenance, VBS materials, promotional banners, decoration, vehicle upkeep, janitorial supplies, food, children’s ministry, women’s ministry, singles’ ministry, missions trips, outreach, denominational requirements (eg participating the SBC’s NAMB and IMB), lights, music licensing … and the list goes on and on.<\/p>\n Several of these topics will be addressed in future posts, but I propose the following simplification for church budgets:<\/p>\n That’s it. five categories. Maybe one or two additional \/ altered for a specific church.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There has been a massive over-complexification that has taken place in modern [Western] “Christianity” that needs to be seriously and radically addressed. All throughout the Bible, God is portrayed as a God of exactness, precision, detail, and immense variety. He is also portrayed as a God who is very simple – infinitely powerful, wise, knowledgeable, …\n
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Continue reading a plea for simplification<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[883],"tags":[968],"keyring_services":[],"class_list":["post-3500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-study","tag-unbiblicality"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3500\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3500"},{"taxonomy":"keyring_services","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fkeyring_services&post=3500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}