Oversimplification Kills the Church

Going Deeper Means More Than Information. It Means Embracing Complexity.

This is the next installment in my series on building healthy churches/institutions. Today I’m talking about the importance of churches embracing complexity and rejecting oversimplification. It’s a bit of a journey, but I think if you can make it to the end, you’ll see my point. As always, thanks for reading. I don’t take it for granted.—Steve

---

Photo by T L on Unsplash

Joy and I recently finished watching one of our guilty pleasures—a British police drama.¹ This particular show focuses on an English detective and his Syrian assistant working to solve a season-long missing persons case. As we get to know the mysterious Syrian assistant, Akram, we discover that he worked for the police in his home country, but he regularly resorts to, shall we say, unconventional methods when obtaining information useful to the investigation. At one point, our English detective, Morck, has questions about these methods.

“Did you work for the good guys or the bad guys?” Morck asks.

Akram’s reply surprises him: “When you know which is which, please tell me.”

The statement startles Morck for the very reason that it startles us: We like to think of the world far more simply than it actually is. We like good guys and bad guys. We like right and wrong. We like black and white. It’s clean. It’s tidy. It’s easy to understand. It’s easy to digest.

Perhaps most importantly: It’s easy for us to defend our position—whatever that position may be—for we know that there is our side and there is the other side, and our side is always right, and the other side is always wrong.

This sort of thinking pervades the world today, particularly social media thinking. If you spend just a few minutes on YouTube you’ll see clips entitled, “Pastor Totally DESTROYS Atheist With One Simple Question.” Places like Instagram and TikTok are awash with “stitches” of response videos arguing with original videos. And don’t get me started with Facebook or X—the Websites Where Dialogue Goes to Die.™

We are addicted to arguing and to believing one group is always right and another group is always wrong, and we engineer our lives to prevent us from thinking otherwise.

For example, we tend to oversimplify our politics. We say one party is good; the other party is bad. We all know it’s not that clean. But we prefer to think that way.

By way of example: Republicans voted to uphold age restrictions on pornographic material online. That’s a good thing, and we can celebrate it. We also know that our current Republican administration is deporting Iranian and Afghan Christians (who will face torture, rape, and execution if deported to their home countries) because of their disregard for due process. That’s a bad thing, and we can say so. It’s not all good. It’s not all bad. It’s complex. (This post is not about politics, per se, so keep reading.)

The problem with oversimplified thinking is that—while comforting—it usually causes us to miss the real world. Most of the situations we encounter in the real world are far more complex than the algorithm indicates. Even the best of our heroes have flaws. Even the worst of our villains have good qualities. Life is multi-layered, complex, rich, and varied.

This requires us to have a theology that is also multi-layered, complex, rich, and varied. And a church that will embrace such a theology.

Which leads me to my point: Those of us in church leadership need to embrace the complexity of the Bible and resist the temptation of oversimplification in our teaching. I believe our congregants when they say they want to go “deeper” in the Bible. I think they want us to show the places where things are a bit more complicated. They want us to be clear when we are confident that we can be, but they also want us to be honest when things get messy or complicated.

I think they want this, because they know this is how life truly is. In the church, we confront a never-ending parade of messiness. Over time we encounter death, loss, tragedy, pain—often without easy answers. In the midst of tragedy, clichés and platitudes fall flat. Our best explanation is often simply that God is still God—despite our pain. He is with us, even when life crushes us. He is with us, even when it feels like He is not.

It is tempting to not embrace this sort of complexity. It is tempting to always have a clean and tidy answer. It is tempting to always have an easy explanation. It is tempting to appear to always be in control. It is tempting, because we want our congregations to believe us competent and studied. We want to maintain an air of success—of demonstrating that walking with Jesus is easy. (It isn’t, of course, but we would like others to think that we find it easy.)

But if we don’t embrace complexity and reject oversimplification, we hurt the church. I might even go so far as to say that we will aid in killing it.

Why am I in favor of embracing the complexity of theology amidst the messiness of life? Because pat answers and explanations may feel good in the moment, but when life becomes difficult, they are exposed as fraudulent. And if your theology suddenly feels like a lie, everything feels like a lie. And this is why people have walked away from the church over the years—particularly in the last decade or so. When the tidy answers turn out to not be answers at all, you question everything.²

This is why I think it’s best to be honest in our theological answers—even if our answers are not always easy to digest.

To be clear, I am not talking about muddying every single theological puddle. This is not about making the gospel message confusing or abandoning the Kingdom.

So what am I talking about?

For starters: Refusing to flatten the Scriptures into an all-prose instruction manual. We should embrace the varied genres of the Bible and allow them to inform our reading and interpretations. For example, when teaching Revelation, it would be best for us to say, “Revelation is a book written in a style called apocalyptic literature. Much of it is in symbolic code, and we don’t have the definitive key to unlock it. But we are going to do our best to understand it.” I think most people appreciate this sort of approach because it sounds like the rest of life—we have some information, but we don’t have all of the information.³

Further: Refusing to back away from some of the harder teachings in the Bible. We should find ways to talk about the radical generosity of the early church in ways that make those of us who shop on Amazon in our pajamas uncomfortable. We should talk about enemy love in a way that makes those of us who revel in the destruction of our geopolitical enemies uncomfortable. We should talk about the unavoidability of suffering in such a way that those of us who are dreaming about a poolside vacation become uncomfortable.

We should do these things not to be sadistic, but instead because they call us to the deeper and truer things of Jesus. And Jesus is, after all, life.

In the end, the healthiest and strongest churches will be those that help their members realize that—at root—we are complex. The Spirit and the flesh are at war within us. Like Akram, we are sometimes confused, wondering if we are good or if we are bad. Instead, we can embrace the complexity within this life, and we can delve deep into the mysteries of God and life.

We can do these things because we know that—mercifully— the most complicated things find resolution in something very simple:

Jesus meets us, saves us, and changes us—in spite of it all.

1. Dept. Q on Netflix. We thoroughly enjoyed it, but be forewarned that it is rated Mature for all the usual reasons shows these days are rated as such.

2. If I could distill all of the “deconstruction” conversations I’ve had over the last ten years or so into categories, most of them would fall into two: hypocrisy and platitudes. By hypocrisy I mean churches teaching one thing and doing something entirely different. By platitudes I mean teaching oversimplified truths that are simply not factual.

3. We preached through Revelation a few years ago and took this exact approach. Instead of pushback and confusion, we found the congregation to be grateful for our honesty and willingness to engage the text in a way that was more pastoral rather than prognosticatory.