Creeping elegance - Why church is the way it is

In a reflection entitled, "Why software is the way it is", Jef Haskin writes about 'creeping elegance'. It's the familiar phenomenon in which an efficient and effective computer program is incessantly improved with little additions and tweaks. Some of these enhancements might add benefit to the user, while perhaps most make the program run more slowly.

In my former engineering life, we spent considerable time and resources refining our products. But if I'm honest, there were moments when we added too many features, leading to a loss of focus and making life a little harder for our customers. We called the worst of these largely-useless additions 'bells and whistles'. When things got out of hand, we asked ourselves why we'd introduced unnecessary clutter and usually concluded that we'd simply acted on a whim. We knew that people wanted quality and genuine value from what we made, but perhaps we got too excited sometimes about novelty and cleverness.

This isn't a new problem. In most areas of human activity, it's tempting to assume that adding new enhancements automatically delivers improvements. The worship of the church has arguably gathered little accretions of language, ritual and ceremony over the course of time, before undergoing minor reformations (and one major Reformation) to recover the essentials. Liturgists are particularly fond of adding clauses to prayers, to say just one more thing about God. Worship leaders so easily add yet another unnecessary phrase and so dilute our praise. Even in our informal intercessory prayers, we have a problem of language getting away from us.

With all our technology, for example, there is a real question to be asked about whether we are more effective than our predecessors, who relied on less. This blog might itself might be a useful support to our mission and ministry, and it provides me with a space to think, but if it becomes an end in itself, or an alternative to the more important things, it's simply wrong.

Jesus criticised the Pharisaical tendency to focus on minutiae and to lose sight of the bigger picture. He rebuked people for going so far as to tithe their tiny stores of mint, dill and cumin while neglecting the key issues of justice, mercy and faithfulness. (Matthew 23.23). Jesus embodied a practical wisdom that focussed on the essence of a well-lived life - Love of God and love of neighbour, prayer and worship, devotion and rest.

So it's really important to me to live with an open question in all areas of my life, "is doing this new thing a genuine enhancement, or a fancy bit of trimming, which is really a distraction?" Or, to sum it up in a more memorable command, "Simplify!"

In our church community we're quite good at looking for little ways of improving and developing our ministries - St Paul's is not a community that always wants to keep things the same. But let's be careful not to focus on the ephemeral at the cost of the essential. And let's attend to the quality of all we do, rather than cleverness.