There are all manner of things that are over-engineered and over-complicated. I am not one of life’s luddites and I generally embrace new tech and quite like invention. But there are times when things are over-complicated to a degree that cannot be considered any sort of improvement.

I don’t think there is any clearer example of this than train toilets. I am writing this as I am on the train so it is in mind. Specifically, I am thinking of a certain kind of train toilet door.

Time was you used to have a door with a handle and a small bolt that you slid by hand to lock the door. It was all very obvious and very clear. Nowadays, however, you have a huge curved door, that slowly rolls back like a curtain with a series of buttons on the wall that let you attempt locking. You now no longer have any degree of certainty that the door is actually locked. Only a small light indicates anything and, electronics being what they are, give you little confidence that the door won’t open whilst you are mid-toilet, opening like a theatrical curtain to reveal you like a booby prize on a terrible quiz show to the horrified onlookers whose anxiety levels suddenly rise knowing that they, too, may have their shame uncovered.

What all this does is make the perfectly normal and ordinary task of going to the toilet incredibly stressful. And it could all so easily be avoid if we just did the sensible thing and reverted to a simple mechanical bolt. It is entirely unclear how the arcade-style experience of locking the toilet door represents any sort of improvement.

I sometimes wonder whether our innovations in the church aren’t a little like this. It can be tempting to play around and seek improvements that aren’t really any such thing. We may think we are “improving” the church experience when, in fact, we are simply messing around with ways that work and replacing them with what is notably worse. That isn’t to say every change is for the worse, just that I am in little doubt some of them certainly are.

Just as sometimes all you want is a basic handle and a bolt, so often the things we think make the church experience more exciting and interesting are often the very things that undermine what we are aiming to do. These things can cause people to feel the experience of coming to church is worse because, it turns out, they were ultimately coming to fellowship with the people and hear from the word and the new innovations do more to get in the way of that than serve it.