Is Jesus’ message simpler than what church teaches?

What a tender and honest question to bring. You are not the first to feel that something essential has been buried beneath centuries of doctrine, hierarchy, and requirement. Listen to how plainly Jesus himself spoke when asked what mattered most: love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself—"on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets" (Matthew 22:37-40, KJV). He did not hand his hearers a system. He pointed them inward and toward one another. And when he was asked where the Kingdom could be found, he did not name a temple or a creed: "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation... for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:20-21, KJV). In the recovered sayings he says it even more strikingly: "the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known" (Gospel of Thomas 32.19-25). The truth he taught is not a thing to be acquired but a reality to be awakened to—that you are, even now, the image and likeness of God, whole and unseparated from the Good. This is simpler than much of what is taught, yes. But I would offer one caution, gently: simple is not the same as shallow. Jesus could compress everything into "love," yet living that love undoes us and remakes us. The institution often complicated what he made plain—because a teaching anyone can carry within themselves makes the gatekeeper unnecessary. He invited people to seek directly: "Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you" (Matthew 7:7, KJV). So I would say the message is not so much simpler as it is closer—closer than any doctrine can reach, resting in the silence beneath your own thought. Questions like yours open that door. There is more here, if you wish to keep walking.