Thursday, September 29, 2005
Simply Living
SmartChristian linked the other day to this article on Richard Foster's book Celebration of Discipline and looks specifically at the discipline of simplicity.
I'm not so sure about that. I'm not sure about that, not in America today. We are simple too affluent. I know many people who live very simply, but are very cluttered and have many things. People that are hugely generous with their time talents, and finances, still accumulate a lot of stuff. This is the real money quote from the article
I have an issue with all the recent talk about simplicity, and that is that it makes it appear that people of genuine generosity and genuine affluence somehow cannot be true Christians. People should live within their means, they should avoid debt, they should never let their possessions stand in the way of God, They should be grateful to God for all that they have, they should be generous past the point where it amazes their tax guy, but those points are very different places for different people.
We need to be careful in the discussion of simplicity that we do not fall into an unworthy judgmental pattern.
In "Celebration of Discipline," Richard Foster argues that "the majority of Christians have never seriously wrestled with the problem of simplicity, conveniently ignoring Jesus' many words on the subject. The reason is simple: this Discipline directly challenges our vested interests in an affluent lifestyle."I agree with this, to a point. The article goes on to describe, in a fashion entirely parallel to the standarargumentsts about tranformation reducing the incident of sin in our lives, that an attitude of simplicity will result in actual unclutttered closets.
Foster makes an important distinction when he describes the Christian discipline of simplicity as "an inward reality that results in an outward lifestyle." In other words, focus too quickly on the externals—the doing without—and it's the good intention that is likely to be cast aside instead of the extra blender.
But simplicity is more than just uncluttered closets. "It is possible for a person to be developing an outward lifestyle of simplicity and to be filled with anxiety," according to Foster.
I'm not so sure about that. I'm not sure about that, not in America today. We are simple too affluent. I know many people who live very simply, but are very cluttered and have many things. People that are hugely generous with their time talents, and finances, still accumulate a lot of stuff. This is the real money quote from the article
Of course, too much stuff can also leave too little room for God. With the time required to shop for, move, insure, use, store, clean, maintain, organize, and worry about our stuff, time in God's Word, time to minister, time for church, and time to reach out to others can easily get edged out—hence, the call for simplicity.The issue is not our things, but our relationship to our things -- do we hold our things as idols? The real problem is not simplicity, but people living beyond their means. The anxiety of too much stuff, the complications thereof, result only when people live just a little bit beyond what they can afford. I would argue that the call to simplicity is about consumer debt more than anything else.
I have an issue with all the recent talk about simplicity, and that is that it makes it appear that people of genuine generosity and genuine affluence somehow cannot be true Christians. People should live within their means, they should avoid debt, they should never let their possessions stand in the way of God, They should be grateful to God for all that they have, they should be generous past the point where it amazes their tax guy, but those points are very different places for different people.
We need to be careful in the discussion of simplicity that we do not fall into an unworthy judgmental pattern.
