God is calling us to do less.

Recently, a good friend and spiritual guide, Mark Love, has used his blog to explore a new metrics for determining the health of churches that are leaving the attractional model and the promise of megachurch for a more missional approach. Numbers of conversions, baptisms, and contribution can be helpful to some degree but are not the most reliable or revealing barometers of whether a church is healthy and thriving in God's will and Spirit, especially in a post-christian culture. 

His first three metrics were great: 1. Diversity, 2. Openly Seeking Partners in God's mission, 3. Open Dialogue on Tough Issues. To be honest, these three even made me feel good. I think most of that had to do with me seeing that the church that I help lead has been making wonderful strides on these three points in the last two years. Even if I didn't feel we had accomplished these fully, I did feel affirmed that we were on the right path toward being the church that God has called and gifted us to be. 

But then, on Tuesday, he posted his fourth metric: Simplicity.

Is your congregation--and its members--intentionally pursuing simplicity? My hunch is you're not. My hunch is that church, for a lot of your members, is just another place in our cultural landscape where people are being asked to do more.   

I think the absolute spiritual challenge of our age is related to simplicity. Taking intentional steps to slow down and pare down are crucial for paying attention to God. And there's no other place where people are going to be asked to do that. Not at their work, not in their kids' lives, not in the media they consume. Church has to be the place where that happens. 

Happy feelings = gone. #RealTalk: Mark Love is a buzzkill. (I love you, Mark!)

Not only was I challenged by his call to simplicity, I actually commented on his blog some feelings of just how challenging this has been to put into practice. I mentioned how I had been trying to create just this influence among our church leadership, and had met ideological agreement followed by practical opposition. We all thought it sounded like a great idea, but we couldn't do it--wouldn't do it. I was perplexed at the time, but had several other things keeping me busy so I let it go for a while. Then the blog post convicted me. And then, I received this honest email from one of my close friends on the leadership team at our church who had also read the blog on Simplicity:

Do you know what he's talking about?  I mean, I understand what he's saying but I don't have a clue how to do what he's suggesting.  If I don't understand it, I can't do it and if I can't do it, I can't model it for anyone else - FAILURE!!!!    HELP!!!!!

I must admit that I need to simplify - I'm tired out, burned out and ready to try something else - I just don't know what that looks like b/c I've been on this treadmill so long - its the only thing I know.  But I also know that its not the right thing or the only thing - I just don't know what the other thing is.  I do know that what we are doing now doesn't look a whole lot like anything Jesus ever did.

Bingo. Did I mention already that Mark Love is a buzzkill? I might make shirts that say this.  

I know they'd sell.

Seriously, though. I feel exactly like my friend. I struggle with how busy we make ourselves and how we seem to be just another voice complicit in our culture's frenetic race to actually run ourselves to death. Sabbath is such a foreign concept that instead of embracing it's (non)practice as a part of the rhythm of life, we generally study those parts of scripture and satisfy our selves by discussing the technical timing of it in the Jewish way of counting days--apparently, by making this point, we can say we have not out-rightly ignored it.  

But simplicity is hard--especially on the communal level. Maybe your church is different from mine, but our church calendar is super-full. We have so many events and offerings on our calendar that we can't even get out of our own way. 

Often, we have so many events in the same weekend (or even on the same day!) that we struggle to fill all the necessary volunteer spots needed to pull them off. And that is what we do most often--pull them off. We rarely do something so well that we celebrate it as a complete victory; rather, we usually get to the end of an event breathing a sigh of relief, slouching exhausted against the office hallway walls, giving tired high fives for surviving and pulling it off. 

Deep down, I think we feel the weight to justify our existence to the world (but more likely to our members and ourselves), so we keep ministry efforts happening around the clock. We feel guilty for the days when the building sits empty or unused. Oh, we know that less is more (which is also  true about presentation slides, fellow preachers... but that is another blog post). And we know that by doing less we can do it more faithfully and with greater impact and effect. And we know that by doing less we can relieve our volunteer corps from feeling so over-worked and burnt out. 

We know we need to simplify, but none of us want to be responsible for it. As a leader who is "responsible" for how "my" church is doing, one of the hardest things to believe and embrace is this: 

Our church needs to do LESS.

The truth is that a lot of people in our pews and in our leaderships at many of our churches equate simplicity with laziness and complacency. Let me give you an example: 

I am responsible for the adult ministries at our church. I was recently questioned by several shepherds as to why the empty-nesters group does not have events and projects like the other lifestages (families with children, families with teens, college/young married, etc.). It was not aggressive or overly critical, but I did take a small amount of heat for not having stuff on the calendar. My response was that there is already too much on the calendar, and my group was busy being every other event's volunteer staff. I explained that any event on the calendar requires planning, resources, and volunteers to make it happen. We don't have any extra time, resources, or volunteers for any more stuff on the calendar. They seemed to get it somewhat, but they still wondered why my ministry was the only one not actively "doing something." 

Now imagine being the youth minister or children's minister at a church like ours. What would be the backlash if they trim back their calendar of events? Can't you hear it: "Why don't you care about our teens? Now they only have one night with God and six out with their friends each week." Or, "I remember when we tried to get our kids to love being at church... now it seems like you hardly want anything to do with them." "Shouldn't someone be doing something to reach our community?" Is it fair to open our ministry leaders up to this kind of unfair criticism? 

Being the ministry leader that opts for simplicity is often the same thing as being the ministry leader who is labeled lazy or a quitter or not passionate enough. Who wants that reputation? So we keep the treadmill going. We keep packing our calendar. We keep tripping over ourselves. And we keep bemoaning that our disciples do not embrace volunteering as eagerly as the more faithful disciples of back when things were better. 

God forgive us. God save us... from ourselves.