I’d like to take a brief break from my Christmas tirade (just a short one) to run a few thoughts by my reading public:

Simplicity seems to be a growing phenomenon in our society. People are working hard to un-clutter their lives, their homes, their budgets, their (fill in the blank). Why? Because people want to feel no longer out of control. Take for example the premise behind John Grisham’s book from 2001. Skipping Christmas was about a man who had finally decided to quit making a big deal out of Christmas and for once spend all the money he’d normally spend on the holidays for a holiday trip. The idea—what if we removed the trappings of Christmas and just enjoyed each other? (Oops, there goes that Christmas tirade again!)

Even Google has developed a “simple” mindset with a homepage that is free from extras—those bells and whistles that flash at you from every other homepage/search engine on the ‘Net. Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger cite this trend in their book Simple Church (Broadman & Holnam, 2006). Note the following quote:

“Marissa Mayer oversees the Google home page. She is responsible to keep it simple. She says that ‘once you have a home page like our competitors, paring it back like Google’s is impossible. You have too many stakeholders who feel they should be promoted on the home page.’”

I’ll let Rainer and Geiger make their own point about simplifying church, instead I was just wondering what kind of application this knowledge might have to some other arenas:

Government—is it really true that they can’t cut back on the pork and the fat? According to Mayer that must be the case, because “once you have [interest groups] like [Congress does], paring back to [the essentials] is impossible. You have too many stakeholders who feel they should be promoted . . .” (I think the principle fits.)

Homes—we begin to have a difficult time saying no to the unnecessary things that clutter our lives and tax our budgets because we’ve always done them, had them, or wanted them.

Perhaps you know some other areas that need to be clutter-free. I’d love for you to share them here.