Certainly an admirable vision–to eliminate and simplify.
I hope you will accept some advice–do not allow your blog to become legalistic, and please constantly remind other Christians not to become legalistic in their quest for simplicity.
Back in the late 1970s, in the Protestant world (which my husband and I were part of for the first 47 years of our lives), a movement sprang up. This movement was called “Simple Lifestyle.”
I believe this movement got its start with an excellent book by Ron Sider called
Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. I highly recommend this book for Catholic and Protestant Christians. It has held up well. Ron Sider has gotten involved with certain liberal organizations and political stands over the years, but his book about poverty and how Christians can help is still quite good.
After his book came out, books and seminars were everywhere! Everyone was trying to be “simple.” Even Billy Graham got into the act, and one of the big Evangelical conferences actually published a mission statement that the participants would commit to living a simple lifestyle in order to have more money to give to the church and to missions.
But as the movement continued into the 1980s, it became disturbingly legalistic. I remember a discussion at a seminar about whether we can buy coffee or not. The speaker told us about how the farms in South America are bought up by giant coffee corporations, and the farmers work for pennies a day and often become poor, just so we can drink coffee, Coke a Cola, and eat chocolate.
Then the discussion turned to bananas, and we were told not to buy them because the poor sell them for pennies, while rich American apple growers sell their apples for an exorbitant price.
I think that’s when I started getting fed up with this movement. EVERYTHING was examined, even our shoes, and many of the simple lifestyle adherents were wearing shoes made out of old tires!
People judged each other, and if you actually ordered a Coke, you were sinning!
So my husband and I gave it up. I think that the Simple Lifestyle Movement definitely influenced us (we were married just as it got started). Instead of falling for the Great Big Castle House thing that so many of our peers did, we bought a smallish house in an inner-city neighborhood, and boy, are we ever glad we did after the housing crash a few years ago!
We don’t buy cable and never will. I don’t have a walk-in closet and never will because I don’t own enough clothing to fit in it and neither does my husband. I have three pairs of shoes (many women I know own several dozen pairs of shoes!).
But we are a figure skating family, and I know that the Simple Lifestyle adherents would utterly condemn this as heinously sinful! We also sent our daughters to a private secular preparatory school–the tuition was as much as many colleges. Outrageous!
So basically what I’m telling you is don’t let your desire for simplicity turn into a judgmental legalism. God is perfectly capable of guiding each individual as to how much they should or shouldn’t buy and own.
I hope this is helpful to you.
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