Lent is almost upon us and with it the annual question of what to give up. But perhaps we should ask ourselves a deeper, harder question: what of our comforting religious traditions and customs should we be doing away with?

The book mentioned in the podcast is Simple Church: Returning to God’s Process for Making Disciples by Thom S. Rainer by Eric Geiger.

 

 3MT : Simplicity and Clutter, Lent and the Beatitudes [3:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (68)

How much will you give up for Lent? It’s not a precipitous question: even though, in the liturgical calendar we are still in the Sundays of Epiphany, next Sunday will be Candlemas, the end of the Christmas season, and, because of the peculiarities of full-moons and the solar year, this year Easter will fall on the second earliest possible date. That means we say goodbye to Christmas on the Sunday, and hallo to Lent on the Wednesday. So, I ask again, how much will you give up for Lent?

Not what will you give up for Lent? That’s an easy question to ask and to answer. All of us, I think, are culturally conditioned to have something ready prepared, up our sleeves as it were, to renounce (just as some of us (or is it just me?) have the full list of seven songs ready just in case Desert Island Discs call tomorrow): chocolate, late nights, no exercise, alcohol. Each little pleasure turned into a little vice, all the easier to exercise our virtue for Lent.

But to answer how much is much trickier, especially if the person asking the question begins to press us on our religious disciplines, our church life, the practical expressions of our faith. How much of what you think is important to your religion will you get rid of this Lent?

The question has occurred to me this year as I have been reading Thom S. Rainer and Eric Geiger’s book Simple Church: Returning to God’s Process for Making Disciples. These two American Church consultants set out to survey the differences between vibrant and stagnant churches. They had a hunch that the difference between vibrancy and stagnation was not so much to do with doctrine, or ecclesial structures, or denomination, or even financial resources, but to do with the simplicity or otherwise of each church’s process for making disciples. Their findings were staggering (or, in the cooler language of statistical analysis: “highly significant”). Simply put,

simple churches are growing and vibrant. Churches with simple processes for reaching and maturing people are expanding the kingdom… Conversely, complex churches are struggling and anaemic. As a whole cluttered and complex churches are not alive… they have become cluttered. So cluttered that people have a difficult time encountering the simple and powerful message of Christ. So cluttered that many people are busy doing church instead of being the church.

Which brings me to the Beatitudes. In the church for which I am responsible this Lent we will be looking at the first ten verses of the Sermon on the Mount, and exploring something of what the Blessèds of Jesus’s great teaching might mean for us today. I’ll share what we find in a series of podcasts, but I’m already beginning to think that a Church of the Beatitudes is going to be a Simple Church, and a church that deserves to be called “blessed and happy” by Jesus will be a church which has given up a lot of clutter for Lent.