Last night, I was asked to share for five minutes before John O'Keefe, a theology professor at Creighton University, came to share about "simplicity" as it relates to theology and the environment. His time of sharing was fantastic...weaving beautifully the strands that have contributed to misconceptions surrounding the environment in Christian circles.
I wanted to repost my small contribution to the evening below:
When we talk about simplicity, my feeling is that there seems to be both a healthy need to emphasize the spiritual aspect of simplicity and not let it tread down the path towards legalism, but also feeling that the charge of “legalism” is leveled quickly against the concept of simplicity as soon as the conversation starts. There is also the quick and unfair charge against social justice, asking why we would want to better living conditions for our friends overseas when we want to simplify our own. Shouldn’t we want simplicity for everyone? So to help clarify, simplicity is broken into two categories: voluntary simplicity and involuntary simplicity.
When we in WMF talk about simplicity it references voluntary simplicity and can be likened in one sense to a decluttering of our life. By throwing off some material things, we believe we can remove some hindrances to hearing from God, receiving His love and care and obeying Him. Many spiritual giants of the past have advocated this kind of lifestyle. It becomes part of a package of spiritual disciplines in order to be steered in life by God and not by the world.
What is being added to the idea of ‘simplicity for personal spiritual growth’, is the idea that our ‘simplicity’ has connections to the rest of humanity just as our overconsumption has a connection to the rest of humanity. Simplicity is recognizing the injustice of the world and our small choices towards simplicity help us identify a little bit with the vulnerabilities faced in the rest of the world.
Let’s look at it a different way:
You were born to your parents who were given to you by God, into a particular country, with specific giftings and aptitudes, in a particular time period in history which bears no correlation to your own merit. You had no hand in the circumstances surrounding your birth or even in setting the stage for your own accomplishments in life.
For some, this “the lottery of the womb” means that life should be lived in a way that “does no harm”. For a non-Christian, this lottery means that you could have just as easily been born a medieval maidservant, a soldier in ancient Eqypt, a Mongol tribemember or in modern times a Bangladeshi child who works in a factory 12 hours a day. In a philosophical sense, its like making all your decisions as if you had no idea about your own place in the world. That you would make your all decisions not knowing if you were a middle class American, a Bangladeshi child laborer, a Sierra Leonean child soldier, a woman kidnapped and being forced to prostitute in Italy, or a Chinese farmer. Its another way of saying that we should place ourselves in someone else’s shoes and make decisions accordingly. We might make a different decision about the clothes we buy if we placed ourselves in another context-even placing ourselves into an unknown context, because the repercussions of our decisions can be seen more clearly.
For Christians we usually believe there is a specific purpose in who we were created to be and in the circumstances surrounding our life. But this can quickly/easily morph into a type of religious determinism -- the belief that we deserve all the riches and entrapments of being born in the most economically, politically, and militarily dominant country of our time in a time period when social mobility is possible and where hard work is rewarded. That we deserve having been born healthy with many giftings and aptitudes and being born to loving parents that nurtured us.
What if we see the opportunities that we’ve been given, not for us to use for ourselves but for us to be openhanded? We might, instead, consider that many things that have been given to us are really designed for others…that they were never really ours in the first place. After all, everything we have is God’s.
In WMF, we receive salaries that are needs based so that we are not accruing wealth but receiving what we need to live a healthy and vibrant life. We also allow and encourage participation in a retirement plan. As a community, we even wrestled whether saving for retirement was consistent with a life of simplicity. We finally agreed that staff members could decide this based on their own convictions. However, before staff members are allowed to set aside money, they have to agree to the some of the following affirmations:
As Kingdom citizens, we realize that we own nothing, that everything is God's, and that everything in our possession is to serve as material means for eternal ends (Psalm 24:1; 2 Corinthians 4:18).
As Kingdom citizens, we are committed to ministering in community among the poor, but we realize that we live in a culture emerged in gross individualism and materialism. Our culture tells us to save for our future in order to maintain our standard of living even after we are no longer "economically viable." This projected individualism may taint our choice to invest in a retirement plan. We, however, are committed to being an interdependent community, not surviving as isolated individuals. This means that any retirement plan that we invest in should foster community and continual care for one another into the future (Acts 2:44-45).
We do not minister out of what we have but out of who we are (Acts 3:6).
As a community, we celebrate a lifestyle of simplicity. By investing in a retirement plan, we seek to maintain simple living into the future (Luke 9:3; Matthew 10:9; Luke 18:22). We recognize the difference between taking a vow of poverty and committing to a life of simplicity. While a retirement package is incompatible with a vow of poverty, we desire to make room in our community to include and celebrate those who are called to this commitment.
Though we renounce hoarding wealth for selfish gain and storing up treasures on earth, we recognize the responsibility of good stewardship of what God has given us (Matthew 6:20-21; Matthew 25).
Though we make plans for the future, we recognize that the future is uncertain. Our faith is not in our plans but in that which is certain: the unshakable Kingdom of God (Hebrews 12:28-29).
Each of the paragraphs in this statement refer back to Scripture verses so that we remain grounded in the Word of God.
What we try to continually remind ourselves is that everything is God’s. Everything is God’s, not just in WMF as a Christian organization, but in our personal lives and in your personal lives. We don’t want to get rid of the tension that comes from living in a society that bears little resemblance to the Kingdom of God. We keep the tension because this helps us make better choices.
Simplicity, after all, is a way of connecting us with God and connecting us with humanity.
