by Eddie Pipkin
What to keep and what to get rid of? It’s a modern dilemma. We are so blessed, our homes so filled with stuffthatwe’re constantly having to think about what should stay and what should go. Or we’re scheming ways to keep asmuch as possible! But I’ve been on a minimalist kick this past year, so I’m a sucker for any article or podcast that talks about the value of paring down and maintaining a lean, clutter-free lifestyle. A line from such an article this past week reminded me just how much keeping ministry lean, functional, and uncluttered by the extraneous and unproductive is just like cleaning out our closets. It’s tough decision making, but so worth it in the end.
In the Saturday paper, I was reading my favorite home design and decorator opinionator, Marni Jameson, and she was holding forth on how to reduce the stuff in the house, specifically family keepsakes. This is a specialty of hers, helping people winnow down their mementos and heritage furniture pieces, and she offered sage advice in the article, “Hold onto pieces of the past – selectively: things to consider when deciding whether to keep, toss, or sell a family heirloom.” Here’s what she had to say about whether something should stay or go, from grandma’s jewelry to Uncle Clive’s armoire:
Apply the keep test. If the piece is meaningful (as opposed to valuable), you love it, and you have a place for it (other than a box in the attic), keep it. If you cannot actively use and appreciate it in your home, don’t store it. Pass it on. If a piece is valuable but not meaningful, sell it. Use the money to buy something that would honor the loved one.
Cherish the small and few. Keep the pearls, not the piano. And remember, when everything is important, nothing is important.
It was that last line that stood out to me: “When everything is important, nothing is important.”
That is equally true in heirloom management and ministry management.
It echoes many other phrases we have shared over the years like “Keep the main thing the main thing” (thanks, Stephen Covey!) and “Everything must serve the Big Idea.” It is a matter of decision and focus to build our goals on our values and priorities. All of our decisions must serve those values and priorities, and we can’t have five hundred values and priorities if we want to serve any of them with excellence. That is, we can’t have five hundred competing values and priorities jostling for our attention. Our small priorities must stem from our big priorities. Our secondary values must be in service to our core values.
Of course, minimalist vs. maximalist is a strategy, not a gospel truth. You’ll see different approaches come and go in design, fashion, and art, periods when looks are pared down and spare and other times when things are piled on and details added to excess. You’ve visited homes and institutions that are on one side of the spectrum or the other, and you probably have a personal preference for sparsity or sprawl. Sometimes this changes over time for individuals; it definitely does in the greater culture. Personally, I trended towards maximalist when younger and lean hard towards minimalism now.
A big part of my current minimalist kick has involved deciding what stays and what goes. That’s true for the stuff in my garage and basement and the main living space, and its true for my daily routines and work projects. Marni is totally correct that the fewer things that are left – the ones that align with my carefully chosen values and priorities – the more precious those remaining things become.
I’m currently getting ready for a backpacking trip next week, and it’s become a grand provocation to excise my superfluous camping gear. Do we really need seven sleeping bags? When’s the last time we used even one sleeping bag (other than my occasional backpacking outings)? Do we keep bins of sleeping bags just in case of emergency?
Minimalist me has decided no, we do not.
However, minimalist me has decided to replace three ratty old sleeping bags with one ultralight high performance sleeping bag for the trail. If you’re keeping one thing, make it something worth keeping.
The applicable metaphor for the local church is that instead of hosting three poorly run, low attendance Bible studies, what if we pour our resources and talent into one very well executed, high quality Bible study?
Nothing wrong with hosting three excellently run Bible study small groups with distinct emphases, tailored to diverse audiences, if you have the gifted people to lead them and the space to host them and a pool of motivated participants. That’s a maximalist strategy (more stuff for more people). But there is a distinct difference between being a maximalist by accident and a maximalist by design. Many, many churches that have been around for a generation or three find themselves steadily accumulating ministry, programming, and accompanying staff and budgets over time, and they just sort of end up as maximalists.
There’s something to be said for the church campus that has something for everybody, a ministry for every little niche of their community, but this is a hard mission to maintain, and while it is fair to say that the megachurch movement was a maximalist model, it was a strategy that could only be maintained over the long haul by a select few. Many mid-sized churches tried to emulate that approach only to find themselves dramatically over-extended.
How much better to custom design a boutique approach, a few things done really well for the people who will benefit most from them? What we choose is what works within our unique context and what aligns with our (carefully thought through) values and priorities. Things that no longer align with those values and priorities should be cut loose. Even things that do align with those values and priorities, but are structured in ways when times were more flush and people more plentiful, should be scaled back or eliminated. Sometimes, as Marni celebrates in her article about whether or not to keep granny’s pearls, there is a way to decrease the abundance of untenable options while honoring the memory of what they once represented. Some aspect of the nostalgic thing can be repurposed as part of a new idea or repackaged as an emotionally effective curio.
Don’t callously toss what must go in the trash with a sneer. Give people time to celebrate the nostalgia and to grieve. Their pain is real. Change is hard. Honor those emotions. If you can, give them some ownership in the thing that remains or some featured participation in the new thing.
How do you and your team prioritize what to keep and what to let go? Do you have a process in place for making such decisions? Do you let things linger on even when it’s obvious that they have outlived their usefulness and are draining resources that might be better leveraged elsewhere? Share your own challenges in the comments section.
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