Uncluttered Faith

Uncluttered Faith

1

The Way to Unlock God’s Blessings

It was rainy when Amy Slenker-­Smith pulled her car into a parking spot at Target in the Washington, D.C., suburb where she lived. She cinched her raincoat closer around her, then hustled around the car to get her infant son, Zack, from the back seat so they could head into the store and buy the stuff on her list.

She’d done this same shopping excursion many times. A thirtysomething mom at the time, she worked fifty hours a week, did the daycare dash every Monday through Friday, and stopped at Target at least once a week so she could bring more stuff into her home. All in all, the actions of a typical middle-­class woman.

But this day would go differently.

Over the previous months, Amy had been reevaluating her life and commitments. It had taken Amy and her husband, Steve, several years to conceive Zack. With that in mind, she had said to herself, We worked too hard to have a child for me to just see him briefly in the mornings and put him to bed in the evenings. So, she and Steve had begun a journey of removing the excess from their life so they could be more available for their son.

And now she found herself in the Target parking lot, raindrops wetting her long brown hair. Just as she was about to drag Zack out of his seat, she stopped and just stood beside her car, staring at the giant discount store with its red-­and-­white bull’s-­eye logo prominent on the façade.

“Suddenly it hit me: There is nothing inside that store I truly need today,” Amy remembers. “There is nothing that’s going to add any value to my life. Even worse, it means I’ll have less time at home with my husband and son.”

So, she got back into her car and drove away, buying nothing.

From this point on, Amy was unstoppable in decluttering and de-­owning everything she could. She used evenings, weekends, and Zack’s nap times to do the work. Along the way she read everything she could find about living a simpler life. The process changed her entire life. Today, she is a Becker Method certified declutterer and gives advice to others at her website, Simply Enough.

“Now what I try to share with others,” Amy told me, “is that your stuff, your time, and your money are heavily intertwined. I learned that I wanted to use my time and my money differently.”

But Amy’s story doesn’t end there. Around that same time, Amy and Steve had reconnected with their faith and had begun attending church again and growing spiritually. “Minimalism freed me to become a more available mother. It also freed me to focus on my relationship with God in a different, more intentional way. We had less stuff but more God,” she says.

I wonder how many Christians are like Amy on that rainy day at Target—­their lives cluttered with so much stuff, so focused on buying, storing, and maintaining things, that it squelches their happiness and frustrates their purpose. My guess is that, here in the United States and in many other affluent lands, this is almost a universal problem among my fellow believers. One with immense, incalculable costs.

Owning more seems to be the target we’re all aiming for when it comes to happiness, maybe without even realizing it. But what if that’s the wrong goal?

What if we need to turn and go another way?

For more than fifteen years, I’ve been promoting the virtues of minimalism and owning less. I define minimalism as “the intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of everything that distracts us from it.” Minimalism looks different from one person to another, but it is something that everyone can benefit from.

To clear up a possible misunderstanding, this book is called Uncluttered Faith not because it is about believing less, as in abandoning unwanted doctrines or picking and choosing one’s version of God. It is about intentionally uncluttering the physical possessions in our lives so that our faith can be uncluttered and unfettered, and we can reach our full potential through Christ.

In Uncluttered Faith I am making the case that my fellow Christians—­all my brothers and sisters in Christ—­need minimalism. Not because it is a trendy topic or because we’re seeking self-actualization, but because it is God’s design for our lives. In fact, simplifying our lives is one of the most widely overlooked keys for opening the door to the spiritual blessings God wants to give us—­blessings like contentment, joy, spiritual growth, generosity, kingdom influence, and much more that we’ll be considering in this book.

I’m not here to criticize you for your materialist tendencies. Instead, I’m here to invite you to consider a better way. A life with less stuff but more God, as Amy Slenker-­Smith put it. This could be one of the greatest turning points in your life!

Whether right now you are convinced, curious, or skeptical about minimalism, all I ask is that you keep reading and see not whether Joshua Becker is right but whether living the simple life is what Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are inviting us to. I think you’ll discover that letting go of excess is essential to living faithfully and fully blessed—­and it’s a truth hidden in plain sight all throughout the New Testament, if we have eyes to see it.

My First Minimalism Epiphany

May I briefly introduce myself to you? Not that my own process of finding an uncluttered faith represents the only way to do it, but I’ll be sharing my story (and those of many others I’ve met on their minimalism journeys) throughout this book, so you might as well start getting to know me now.

I am the oldest of three kids born to Roy and Patty Becker in Aberdeen, South Dakota. I am grateful to have been raised in a Christian family—­in fact, all four of my grandparents loved and served the Lord. One of my grandfathers, Harold Salem, was a Baptist minister in South Dakota for seventy-­eight years, working full time in the ministry until his death at the age of ninety-nine. Alongside my brother, I accepted Jesus into my heart at the age of five, walking forward during the final hymn following a Sunday evening service at First Baptist Church in Aberdeen.

Later, as a junior studying banking and finance at the University of Nebraska Omaha, I felt God’s call to be a pastor. For the next fifteen years, I served as a pastor of student ministries at churches in Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Vermont and as associate pastor at a church plant in Arizona. My wonderful wife, Kim, whom I met in high school, has been an invaluable partner in ministry with me throughout it all. We cherish our two kids, Salem and Alexa.

One of the greatest turning points in our lives happened in 2008, while I was serving students at Essex Alliance Church in New England. If you’ve read my previous books or heard me speak, you may already know this first part of my journey. But if you’re not familiar with my story, you need to understand how my life changed on that sunny Memorial Day weekend.

On that Saturday, I decided to clean our family’s garage. All morning I hauled out dusty boxes, kids’ playthings, gardening tools, and all kinds of other odds and ends and junk. As I ground my way through the work, I kept an eye on my then-­five-­year-­old son, Salem, playing alone in the backyard because his dad didn’t have time for him just then.

After a lunch break, I noticed our next-­door neighbor June in her own yard, planting flowers and watering her garden. I waved to her and got on with my tasks.

By this point, I was trying to clean and organize all the stuff I had dragged out of the garage in the morning. It was taking much longer than I had expected. As I kept going, I thought about all the times lately when I’d felt discontented while taking care of our stuff.

Several hours into her own work, June said to me sarcastically, “Ah, the joys of homeownership.”

Not knowing exactly how to respond, I replied, “Well, you know what they say—­the more stuff you own, the more your stuff owns you” (something I’d probably read on a bumper sticker somewhere, without ever considering what it fully meant).

“Yeah,” she said, “that’s why my daughter is a minimalist. She keeps telling me I don’t need to own all this stuff.”

There it was! The insight I didn’t know I’d been looking for and a more life-­changing revelation than I could have imagined: I don’t need to own all this stuff.

First, I looked at the pile of dirty, dusty possessions in my driveway. Second, I looked at my young son in the background, swinging alone on the swing set, and the full implications came into focus. Not only are my possessions not bringing happiness into my life, even worse, they are distracting me from the things that do!

In other words, I had the same realization that Amy Slenker-­Smith had in the rainy parking lot of a Target.

My life would never be the same.

In my writing, speeches, and some personal conversations, I’ve told people about this insight many times. But what I’ve never shared before in print is that I would soon have another—­more important and more life-­changing—­insight related to minimalism. One that ultimately formed the foundation for this book.