The office building where I work is being sold. My employer has been headquartered here for about seventy years, so you can imagine the sorting and sifting and recycling that’s been going on to prepare for the move to a newer, smaller building.
Watching a group of people move has been fun. People I would have thought to be “dumpers” are suddenly sentimental, and ones I thought would be “savers” are almost gleeful as they throw boxes of receipts and correspondence into blue recycle bins, never to be seen again.
By the time what needs to be saved has been boxed and labeled, the artwork has been taken off the walls, and essential office furniture is all that’s left, a sense of relief seems to have replaced all the clutter. I suppose the feeling I’m picking up on could be just my minimalist bias at work, but I don’t think so.
I wonder if we prefer less clutter but need a shakeup of some kind to start the decluttering. It’s easier to let stuff pile up. Remember the good feeling of coming home from school to see that a parent had rearranged the furniture in the living room? Or the sense of a promising future an empty apartment for rent or house for sale gave us? What could we do to create these feelings in our worship spaces?
Shake It Up
As with a move from one office building to another, maybe you need to shake things up a bit. You could renovate your church building entirely, but I think you could accomplish the same sense of newness for a lot less. Here are some ideas to declutter your worship space:
- Prepare yourself for both dumpers and savers. You will not make everyone happy with the changes, but with grace, think through how different people will respond and honor them with a clear explanation of what you’re trying to accomplish. That will also keep you focused and prevent spur-of-the-moment decisions that everyone will hate later.
- Pretend that you are moving out and your mother is moving in. Take down the visuals, empty out the cabinets, and move all the collected worship paraphernalia somewhere else. Do a deep clean.
- Paint. Repainting is a relatively inexpensive way to help rethink a space. But before you paint, fill in all the nail holes so you’re not tempted to just put up what was hanging there before. And don’t go too trendy with your color choice—you know how long the current color has been on the walls.
- Give the new look time. When you think you’re done, commit to it for at least three months. Change is hard for most people, and, especially when faced with disapproval, people tend to make concessions. But concessions clutter. This goes for you, too. Don’t second-guess yourself and make more changes.
- Prune the pixels. If you’re worshiping in a space with digital components, like an LED wall, cutting on-screen clutter can be a visual relief.
In a world of too many images and so much movement, perhaps our churches can be places of visual refuge: “Ah, I’m at church. Finally some peace.”