According to Jeff Campbell, “In a sense, clutter is the end result of procrastination—especially if your problem is not so much that you have too much stuff, but rather that the stuff you have is disorganized.” (Clutter Control: Putting Your Home on a Diet, [New York, NY, USA: Dell Books, 1992), 46.)
Over the past several months I think we’ve seen an example of how—dare I say it?—marketing principles affect ministry. Over the years I have vacillated between embracing such principles and recoiling from them. I went through a period in the mid-1980s during which I was infatuated with the Church Growth Movement. I still have a rather extensive collection of books on that topic, although I will probably eventually get rid of them. If there was ever a time when “the magic of the marketplace” (as Ronald Reagan called it) had cast its spell over a large segment of the evangelical church, it was when C. Peter Wagner‘s books were selling well. I think many of us shook ourselves out of it when we noticed that Scripture was not only taking a back seat to Madison Avenue, but it was often being tossed out of the car altogether.
Our Life Is But a Span 