Dear Friends,
It is good to be back after a three month sabbatical and two week holiday. I have learned a lot and will hopefully be sharing with you all some of the fruits of my studies. However as it is soon Harvest Time, I thought I would restrict myself this time to telling you about a course I did while on sabbatical called ‘Leading Your Church Into Growth.’ This was a very inspiring course, and its basic premise is that we must be ‘intentional’ about what we do in church, otherwise the church will not grow. As any gardener will tell you, gardens do not just grow by themselves – they need careful planning and nurture if they are to achieve maturity. Rudyard Kipling put this well in his poem ‘The Glory of a Garden’
Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing:-” Oh, how beautiful,” and sitting in the shade
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives.
Jesus made the same point in his parable of the sower in Luke 8. The same seed – the word of God - is sown in different places (i.e. different people’s hearts), but the results differ depending on where the seed is sown.
• The seed that is sown on the path is eaten up by the birds – representing those who hear the word of God, but do not respond to it.
• The seed that is sown among the rocks starts up well, but because it has no root, it withers when the sun comes out. This represents those who respond well to the word of God at first but then fall away as they have not let the word take root, perhaps because of the ‘rocks’ in their lives – problems of the past such as resentment, hurt, bitterness, unforgiveness, abuse, disappointment etc. As any gardener knows, rocks must be removed from the soil for plants to thrive.
• The seed that is sown among the weeds starts well, but then the weeds choke the growth. The weeds represent the problems of this life – things that are we allow to take over our lives and
crowd out our spiritual life – worries about money, families, careers, status, vocation, etc. all these things are good in themselves, but have been allowed to become ‘idols’ and God’s rightful place in our hearts is displaced by these things. Gardeners know that weeds have to be completely rooted out for plants to thrive.
• The seed that is sown in good soil, takes root, and produces a large crop. This represents those who by perseverance, put God first in their lives, deal with the issues of the past and battle through their problems with faith and hope in their hearts, and eventually receive their reward for their efforts. It is interesting that Jesus says this fruit reproduces a hundredfold – one interpretation of this could be that the ‘fruit’ we produce in our own lives is to be shared out and influence others.
George Lings, who heads up the Church Army Research Centre, and who I met on sabbatical in Sheffield, has written the following about ‘Christian Maturity’
a) Maturity as a quality is primarily relational; in the way people think, take appropriate decisions and treat others.
b) Maturity has a right sense of what is desirable, what is possible and what is unknown.
c) Maturity balances love, truth and compassion and judgement. It is able to commit.
d) Maturity is not childish clinging, nor adolescent fierce independence; it is strongly linked to healthy interdependence, which can only work if the previous two stages of growth are handled well.
This is the maturity (crop, growth, fruit) that Jesus is looking for in his parable, that only comes about by people being ‘intentional’ about being receptive to the word of God - hearing it, and putting its teaching into practice in their lives- not as the poem says by being ‘passive’ – sitting in the shade- but by being ‘active’ - removing the ‘rocks’ and ‘weeds’ in their hearts.
At this Harvest Time, as we celebrate all the efforts of farmers and gardeners utilising the goodness of the land for our crops and fruit and flowers, let us also think about the ‘intentional’ efforts we need to make in our own lives to clear our hearts of things that prevent growth, and pray that God will give us grace to seek His help and grace and to listen to His word, and produce the fruit that pleases Him.
To quote Kipling again:
Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray
For the Glory of the Garden that it may not pass away!
And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away !
In Christian love
Paul
