Preparing the ground: A message for the Church (Part 2)

I often sense God speaking to me through spiritual parallels of what I see going on in the natural world around me. A little while back I felt Him speaking to me about the Church as I overhauled a section of our garden.

We live in a cottage that is over 100 years old, situated on around an acre of land. Although the garden is well-established, it ended up in disarray as the previous owner aged and was no longer able to keep up. It has taken much time and effort to restore and rebuild, as has the house. Although there are some “good bones” to it all, including some amazingly beautiful specimen trees of great height and strength, there have been many areas which ivy, blackberries, wisteria, “weed trees” - those growing in the wrong places - and a myriad of other weeds and pest plants had overtaken. Some plants lacked proper tending or pruning and have grown crookedly or in an unbalanced way. While we have been able to salvage many, others have needed complete removal.

In the past, my gardening had consisted of merely adding plants to fill the gaps just to keep the garden going and provide less space for weeds. It gave me little overall satisfaction. More recently, I have felt energised to make a fresh start on some areas.

I began completely revamping one of the garden beds removing many weeds and unhelpful or struggling plants that were in the wrong place. Much of the area had very little growing in it, and those things I had planted were generally quite unproductive. As I started digging over the soil, I found the reason:

The soil was choked and hardened by masses of tangled roots from previous plants long since gone.

It took a great deal of work to get it ready for re-planting. This was the prompt for the thoughts that follow.

As I removed new plants from their pots and placed them in the hole in the garden bed, which was now very easy to dig due to our excellent mountain soil, I thought about how much joy there is in planting:

Most of us love to plant, but how little do we enjoy the hard work preparing the soil for the planting.

In the past, I have often been in too much hurry to see the end result of planting without doing the preparation. I had really not put in the effort to establish a good environment for the plant to grow well. Sometimes I have put plants in inappropriate places simply because I like them, not because they are right for the environment or position. Subsequently they have really struggled and not grown well, or simply died.

What I felt from God was something of a caution, or advice.

We are living in a season where many are sensing a great move of God. Things are stirring and shifting and the hunger for revival is rising. In among all this, I sense what God is showing me through my garden is not only what He is doing in the Church, but also about how we need to cooperate with Him if we want the change to be lasting.

Preparation is an essential beginning.

For at least the last decade or more, there has been a sense for me that God has been pruning, removing, digging up, stirring up, relocating His people. It has came with the feeling that the time for us to get on board and work with Him in this had a limit: if we refuse to move, or to allow the pruning, we will get left out/behind in what He is going to do next – such an important part of preparing His Bride. Just as with my garden,

God wants a Church that is well-prepared so it can grow well.

I believe church communities must be prepared to reassess what they are doing, to be prepared to rein some activities in, to prune them back and decrease the focus on them. Others simply need to go completely – they are either total weeds, taking over a distracting from God’s work, or they are in the wrong place – might be lovely somewhere else, but not for what God is doing in that particular community.

There are other places where there are still roots from things long gone. These are more difficult to remove. They might be belief systems about “how church works” or structures within church systems that no longer feed anything, but simply cause a blockage and prevent further growth and sustenance. They may have once been good, but are now simply a hindrance to further growth.

In a nutshell, I believe that while there are aspects of our faith communities that are like my strong, beautiful trees, that give structure and form, there are many aspects of how we “do church” that are past their prime and are no longer functioning or productive to our purpose. They may have simply been “place fillers”, or even worse, weeds; things we did to look productive or fill our space. Some of them were things we just wanted to do because we liked them, or they looked good in another church community, but in the long run they have either had no purpose, or not been productive in the way we might have wished.

As I mentioned in Part 1, we really need to reassess how we “do church” as a whole – come back to our true vision and calling, as The Church and as church communities and even as individuals. Along with the previous questions, we might ask these:

What is our calling in the community we are part of and how is the best way to do this with our resources, both human and otherwise?

Are we prepared to scrutinise every aspect of our church life in partnership with the Holy Spirit to determine our best way forward to be the most effective we can for the Kingdom?

Are there areas of our community life that we declare “untouchable” – sacred cows that tolerate no reassessment? These are often the areas in most need of change!