Individual Entry: Of growth, natural and otherwise
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September 24, 2010

Faith : Of growth, natural and otherwise

When a farmer sees that some crops may not be growing as they should, the farmer starts to look at things like the weather (has it been too hot? too cold? too sunny? cloudy?); the soil (too acid? base? not enough nutrients? etc.); irrigation (too much water? too little?) and the like. Essentially, they look at the environment in which their crops are growing because they know that plants will grow just fine on their own if you give them the right environment. What they don’t do is grab the plans and start pulling on them to try and stretch them; or paint them to make their color better - trying to directly make plants grow better never works.

This is a lesson the church needs to learn.

I believe that Christians will grow to be fruitful disciples quite naturally if they are given the right environment to grow in. Their fruit will both be personal (love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control) and evangelical (sharing their faith with others). There is nothing you need to do to get a Christian to grow in this way if you have given them the right environment.

If there are aspects of growth that are not present in people lives, what we need to be asking is: what is lacking in the environment in which they are growing? Why is this growth not happening naturally as it should? There are numerous factors that could be involved and listing them all is impossible; my desire here is not to give answers but to encourage the right questions to be asked.

Unfortunately, in most churches what happens is that when someone sees that the congregation isn’t growing in some way is that a program is created to artificially produce growth. People aren’t sharing their faith, so let’s start a door-to-door ministry or a tract distribution ministry. Men aren’t supporting each other so let’s create a men’s ministry. People aren’t reading The Bible so let’s create Sunday School classes to teach them.

Now it could be countered that these programs are just attempts at establishing the right environment, and I accept that many sincere, well-meaning people view it that way. In many cases they believe that because they have never seen church done any other way. The distinction I am making here is between told “now we are going to do X (study, evangelize, build relationships, etc.)” and doing X because you are driven to do it from inside (by your heart and by God’s Spirit within you).

When I first began my journey of following Jesus, I read the Bible through in about a year. I didn’t do that because I was told to do it – I did it because I wanted to understand this thing I had become a part of. You would have had to struggle to get me to not read my Bible. Likewise, in those early years I was quick to tell people about what I was learning about God, and led several people to begin their own journeys. Again, I didn’t do this because it was Saturday morning and therefore time to “do evangelism” – I did it because I was excited about my new relationship with Jesus and talked about it (just like I talked about everything else I was excited about).

It took several years of being part of your typical American churches for those natural desires to be squeezed into the church’s programs and for the passion to disappear.

I am also not suggesting that organized activities are a bad thing. If a group of men, who have already started to form relationships with each other, want to get together regularly to support each other in their faith, that’s a great idea – such meetings would be a natural, organic outgrowth of their relationships. If a group of believers find themselves drawn to the homeless who are living in a local park and want to express God’s love to them (both in actions and words) in an organized way, by all means. Such actions come about because the individuals are growing in an environment that encourages love and action. My objection is only to creating programs and institutions to do something that people should be doing; but no one wants to do because the environment doesn’t encourage such growth. My plea is that when we discover something lacking in the discipleship of people in the church, we ask "why are they not motivated to do this on their own?" and look at the environment we have provided to them in our churches to see what is lacking to support that growth.

Posted by Steven at September 24, 2010 05:00 AM

Comments

Posted by: Stacey at September 25, 2010 08:02 PM