Mustard Seeds – Re-wilding the Church

I have been wondering this week… how do things grow?

I plant my little sunflower seeds in their pot, place them on my windowsill and wait a few days… hoping for the best. Then, low and behold, their funny little sprouts begin to poke through the soil and (providing I keep them well watered) they continue to reach upward, turning their faces to the sun and growing stronger day by day until I can transplant them into the great outdoors and watch them grow. I am not enough of a scientist to know how they grow, but I am enough of a romantic to marvel that they do, and feel a twinge of child-like excitement as I go to bed at night wondering if they will have grown taller than me by the morning.

The mint in my garden, is another story. I gave it a rather dramatic haircut only a few weeks ago. Cutting it back to mere stubs and already it has gotten out of hand. It has spread rapidly through the border, taken over the path and, if left untamed, it will only be a matter of time before it colonises the garden. I don’t know how it grows either but (no matter how often I take my secateurs to it for culinary purposes - from mint sauce to mojitos) it’s beginning a feel a little out of my control - and I go to bed with some trepidation half-expecting to wake in the morning to it tapping on my window saying ‘feed me’ like something out of the little shop of horrors.

The trails of novice gardening…!

I really want to be able to say that the Kingdom of God, as described in the parables we just heard, is like my beloved sunflowers: perhaps appearing fragile at first, and needing tender care, but ultimately glorious and shining with the radiant light of the reflected sun. 

BUT I am afraid, as Paula Gooder suggests, it is far more likely that the Kingdom of God is like the slightly chaotic, surprisingly successful, and lavishly bountiful mint that gets everywhere - even in the places it is neither welcome nor wanted; and once established, is incredibly difficult to tame and almost impossible to eradicate.

When we hear the well-known parable of the mustard seed, we may be prone to unhelpful romance; thinking how wonderful it is that this tiniest of seeds grows into the greatest of trees and imagining all those birds which shelter in its branches.

When, in actual-fact, it was neither the tiniest of seeds nor the greatest of bushes known at that time, and it was also a pretty self-seeding wild plant which it would have been absurd to try to intentionally cultivate; especially if it were also going to attract birds to settle in its branches and thereby risk damaging nearby crops.

This all sets up our parable to be far from a nice, neat metaphor for a nice, neat Kingdom. Jesus is telling us something far more radical about the Kingdom of God and about its growth in us, and the world, than it at first appears from this rather sedate story.

Because, if we scratch the surface of this simile - as we must do with all parables if we truly want to understand them on their own terms - Jesus appears to use it precisely for these apparently absurd qualities - to show how wild, and free, and tenacious the Kingdom really is.

Steve Aisthorpe in his book titled Rewilding the Church remarks that:

‘our appetite to plan, manage, contain and control has not only led to an environmental crisis, but has also disrupted the natural patterns of the Church… what began as a Spirit-empowered movement has become hindered by excessively complex and risk-averse institutions.’ That: ‘the Christian way has been domesticated, and it is time to rediscover the adventure of faith.’

Adventures cannot happen apathetically.

Adventures cannot happen unless you are prepared to go in search of something even greater than what you know now, and to let go of your need to control the outcome.

Adventures can only happen where there is vision and there hope.

And we can afford to have hope for the future of the Church precisely because the vision of the Kingdom is far beyond the scope of either our individual or institutional imagination. And because God refuses to limit Godself to our nice, neat agendas and expectations.

Underestimate the Kingdom at your peril,
and you will soon find it spreading like wild-fire… 

Try and stop its growth, and you only increase its intrigue and appeal. 

Attempt to kill it off, and it will be back even bigger, because it is indestructible…
as those of us who know the Easter story can confirm.

But for far too long the Church of England has believed that if only we measure and plan and toil and meet targets and report back… we will somehow be able to anticipate the next move of the Holy Spirit and get ahead of the game. When in fact these strategies have arguably failed to either notice or celebrate where the Kingdom is breaking through in our society at large already; and have left the Church running to catch up, instead of having the humility and faithfulness of the sower who simply sleeps and rises, not knowing how the seed is growing, but trusting that it is. 

For too long, we have believed that we can dominate the Church, like we have dominated God’s Creation. Yet we forget that domination is a product of the Fall – not an insurance against it.

For too long, we have believed that Stewardship meant following our own agenda (a very white, wealthy, anglo-centric agenda at that) and letting the institution (presided over almost exclusively by that demographic) decide whose needs should be met and acted upon, rather than listening to the voices of those we excluded from the Table at which God expressly welcomes all to eat at in fellowship.

We have expected an accolade for growth to be the just-reward for our labour, instead of being satisfied to get on with the daily task of sowing Kingdom seeds and accepting that where the hungry are fed and weary souls find rest, ‘God’s will is done’.

We are a local Church who is bucking the trend and who are growing: numerically and spiritually in all sorts of ways.

But, in all honesty – I have to admit that I don’t know how churches grow any more than I know how my sunflowers do.

But I do know it is God, not us, who does the growing.

And that if we want to see growth and change in Society, as a national church we must abandon our need to dominate; and allow our hearts to be re-wilded by the Spirit which blows where it wills and upends our best-laid plans. Only then will we be an effective witness to the measure of growth that turns those tiny seeds into great trees which Jesus speaks of.

It is not our job to decide what flourishes and what falls.
But it is our job, as a community of faith
to make sure that our soil is rich in theological nourishment,
that our roots are deep in worship,
that faith’s first shoots are watered with tender care,
and that the dead wood in our institutional life is pruned to allow new growth.

New growth is messy.

It is unpredictable.

It can sometimes feel like it is taking over and it will, almost inevitably, spring up in the most unexpected and inconvenient of places.

The growth of the Kingdom is wild and untameable… but it is certain. 

Because even in the harshest of conditions, even though assaulted with everything evil can throw at it… still the Kingdom will rise each day and continue to grow through the silent hours of the night – even when we fear it is asleep. 

Our job is not to ask: how does the Kingdom grow?

But to ask: How is God growing the Kingdom in us,

and how can we use the fruit of our faith for this world’s flourishing?

Amen.