By Scott Dickison
Last spring, my wife and I decided that tending to an infant was not enough responsibility for us, so we tried our hand at some backyard gardening.
I built a raised bed plot in the backyard, trimmed back some overhanging limbs to make sure it would get enough sun and brought in a load of dirt and compost. We planted our little seedlings with care and went to bed that night with visions of eggplant and okra dancing in our heads. And in the morning when we woke up we rushed out there to find our little raised bed garden bursting at the seams — a 4 x 8 cornucopia of fruit and vegetables ripe for the harvesting — it was like a nutritional Christmas morning!
No! Of course that’s not what happened. It took months for us to see some blooms, let alone anything edible.
The great British horticulturist and gardener Gertrude Jekyll once said, “A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches trust.” We can make the conditions to encourage growth — we can check the soil, provide water, put fertilizer down for some extra encouragement — but ultimately the challenge and beauty of gardening is learning to let it grow.
Can we not say the same about church?
The work of the church, done rightly, takes an incredible amount of trust, and time. This is how it is with relationships, and our work as people of faith is mostly to be in relationship with others and God. Shalom, Scriptures calls it. Relationships are like gardens: they can’t be forced. You tend to them, nurture them as best you can, but then you have to let it grow, and trust that God will do something beautiful. This is church.
We get our hands dirty doing our part of cultivating the soil and scattering the seed, but ultimately we have to trust that over time God will take these efforts and bless them and fruit will be born — in our community, our families, our church, and even, we hope, within ourselves.
And here’s where things get interesting. Ask any master gardener and she’ll tell you that the more time you spend in the garden, the more you get your hands dirty, the more you realize that the garden is not something completely apart from you.
As one of my church members in Macon who’s a lifelong gardener told me, that dirt gets in your blood. That dirt gets in your blood and under your fingernails, that earthy smell gets in your nostrils, you see what you’ve planted begin to bear fruit and you realize that all the while as you were nurturing things into growth something has been growing in you as well. You realize that you, the gardener, are part of the garden.
And so it is that through the miracle of faith we’re all both gardeners and gardens — planting seeds of the Kingdom, what God wants this world to grow into, and hoping that some of it might be scattered in us as well. Our work as the people of God is to plant the seed, tend the garden and watch the Kingdom of God grow, but the church — and we who are the church — is also called to be a place where all this happens.
And it makes sense, this “church as garden,” because where else in the world is the miracle of life in all its fullness better on display than in a garden or in a church? Where else but these two can you see so clearly the mystery of life and death and the fruit that’s born and savored and shared in between?
In the garden seeds are nurtured with care until they’re strong enough to take up roots in their own soil. The garden bears fruit, the fruit is eaten and shared and this fruit holds the seed for the next generation. The seasons change and the process begins again. It’s the most natural thing in the world for a garden to grow and yet ask a child if there is anything more mysterious than a simple shoot of green finding it’s way up from a pile of warm dirt, and then over time growing into something that will feed you?
And in the same way, is there anything more miraculous than a group of people coming together, covenanting with one another to share their lives with each other, their time, their gifts, their prayers, and when the time comes, where people share in death? Tell me where else in the world this happens.
But it doesn’t happen overnight. Despite what you see on the news and what you think you see growing in other gardens, the work of the church takes time. The mark of a good garden is its capacity to bear fruit over the seasons, and the mark of a good church is the same. You can’t rush it. You’ve got to let it grow, and trust that the Spirit is moving and working in ways we could never expect or understand.
It’s a difficult thing, to learn to let grow. Maybe the most difficult lesson to learn in life. But when it comes to the church, the great promise of our faith is that the fruit will be worth the wait.