Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Mark 4:26-34.
Most of you know that I hunt elk and deer. But that’s not all. I hunt squirrels and doves, too. Doves are an entirely different form of hunting because you shoot them as they are flying by. It’s a very active experience. I’m not a very good shooter, so I average two or three doves per box of 25 shotgun shells. To have any chance at all, you need a reasonably sized field with appropriate food for them, and multiple hunters to keep things moving.
A typical dove field is at least two acres, sometimes five or ten or even larger. Sunflowers are the most common crop, but I’ve seen corn, millet, and buckwheat. The idea is for the crop to mature to the point of producing seeds a couple of weeks before the season opens on September 1, so that the doves have time to find the field. Actually, it takes a couple of years before the doves reliably come back to the field, but they’ll only start coming if you do things right in the first place. Anyway, when the time is right, you bush-hog the field in strips so that there is food on the ground for the doves, then hope for the best.
Several times, I have gone hunting on public land in Missouri. The last couple of years, though, Missouri Department of Conservation hasn’t had funding to plant, so I haven’t been able to go here. Instead, I’ve gone up to my father-in-law’s house near Effingham. Ron has been trying for a few years now to get a dove field going, with little to show for it so far.
First off, his field is just a little too small. It’s more like one-and-a-half acres instead of two. He’s also in the middle of farmland, so his field needs to be extremely attractive to really draw doves in.
Secondly, he has tried different crops and different planting schemes. One year, he used too much seed for the space. The seeds all sprouted, but they didn’t mature and produce a good harvest. Another year, he got the crop planted too late for it to mature in time. Yet another year, his crops matured too early, so the doves had come and gone before the season started.
This year, he’s going to try again one last time to see if he can get it right. As I mentioned, doves actually take a few years to reliably return to a given field. So perhaps he has done enough over the past few years that if he gets a good crop with the right timing, he’ll have success.
I’m not much of a farmer myself. I’m not even much of a gardener, but Rhonda is. It’s too hard for her to get down to plants on the ground, so I built her a couple of containers like the church used to have. We have had varying levels of success with them. Like her dad sowing too much seed in his dove field, Rhonda sometimes plants too many plants in a single container. Also, we have had to experiment with different kinds of plants. Tomatoes seem to do pretty well, as long as you keep them watered. You would think that pepper plants would be about like tomatoes, but you would be wrong. We haven’t had any success growing peppers of any kind in containers, so this year, I planted some down on the ground. Similarly, cucumbers need to be planted in the ground and need a lot of space and the right conditions. Last year, we tried them in a spot that isn’t really sunny enough, and only harvested a few small, misshapen cucumbers. We moved to a different area this year, and so far things look OK, but we have a long way to go.
Jesus was talking to an audience who was intimately familiar with all of this and much, much more. Many of them would have been subsistence farmers, whose life depended on knowing as much as possible about growing crops. They had to know when to plant, what kinds of crops thrived on the land that they could use, how to prepare the soil, how to care for the seedlings, and more. Yet Jesus said, “The seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” As much as ancient farmers knew, they were still ignorant of many of the most basic agricultural concepts that have enabled modern society to enjoy plentiful food.
If someone mentions a parable about sowing seeds, your first thought is probably a totally different parable that Jesus told about different kinds of soil where the seeds landed—on the path, rocky soil, among weeds, and good soil that produced a hundredfold. In that parable, Jesus was talking about evangelism. If you want to spread the Gospel, your best bet is to sow love as broadly as possible. Love is a limitless resource, and in fact, the more you give, the more you have to give. Especially if you let God’s love channel through you, to continually renew you.
But we have other limits that we need to be aware of. Time, first and foremost. Ming alluded to that last week during our informational meeting—how can I possibly have time to do more? Well, I’ll just need to be efficient. But even at maximum efficiency, there are only so many hours in the day, so there’s only so much that I personally can do. Each one of us has limits on our time, and commitments that we cannot avoid or abandon. Plus, there are only so many people who are available to serve our church right now.
Energy is another one. As we age, we have less and less energy and can’t accomplish everything we used to. Oh, we gain wisdom, so that we can work smarter, but that only partially compensates for the fact that our muscles and joints are declining. Another aspect is that some activities revive us, and some drain us. I am naturally an introvert, so spending time in a crowd is sometimes very draining for me. Other people are extraverts and are energized by spending time with friends. Everyone has tasks in their lives that drain them spiritually or emotionally, much more than just the physical effort. And sometimes it’s not the task itself, but the amount. If I volunteer at the Mission to serve one meal a week, I leave feeling energized from having accomplished a good deed. If I do two meals in a week, or try to serve in some other way, it drains me. It shifts from being a joy to being an obligation. It’s important to be cognizant of those things that bring you joy and energy and those things that drain you, and manage your energy level accordingly.
Money is another limitation. It would be wonderful if we could replace our sanctuary doors, upgrade our sound system, and make many other improvements to our church building. It would be wonderful if we could hire a full-time pastor plus a full-time youth or campus minister. Give me a few minutes and I’ll think of lots of ways we could spend more money. But the reality is that we have limited financial resources that we need to manage and allocate for our operations and for new ministries.
So given all of these limitations, we need to be strategic. We cannot be all things to all people, but we can meet some people where they are and help them enter the kingdom of God. We should never turn anyone away, but if we try to do everything, we’ll accomplish nothing.
For example, Fort Leonard Wood is a substantial mission field for Rolla area churches. I don’t know how many people come through the fort on an annual basis, but I know it’s a lot. Some are only here for a few weeks, others for months or years, and still others retire from the military and stay around for decades, working as civilians. These are people who are hungry for interpersonal connections, since each time they move, their lives are disrupted. We could figure out how to reach them and invite them into our Christian fellowship.
It’s a great idea—not mine, one that came up in a discussion with session. But the question is, how do we make it happen? Who has the burning desire to serve that population, enough so that they will learn their needs, determine the best way to connect with them, and coordinate a group of our members to surround them with love? If we do it half-heartedly, we can do more harm than good. Growing the kingdom of God is not the work of a month or a season, but of a lifetime. If we start some outreach and then fade away, people at the fort who stick around will remember us as a flaky church that can’t be trusted.
So, maybe that’s a great idea that we don’t have the bandwidth for. Or, maybe it’s a great idea that we need to talk about more broadly and find a little group who has the passion to make it happen. The effort needs to grow from a sincere, heartfelt desire.
Assuming that all goes well with my commissioning process, my plan is to start learning all of the great ideas that I know are lingering out there in the congregation, and then try to find some commonalities. I’ll try to find two or three or four people who have a shared vision, and then try to give them the tools and support they need to succeed. That’s something that I think I have learned how to do over the past four years of leadership on campus and in the community—not so much to execute my own vision, but to enable other people to pursue their vision. To provide behind-the-scenes support so that others can do the work that suits their particular skills the best.
As we go, there’s another important agricultural practice we need to keep on our list: pruning. If you are growing grapes or berries, it’s important to prune the vine so that the plant has enough resources to produce good fruit. If you don’t prune it, the plant needs to put too much of its energy into growing the vine and not enough into the fruit. In fact, Rhonda has been doing this with her tomato plants. She prunes off some of the branches so that the remaining branches are stronger and healthier.
Pruning your life or the life of a church or other organization is much harder. Pruning a church’s ministries means ending something that you care deeply about, but that has become more of a drain on your resources than a source of life. My friend Sharon starts Vacation Bible School tomorrow. Her church is part of a coalition that works together on several activities, VBS chief among them. They have struggled just a bit since the pandemic, but they still have the people and the energy to make VBS happen. We stopped doing VBS even before the pandemic because it became just too much work, falling on too few people, for the limited impact that we had. Of course, now, it would be hard to have VBS without severely disrupting the preschool’s operations. None of this means that VBS is a bad thing to do in the abstract; it was just something that we needed to prune so that we could put our time, energy, and other resources to work elsewhere for the good of the kingdom of God. It was something that didn’t work during this season of the church’s life.
Fired Up! falls into that category, too. I dearly loved leading Fired Up! and valued the time we spent in that form of worship with a smaller, more intimate group. But there’s NO WAY that I could lead Fired Up! and be preaching here today, or doing any of the myriad other things I do for the church. So, it had to be pruned.
As we move forward, there will likely be other things that we have to prune away. We may start some things that don’t work out. We may start something that ends up crowding out something else that we’re doing. We may find that some things that we thought were essential, are actually vestiges of a different era that are no longer life-giving.
The promise of the Gospel, though, is that the kingdom of God is at hand! If we follow the Spirit’s leading, if we plant the right seeds, if we commit ourselves to channeling God’s love, Jesus taught that God will give the growth. A spiritual advisor once told me that God does 98% of the work. We have to do our 2%—we have to sow the right seeds in the right soil—but if we do, God will do the rest. We have limited time, energy, money, and people, but our infinite Lord will give us the growth. With that growth will come more resources, more ideas, more love to share, more abundant life. Now may God bless us with the wisdom to choose the right seeds and the energy and courage to do our part in growing God’s kingdom. Amen.
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