Some spinach holding its own against the cold of the winter and visits from the pheasant.
As part of our house hunting efforts, last Sunday we visited a church that sits five minutes from a place we have our eye on. This was a very friendly, welcoming congregation and would be very convenient, but I know that it isn’t for us. Apart from not being my preferred style of worship, which perhaps I ought to be able to get over, I was put off by the altar call with a sinners’ prayer beginning ‘despite deserving outer darkness…’ and an injunction to the rest of us to get out there and evangelise.
My reading for this morning was the growing seed. It paints a picture of a mysterious process, whereby seed sown grows on its own, without any effort on the part of the farmer, resulting in a harvest that just needs to be gathered in. The farmer doesn’t go out to his field every day and fret over the seeds, he doesn’t coax, threaten or cajole then into sprouting and growing – he trusts that the mysterious alchemy of soil, sun and moisture will do its work.
Perhaps this is just my personal bias against evangelism, forged in the conflict between the expectations of certain forms of churchmanship and my own introversion, shyness and hatred of conflict, but trying to persuade people to become Christian feels like a farmer fretting over his seeds. It feels like so much stressful labour with, I suspect, diminishing returns these days.
It looks like our job is to sow seeds and gather the harvest. That will look a little different for each one of us, and might even mean standing on street corners for some, but definitely not for me.