God told Isaiah that one day he would speak to his people with foreign lips and strange tongues. None was stranger than the torrent of profanity through which he spoke to my friend Louis Evans, Jr., early one evening.
He was sitting in his study, staring blankly out the window at the row of trees that lined the foundation of the sanctuary. The church needed to change but wouldn’t. He had tried to tweak its structures and renovate its forms to make new skins for the new wine of the Spirit. But one brilliant idea after another had been heaped on the junk pile of board vetoes and congregational indifference.
Suddenly Louis heard the church’s groundskeeper fill the air with some of the most vituperative–and creative–profanity he had ever heard. Louis went outside to ask what was the matter.
Several weeks before, the groundskeeper had suffered a long illness and was forced to leave his job for a period. In the interim, the church hired an outside company to care for the grounds. The grounds- keeper had been painstakingly shaping the trees that lined the sanctuary’s foundation into pyramids. But the temps had decided globes would be better.
Thus the cursing. They had ruined his work, and it would take a long time to get it back to where it was. As he explained to Louis, “It will take years, because you can shape the trees only as much as they have grown.”
That’s when God spoke to Louis: “You can shape the trees only as much as they have grown.” He had been trying to shape the church before it had grown. He had seen the church as an engineer would a building project. He needed to see it as a grounds- keeper would a garden.
The engineering model had him trying to bring about spiritual change through programs and structures–in essence, working from the outside in. A horticultural model would have him feeding and watering the plants and shrubs and trees until they grew enough to be shaped–in essence, working from the inside out.
Louis began to spend more time in face-to-face encounters with individuals. In prayer. In the Word of God. In worship. In true koinonia. He spent less time in committees and task forces. Or in his study drawing diagrams.
The trouble with programs and institutional exertions is not merely that they require tremendous effort with little return. Their most insidious evil is that they often come between us and the people we mean to serve with them. So the message was: Grow the people, and the institution will follow.
I remember sitting in a staff meeting bemoaning the fact there was no one to chair the church’s mission commission. It would be an embarrassment not to have a chairperson for that important commission. We had asked everyone we could think of to do it and had received one no after another. We had a choice. We could use the subtle institutional coercions of guilt and shame to secure our chairperson. Or we could wait until a chairperson could be grown.
Under no small amount of criticism, we chose the latter. It took nearly two years, but when the chairperson emerged in the garden, more good things happened in a year than in the previous ten.
All institutions amount to considerably less than the people in them. E.M. Bounds knew this. Though written almost a century ago, his words could have been written today: “The church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men. … The Holy Spirit does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men–men of prayer.”
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Ben Patterson is dean of the chapel at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./LEADERSHIP Journal
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Copyright © 1995 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
