The ongoing conversation

Church is, by its very nature, dynamic. It's meant to be more organic than mechanical. It's a garden to be nurtured rather than a engine that needs servicing. This means that stuff grows, changes, develops.

An engine is well defined, with known parameters by which it works. If it isn't working you fix it. You strip it down, replace parts, and rebuild it. Gardens don't work like that, in fact they don't "work" at all. Gardens grow. Without careful, regular attention they become a mass of long grass and weeds. (Weeds are just flowers that grow in the wrong place at the wrong time,—but that's a whole different picture to think about!)

In a garden something of great beauty can happen quite by chance. A combination of plants and soil types (some plants change colour depending upon soil type) can sometimes produce an eye-catching display that was neither planned nor expected. Other things can be more unusual. I remember one time seeing tomatoes growing on a potato plant. Trust me I really did see it, it was the strangest thing, and I've never seen it again.

So, if the church is more organic, more garden, how does this affect vision and strategy? In the first place it makes it more dynamic. Things become more fluid and less fixed. You begin to see church happening in all sorts of new ways because you no longer have a single, mechanical model, but a living, breathing organic model. It also means that you don't need all the parts in all the right places for the garden to be a garden. Most gardens I know are usually in a state of change and development. New lawns, new flower beds, new plants. There are also fallow times for parts of the garden.

With an engine, little changes may stop the engine from being an engine altogether. A garden can change in huge ways, but it remains a garden. One year it can be all plants, the next all vegetables, but it's still a garden.

Do you get the picture? If the church is organic, not mechanical then it won't fit a mechanised world view. The way we do stuff has to change.

So far, this has had apparently little to do with the title "The ongoing conversation", but here's the link. If church is organic, then part of the nurturing process is the ongoing conversation we have about things. With a mechanical view, we have meetings, we decide strategy and away we go and keep the engine running. With a garden, we plant, we nurture, we tend. The growing happens naturally, we just make room for it. The "ongoing conversation" is part of the nurturing process.

Everyone is welcome to bring ideas to this conversation. You don't have to be an expert gardener to do so. So why not join the conversation?