Home » Thoughts for the Week » Are you a gardener? (13 October)

Are you a gardener? (13 October)

Our Thought for the Week comes form John Goddard Minister at Saffron Walden Baptist Church and EBA Trustee

Are you a gardener?

For a holiday this summer we travelled back to the area where I was born and grew up, in the High Peak area of Derbyshire. Most of my visits home in recent years have revolved around the needs of family members who were getting older, so it was good to have a few days to be tourists – an opportunity to visit old haunts and faintly familiar places.

Given Karen’s love of gardening it was hardly a surprise that we spent a day exploring the gardens at Chatsworth House. The scale of the gardens is impressive, and the way that formal gardens, woodland gardens, and even the famously bizarre rock gardens all work together is wonderful. In the 21^st century the uber rich visit space – in the 18^th century they hired Capability Brown and a team of landscape gardeners!

One particular corner of the gardens sticks in my mind, the kitchen garden. Unlike much on display, this dates only to the 1990s when the 11^th Duke decided that the growing of vegetables was the thing to do, and as ever the scale is spectacular. A series of vast raised beds contain a dizzying variety of fruit and veg carefully managed by a team of gardeners and volunteers. The onions alone covered an area the size of our lawn, and were carefully arranged in lines radiating out from a central point, like some vast flag of the United Republic of Onion. Everything was ordered, tended, nurtured, and fruitful.

We have no plans to corner the market in onions at the Saffron Walden Manse garden, although this year’s crop of chili peppers has been abundant. But the same principals apply. The gardener, Karen, without the assistance of a team of volunteers and with only the most occasional of ‘help’ from yours truly, plans and tends and nurtures, and amazing things happen. Colour and diversity, beauty and abundance, as the result of regular, disciplined, determined hard work combined with the unpredictability of the weather and the vagaries of pests and pestilence. The gardener works and the garden grows.

Much is spoken and taught about church growth, not least because many of us worship in churches which are not growing – in fact we are declining. Conferences are held, books are read, seminars attended and sermons preached. We urge church health as a means to church growth, and church growth as a measure of success, and I am sure all of this has good and God within it.

But my thought for the week, at the end of these potted ramblings, is a gentle reminder to myself that I am not the gardener, and neither are you. Jesus told us that his Father is the gardener (John 15:1). What would our churches look like if we spent more time focused on allowing God the time and space to work in us rather than us instructing God on the sort of garden we want? Is there further pruning God wishes to do before we find the health, wholeness, healing to grow into the image and likeness of God? Will we allow ourselves to be tended and nurtured, that something of God’s beauty might be seen in us? In me?

Anyway, the Manse lawns need cutting, which is my job. They are healthier than they have ever been and just won’t stop growing…