Jesus’ parable of the four soils (Matthew 13) shows an unexpected truth about the way the kingdom of God grows: most things we try aren’t successful.
Did you catch that? There are four soils and one is good; the sower’s job is to sow the seed. The quarter, or so, that falls on good soil will bear fruit. The others three quarters will have different reactions.
As Glen Scrivener says: “Hit and miss, mostly miss … that’s how the kingdom of God has grown for 2000 years.”
Most things we do won’t work. That might sound depressing, but I think it’s the opposite. There’s a wonderful sense of grace to the idea. We don’t know which things work, so we try, we speak, we sow the seed. The Lord deals with actually growing things. We don’t know which things will work, so we keep trying and one in four of them does.
Of course, that’s too simplistic. It’s not even that every fourth thing we try works, if that were true you’d just sit out the other attempts. It’s not even that work in the kingdom works one in four times, but it’s that our spreading of the seed in all its various forms works for a quarter of the people. Even our failures for the kingdom will bear some sort of fruit and will fall on some sort of soil.
Jesus is talking about telling people the good news of his kingdom inaugurated in his death, resurrection, ascension, and gift of the Spirit. The principle applies to anything the church does. We’re holy amateurs, even the professionals among us. We try things and they fail, but nevertheless by the marvellous grace of God, seed is sown and a whole quarter of it bears fruit, even if we can’t see it.
This is a charter for being confident to try something even if it might fail. It’s common in the British Chrisitan world for an idea to be swiftly knocked back by being told it wouldn’t work. Well, maybe we should try, but with the confidence that we can fail and that’s OK.
What this looks like
I don’t think we should go off half-cocked on hair-brained schemes. I do think we should think things through. Most pastors are not able administrators, those gifts rarely go together, so get yourself a good administrator who can work through the details. It’s a spiritual gift worth its weight in gold. Sometimes they will shoot down ideas that need shooting down. You shouldn’t just try them anyway.
What I mean is that when a church does a new thing, whether its aiming to preach the gospel to Christians (that’s what we call discipleship) or to those who don’t know Jesus (we call that evangelism), or something more nuanced than that, our attitude is that we’re sowing seed. Of course, if we put a lot of effort and resource into something our natural human desire is for it to succeed. That’s good. However, if we think, and teach our churches to think, of success as seeds sown then it frees us to fail, humanly speaking, at something we try. Being free to fail frees us to try more things, do something outside of the usual, and give someone license to try their idea. It means we might stop stuff that doesn’t work, if we do so we need to be willing to talk to the church about why, say that we failed, and maybe even apologise for some aspect of that; we should then reframe the church’s expectations: did this fail in God’s eyes?
What does success look like
What I’m getting at is that success looks like sowing seed. Success looks like obedience. Success looks like doing what the Lord tells us. Success looks like all that effort for the one person who came to faith. Success looks like assuming that the word never returns void even if we don’t get to see the fruit. It’s rare in the UK that someone who comes to faith, or has a transformative moment in their walk with Jesus, has done so off the back of only the thing they’re directly responding to. We’re usually ‘reaping’ where others have sown. Sowing is success.
Thinking of ourselves as ‘not professionals’ is about allowing ourselves to fail, not embracing mediocrity. It’s good to improve things if we’re going to do them again. We should learn from our mistakes. If everything we try fails, we probably aren’t learning from the failures. The problem with professionalism in the Christian life is that we tend to start thinking that our ‘formula’ is what worked. The way we organised things is why so many came to faith, or this particular method of discipleship is the answer to our crises. That is never true. People repent and change because the Spirit of God grips their lives in response to his word spoken by his people. It’s not our methods, it’s his Spirit.
That shouldn’t stop us improving our methods if that’s possible, but it should stop us assuming that these improvements change the outcomes. We improve things because to do things as well as we can is an act of worship to God. Administration is a spiritual gift. Outcomes rest on the Lord’s will. Everything we do will be hit and miss, mostly miss, and the Lord will build himself a Kingdom of Life, having conquered the grave.
Photo by Oliver Buchmann on Unsplash
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