Plant Seeds, Grow Roots, Bear Fruit

At New Life we are in the process of evaluating our mission statement, strategy statement and core values. It’s a healthy process and one that all organizations need to do every so often if they are going to maintain their effectiveness.

A church is no different.

Yesterday I jumped in the car with Troy Jones our senior pastor as he was running an errand just to get his ear and to share my thoughts on our key statements and values and to cast a little vision for The Crossing (the ministry I over see).  One of the things we talked about was our use of a house metaphor to convey the different types of environments we have for “Leading people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ.”

Front Door – Those environments that are a safe and easy first step for someone wanting to check out New Life or get involved.

Living Room – Environments designed to begin interaction, connection and teaching

Kitchen – Environments where relationships are really formed and more in depth sharing and studying takes place.

While this has been a great model, it lacks an “outwardly” focused environment and that’s where the rethinking begins.

As part of our conversation we talked about something very common place here in the Northwest, trees. We discussed how the church is very much like a tree or a fruit bearing plant, in that you initially plant a seed, it begins to grow roots and establish itself before bearing wonderful fruit, which in return will start the cycle all over again.

This metaphor is very representative of how we want New Life to function and is very commonly used in the Bible. We want to plant spiritual seeds, nurture them so that they begin to grow roots and spiritual maturity and in the end, bear great relational and spiritual fruit that will begin the cycle all over again.

This is a much more complete metaphor and one that if adopted will help keep us focused on producing good spiritual fruit. Fruit that should lead to the planting of more seeds that will result in more deeply rooted, fruit bearing followers of Christ.

…It’s the spiritual circle of life.