Spring is Coming

Do we trust that God can and will grow the spiritual seeds we plant?

By Gavin Henderson, Superintendent, Europe

British people are renowned for talking about the weather. I think part of the reason for this is how mercurial the weather can be in the United Kingdom. One moment it can be warm and sunny, the next it can be cold and raining, and then without warning the rain can turn to hail. The only constant seems to be that, on any given day, there a significant chance you might get wet.

Yet despite our frequent complaints, the British weather is the source of so much life. The rain is the reason why the United Kingdom is so green and fertile. When I work from the office I normally walk to work. The walk is mostly through a park, and I spend a lot of the walk wandering next to a river that winds its way through the town where I live.

Not only does the walk give me a chance to be out in God’s creation, but it also allows me to see the changes of the seasons. The bare trees in winter begin to sprout littles leaves of green as spring arrives, before turning into an avalanche of greenery in the summer. In autumn, the leaves change into different colours before falling from the trees at the inevitable approach of winter.

The writer of the book of Ecclesiastes put it this way:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2 ESV)

If there are seasons for the plants and animals, what about the church? Are there seasons of the church? If so, what season are we in right now? A season of growth? Or a season of decline?

For much of my life, I have heard people lament about how Christianity is on the way out in the West. The decline of Christianity in Europe is being well documented, with the media gleefully announcing the result of the latest census that shows the decline of people who say they are Christians, or the decrease in membership of the major Christian denominations — as well as the smaller ones!

The danger of this narrative for Christians is that we start focusing on our own survival instead of the gospel. Our priorities turn to keeping our existing members rather than making new ones. Our mindset becomes about preserving the status quo rather than taking risks and seizing new opportunities for the gospel.

Or worse yet, we become passive Christians. Christians who accept that the decline of Christianity in the West is inevitable and believe there is no point in doing anything. We have already determined that there is no point about speaking with our neighbour, or our friends, or our family about the gospel because we have already decided for them. We have decided they are not interested!

In the Bible, the gospel is often described as being like a seed that is planted in the ground. Jesus famously spoke of this in his parable of the sower, though there are several other examples. The thing about sowing seeds in the ground, though, is that it is an act of faith.

You sow the seed in the belief that something remarkable is going to happen. Something that will happen completely out of sight, under the soil. The seed will germinate and come to life. Some seeds are particularly mysterious — they will only germinate when they experience the cold of the winter frosts and are then triggered to life by the warmer weather of spring.

Even the most experienced farmers are not certain about how many of the seeds will geminate and go on to becomes plants, or exactly when their shoots will begin to rise up out of the ground. Instead, they plant the seeds and do what they can to give the seeds the best chance to flourish and then they wait … in faith.

You see the problem with churches focusing on their own survival, or Christians deciding that those around us are not interested in the Gospel, is that both positions show that we have stopped having faith. We’ve stopped believing that the future of the church is in God’s hands and that he works through Christians like us to accomplish his goals. We stop believing that God can, and will, call people to him even in an increasingly God-less and moral-less society.

Being faithful in these circumstances means trusting in God even when we cannot always immediately see the fruit of following his command to go and share the Gospel. Instead, we must trust that in the darkness, God is at work, taking the seeds we help plant and nourishing them until they are ready to burst forth into the light at the appointed time.

In the popular book and TV Show, Game of Thrones, the motto of one of the major families is “Winter is coming.” The idea behind it is that it is a reminder that they need to be ready to weather the coming winter.

A more appropriate motto for the church though is “Spring is coming.” It’s a motto symbolising the belief that even in the darkest of conditions, God is at work and the gospel and the kingdom of God will prevail.