Planting Seeds

I was recently at an outstanding workshop about the future of the church. It challenged us to think in new ways about ministry. It asked us to open our minds and imagine new ways of being together in the church. We don’t have to do it the way we always have. It is God who is unchanging and eternal – not the ways we do our ministry together. Different times, differing demographics, different needs are what we are faced with today. A different volunteer pool, a different group of lay ministers, congregation members, and prospective congregation members. They told us we can change our approach to match our present time and situation.

In the midst of the discussion, we broke into small groups. We were supposed to come up with a completely new idea for small group ministry. One thing led to another, and the discussion took me back, on this beautiful fall day, as I stood ankle deep in leaves talking about ministry, to an example I had experienced of thinking outside the box.

One church in which I did ministry, Judson Church near Lake Harriet in Minneapolis, had several families that were passionate about the natural environment – about teaching people, and especially children, how to be good stewards of the earth. As associate pastor, I was told I needed to plan the annual fall outing to a State Park. For a few years the church had been traveling each fall to collect prairie grass seeds for the park – so that they could sow them in the spring in an effort to restore the native prairie grasses.

So I organized, not sure what we were doing, and planned to meet our little group at Wild River State Park on a Sunday morning. I arrived early to get a feeling for the place. It was a cool, crisp fall morning. I had awakened early to get there at a decent time. When I pulled into the parking space near the picnic and campgrounds campers were just waking up in their tents and RV’s. I could smell stoves and fires burning. Sleepy people got up and walked to the restrooms. Some made coffee over a camp stove. The campground was shrouded in fall leaves of every color and I wished I had arrived a day earlier so that I could have spent the night and awakened in this fresh beauty.

Our little group from Judson arrived carload by carload. Soon we had assembled our small congregation at the fire circle and picnic area. In the open air, assisted by young and old lay ministers, we took turns reading scripture and poems, singing simple songs, and passing the bread and cup. Our readings were about fall, about seeds, about the planting of seeds, and about nature. They included parables of Jesus about mustard seeds and sowers and the poems of Wendell Berry and others who love the land. All of us – elders, young parents, youth and children (only sixteen people in all) felt the wonderful connection to God’s creation and to each other as we shared bread and cup.

Then we had a fabulous (and I mean gourmet, open-air, fabulous) picnic lunch at the Park Center and the naturalist met with us and taught us all about the native grasses and the invasive species that were slowly being removed. We were then escorted out to the open fields and rolling prairie. The naturalist gave us our little pails and showed us which seedpods or grasses to harvest, demonstrated how to do it, and then sent us off to do our work.

I think our oldest participant that day was in her seventies and our youngest was around age four. As we spread out amid the low grasses and brush and did our work, I had to stop to look at those around me. In groups of two’s and three’s, young and old were intently working. Small competitions had broken out within the group. Children and adults compared the contents of their pails and began to work harder and faster. Laughter and singing broke out here and there. As I stood back and beheld the workers, all I could see were God’s workers in the fields. What I experienced was God’s Realm coming to life for one golden afternoon – sun shining down on peaceful, happy people seeking to tend to God’s earth, seeking to preserve and restore something for our children and our children’s children. Simple bliss.

At the end of the day, the naturalist took the contents of our pails and weighed the tiny seeds. She told us the value of the seed if it had to be purchased and we were awestruck. Hundreds of dollars worth of tiny little seeds had been gathered. We carried a precious remnant of the past and the future in these little pails. I drove home feeling wonderfully at one with God and the universe.

I believe that as I planned that event I had been variously stressed, tired and hassled - not sure it was worth the effort. Even as we celebrated communion, I think I questioned the value of such a small group sharing this experience. But today, as I look back fondly, I know it was exactly how we ought to have been spending our time: planting seeds in young and old lives that produce the fruit of the Spirit.