Recovering Faithful Participation in a Therapeutic Age – Series Page
Phase 1 – Reading the Waters We Swim In
Why does Christian life so easily become and invitation ti something bigger, better and greater?
The Uneasiness of “Greater”
A while ago, I watched a brief clip from a sermon preached by a pastor. In it he declared:
“We’re not called for ‘fine.’ We’re called to something greater…”
I don’t disagree with the sentiment behind his words. In fact, during my early years of pastoral ministry I likely preached something similar myself. It wasn’t what he said that unsettled me. It was what our culture has taught us to hear. However, what if fine is fine?
I find myself wondering: How have we come to think the way we do? Look at the vocabulary that saturates our modern spiritual landscape:
- Greater.
- Next level.
- Intentionality.
- Impact.
- Live your best life.
- Maximize your potential.
- Excellence.
None of these expressions emerges from the ancient soil of Western Christianity. They belong to the language of corporate expansion, athletic performance, and modern self-optimization. Simply, the Church learned how to speak them fluently.
When “Fine” Became Failure
When I think of my Canadian cultural atmosphere, “fine” is rarely heard as a way of expressing contentment. Instead, we hear it as a confession of defeat: settling, mediocrity, a lack of holy ambition, or spiritual complacency… or just an attempt to change the subject.
Now, when I speak of “fine,” I don’t mean indifference – a passive, “meh, whatever” attitude toward life and faith. I mean the steadiness of covenantal faithfulness in the ordinary rhythms of daily living.
For decades, I repeated a common church growth maxim: “Healthy things grow.” It makes sense, and there’s certainly a measure of truth in it. I measured ministry through many of these same lenses myself. It’s easy to do when breathing the same cultural air as everyone else. Now fast forward to today.
Recently, as my wife and I traveled through the Perth and Wellington countryside to celebrate a friend’s one-hundredth birthday, my thoughts meandered alongside the county roads.
I began to ask myself a simple question: Does everything that grows demonstrate health?
Healthy wheat grows.
Healthy trees grow.
Parasites grow.
Cancer grows.
Growth alone tells us very little about health.
Scale and expansion alone don’t automatically carry God’s rubber stamp of approval.
The Farm and the Field
As we drove past the cash-crop fields and dairy operations outside Listowel, I thought about how every farm requires organization. Regardless of size, a farm needs structure, logistics, and strategy to function. Spreadsheets and administrative stewardship are important; without fences and systems, the farm falls apart.
Yet, consider when we confuse the machinery with the crop. Every farmer knows the difference between the combine and the crop.
The machinery exists to serve the life growing in the field and in the barn. But when we turn that around and the machinery becomes the focus, we’ve forgotten why the farm exists in the first place.
The barns, machinery, and spreadsheets exist for one purpose: to serve life in the field and the barn. Yet I wonder if we’ve come to see a church community more like the farm than the field. The system is to serve the people, not the other way ‘round. Yet, those captivated by the mechanics of corporate church culture – the scale, the output, the branding, and the performance metrics – overlook the silent, un-measurable life growing in the dirt.
Another word we’ve grown fond of is “biblical.” Before we ask whether something is biblical, perhaps we should first ask how we’ve learned to recognize what’s biblical in the first place. Long before we ever open the Bible, our culture has already taught us what success looks like, how health should be measured, what growth ought to resemble, and even how to imagine God Himself.
What Kind of Life?
Instead of asking, “How does Scripture measure health?” Perhaps we should ask, “What kind of life does Scripture describe?”
Over time, that question has quietly become my hermeneutic (my way of interpreting Scripture in its original, historical and cultural context).
When I read the New Testament, I don’t see Paul presenting performance dashboards. Jesus rarely offers strategic growth plans. Instead, we’re given descriptions of a specific kind of communal life:
- Love, patience, and hospitality.
- Forgiveness and shared meals.
- Faithfulness, bearing burdens, and hope.
None of these fit neatly into spreadsheets or organizational strategies. You can’t optimize patience or scale a quiet act of hospitality. Yet Scripture continually returns to them as the true markers of the Kingdom.
A farmer doesn’t manufacture life. As Jesus reminded us, the farmer scatters the seed, sleeps, rises, and watches the mystery of growth unfold without fully mastering how it happens. The farmer’s role isn’t to innovate the seed, but to cultivate the conditions, protect the ground, wait, and participate.
Redirecting Our Aspiration
We live in an age where many criticize and condemn. Some people pit small churches against large ones. Others call organizational structure “bad” and simplicity “good.” I’m saying that both the large farm and the small field have their place.
Instead, I invite us to rethink scaling toward “Bigger, Better, More” and redirect our aspirations to value depth, balance and wholeness. May we learn to thrive within our limits.
The Gospel doesn’t ask us to abandon aspiration. It asks us to examine what our aspirations have been trained to admire. Not toward scale, speed, or high-production visibility, but toward learning to recognize and participate in the kind of life already present wherever Christ is Lord.
Perhaps God’s invitation isn’t always toward something greater. Sometimes it’s toward more clearly seeing the quiet life that’s been growing among us all along.
The ancient seed still carries its own life.
Our calling has never been to improve the seed.
It’s to tend the soil, embrace the ordinary, and learn to see again.