Feeding the Root

I was listening to a speaker from the Minnesota DNR talk about trees yesterday and one thing he said struck me as particularly profound for church growth. "Do not fertilize a stressed tree." He described a stressed tree as one that was in a drought, or afflicted with an insect attack, or similar strain on it. The problem with fertilizer is that all it does is force trees to put out more leaf growth. This extra growth does not help the tree, but instead increases the strain on the tree as it forces it to put even more of its scant resources it to extraneous leaf production. From what I can tell it is the equivalent of opening new stores when sales are down.

So how does this all connect to the church? For me the connection arises out of a recent conversation around the pressures of benchmarks in churches. With the budget strain that churches face, and the pressures facing denominations as a whole, there is increased pressure for churches to demonstrate growth, to be able to clearly measure and express the effects they are having. In the midst of a potential church-wide drought, there is a great deal of pressure to show lots of leafy growth in the church. There is a real pressure for a church to pour on the fertilizer in an attempt to create showy numerical growth without seriously addressing the deeper needs. From what I gather, fertilizer will not really help feed and grow the roots. In fact a lot of the deeper growth needed for sustainability in the long term is hurt by extraneous growth for show during hard times.

In a time where benchmarks and measurable growth is needed, how do we in the church attend first to the immeasurable growth that goes on beneath the surface? How do we look first to building our root structure, so that when the rains do fall we are poised and ready to grow? How do we assess the rain levels for the church? How do we know when there is growth out there we are missing and when is it simply a dry season for the church? When it is time to grow within and when is it time to grow without?