Want to Grow the Church? Understand Your Cultural Soil

Several years ago, my wife and I built a house on a few acres of rural property near St. Louis, Missouri. After spending over a year swinging a hammer, I had barely caught my breath when she led me to a spot of ground she had staked out for a garden. With 15 acres at her disposal, my wife wanted a huge garden. This meant I would spend the next two weeks behind a teeth-chattering tiller, churning up virgin soil, moving rocks, wrestling the occasional root and roiling through various deposits of clay, sand and sticky black earth.

I could not have been happier to shut down the tiller on Day 14. To my eyes the garden plot looked great and ready to plant. I was finished. Or so I thought.

My wife informed me that before planting any seeds she was going to have the soil tested. This should have been my first cause for alarm. A few days later, while I was sitting at my desk, Sherri dropped a report over my shoulder on top of the book I was reading. As the report made a thump, she said, “The guy handed this to me and said, ‘Lady, you’re trying to plant on the moon.’”

The report detailed an array of deficiencies in the soil, along with a long list of nutrients and minerals needed to amend the soil if we were to have any realistic expectations of a harvest. The bottom line for me was that I would soon be back on the business end of the tiller, working all that stuff into the soil, or culture, of our garden-to-be.

Good gardening includes cultivation, which is all about culture. For any leader, and especially for church planters in the first quarter of the 21st century, to ignore the state of the soil in our culture is to risk their efforts and energies at planting the seeds of the gospel. The hard work of cultivating and planting must be mixed with an understanding of the culture we are planting in. Read More