The Need for Nurture
by Shelley Curtis Weaver | 2 August 2024
The Bible has a fair amount of dirt in it.
In Matthew 13, for example, is the familiar parable about sowing seed, and the growth in different types of soil. It’s an Adventist favorite. Sometimes it was presented as a cautionary tale: “Be good soil! Be deep, not shallow. Clear, not weedy. Loamy, not dense.”
When I was small, I worried I was rocky, or prone to wildflowers.
But it seemed to be most often used as an encouragement to evangelize. “Go out and spread those seeds. Not every seed will grow, but none will grow if you don’t spread them.”
What wasn’t said, but seems to have been implied? “Spread those seeds—then you can forget about them.”
Field maintenance
Recently when I read the parable again, something new struck me: soil doesn’t cultivate itself. Weedy valleys becoming fertile fields doesn’t just happen. Someone actually tills the soil. The crop must be tended.
Too often the church sees members leaving and says “Whoops!—guess they were just bad soil!” We forget that most ground resists cultivation. Sure, things will grow, but they are the opportunistic things, the things Jesus calls weeds. Good soil doesn’t just stay that way. The ground compacts and hardens. Weeds creep in. Tilled rows crumble and shift. Poorly drained fields wash away in storms. Good soil requires ongoing care.
When we do talk about care and nurture within our churches, we usually mean reinforcing doctrinal beliefs—that is, “Teaching the truth.” There’s not much discussion of enriching the soil that builds community, or guides how we get along. This isn’t new. Preaching always seems more important than nurture. The early apostles called it “waiting tables,” which they preferred to delegate to others so they could do the work of evangelizing.
Yet despite the stories in Acts where the word is preached and hundreds baptized, the bulk of the epistles deals with the challenge of maintaining good soil in the community. People mess up, hold grudges, and disagree. Hearts are broken, feelings bruised, toes are stepped on. Even with the widows and orphans fed, Paul must elaborate on the nature of love and ask folks to stop quarreling.
Church leaders still view nurture as a distraction from important work.
When my husband was a surgical resident with morning rounds most weekends, I usually took our three preschool children to church by myself. My church was kind and tolerant, and I tried to keep the disturbance low, but it was a struggle. One Sabbath the conference president came to introduce our new pastor and said, “Pastor, I want you to know. This is a church deeply committed to evangelism. This isn’t a church content to just sit around and nurture each other.”
I was hurt. Not only was that a slight to my friends and the kind older folks who loved me and my kids every Sabbath, but it made my deeply felt need for social contact, affirmation, and encouragement seem selfish and insignificant. The message was, “We don’t care if you are lonely and stressed, as long as the Revelation Seminar fliers get mailed out.”
I remember myself as that young mother, and know how often the “cares of this world” nearly ripped me from that church community. Others were aware of it too. I’ll sometimes meet friends from that time who would mention how faithfully I brought my children to church every week. But it wasn’t really faithfulness—I needed and wanted something from that church.
I wasn’t there because the eschatology of Revelation was so compelling. I needed to be seen, known, and valued. I needed to be reminded that both God and other human beings loved me, and that my children and I mattered.
Doing the work
So, after the altar calls and baptisms, the question posed by the early church is our question, too: “Who will feed our widows and orphans?” What can we do to sustain the church? How will we build a community where people aren’t just a project, but are the continued focus of God’s love?
These aren’t questions about keeping the pews filled. This is about the identity of church itself and why it exists. This is the most difficult thing the parched church, the malnourished church, the hard, compacted, stony soil of humanity, must understand for the church to be sustainable.
There is a reason we mail out copies of The Great Controversy instead of building community. It’s easier to shout warnings of apocalypse than to adopt the hard teachings of the Beatitudes. It’s less demanding to predict persecution than to build an atmosphere of safety and trust. The enrichment of church soil requires teaching and modeling forgiveness, peacemaking, personal, and meaningful change.
The following is a partial list of things the church might prioritize to enrich our community soil.
Learn to differ without doing harm: If you watch toddlers learning to speak, you’ll see them striking out in frustration when they can’t communicate. One of the main needs in our community is a maturing of our communication skills. Someone does not need to become our enemy just because they differ with us. We can say what we mean without being mean.
Value people without agenda: Eugene Peterson wrote, “Treating souls for whom Christ died as numbers or projects or resources seemed to me something like a sin against the Holy Spirit.”
I’ve seldom been on a nominating committee where new members weren’t quickly appraised for usefulness. Worst of all were the cringeworthy attempts to “give Bob a job so he’ll come to church.” The world abuses and uses people up. The church must be different.
Manage forgiveness and justice: The church has struggled with consequences. Certainly, wrongdoing can be forgiven. Sometimes, however, we have forgiven offenders without addressing the harm they’ve done. Justice demands we don’t sugarcoat injury, or tell victims that doing justice for them might “upset” the perpetrator or harm the church.
Justice may require apologies, reporting, testifying on behalf of the victims, and ensuring those responsible pay the penalty. The church has done harm by worrying more about “how things will look” than about doing the right thing. This is especially true when perpetrators have status or are financial benefactors. It’s to our shame that lawsuits and risk management policies are often what force us to do justice.
Prioritize tolerance: This is also the stuff of parables. Jesus told us to mind our own business, but most church squabbles are about “who’s doing what.” We see the same complaining and criticism addressed in the early church epistles, so it’s a soil problem old as dirt itself.
Cultivate personal growth: Focusing on personal spiritual growth isn’t selfish or individualistic. It’s the antidote to infighting. When Jesus told us to focus on the plank in our own eye, he was offering a great gardening tool. Twelve Step Recovery teaches the principle of cleaning up your own backyard. By respecting personal boundaries, and weeding, raking, and tending to our own issues, we enrich the soil of the whole community. Stepping over to weed in a neighbor’s yard gives thistles a foothold in your own.
Model and prioritize peacemaking and reconciliation: This change will be challenging because at this moment, our church leadership is choosing to model rejecting and cutting off those with questions or different points of view. This atmosphere of surveillance and scrutiny is unhealthy, shallow soil. New growth dies quickly under scorching heat.
Here’s where local congregations can take the lead. If local pastors, elders, and members really focused on learning to recognize hurts, to manage disagreements, to make amends and move forward—that momentum might change the whole church. Healthy local churches might then correct punitive leaders and say firmly, as to a child, “That’s not how our family is. That’s not how we do things here.”
Shelley Curtis Weaver lives in coastal Washington state. She is a clay-artist, writer, wife, mother, grandmother, and a frequenter of Columbia River crossings. She has edited and contributed to The Journey to Wholeness addiction recovery curriculum from AdventSource.
