'We Intend on Keep Showing Up'

 There is a church in west London built in 1829. Same stone walls. Same Gothic arches the Victorians raised with their own hands and their own offerings. It is called Holy Trinity Brompton — HTB for short. It is home of the Alpha Course, begun in 1977, and one of the most influential Anglican churches in the world. Since then, it has planted 184 new churches and reached over two million people through its ministry in 146 countries — all of it out of a building someone else built and left standing.

Nobody in 1829 had any idea. They just showed up. They built their section of wall. They scattered their seed and went home and went to sleep. And the seed grew. It is still growing today.

Notice that HTB is not exceptional because of its building. Every cathedral in Europe has a beautiful building. Many of those cathedrals are museums now — gorgeous, quiet, and empty on Sunday morning. HTB is different not because of what was built but because people kept showing up to it, generation after generation after generation — showing up to pray, to worship, to scatter seed, to trust God with the harvest. The building did not save the mission. The mission kept breathing life into the building!

That is why we had Miracle Sunday yesterday. Not to save a building. To declare that we intend to keep showing up inside this one. You see, in Mark 4, the scattered seed is an act of faith, not a guarantee. "A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain." Mark 4:26–28

Farmers have always been people of faith. Ask any farmer. There is a reason rural communities have historically been among the most deeply religious people on earth — because farmers understand in their bones what the rest of us have to be taught. You do your part and then you let go. You plow, you plant, you water — and then you pray. Because the farmer knows something the rest of us resist: there is a point where your work ends and something beyond your work begins.

What the farmer does with the seed and what God does with the seed are categorically different things. The farmer works with what is there. God creates something that wasn't. The farmer plants what is finite — a single seed, a fixed number of acres, a limited season. God grows the potential hidden inside the seed that no farmer could manufacture or predict. We plant. God transforms. Those are not the same act. They are not even the same category of act. This is how God has always worked — taking the finite offering of human hands and doing something with it that defies the math. You cannot look at a seed and calculate the harvest. You cannot look at an offering and calculate what God will do with it.

Thirty-three people showed up in Metairie in 1936. Finite. Limited. They had no idea you were coming. They planted anyway — their prayers, their presence, their gifts, their service, and their witness — scattered into this ground like seed. They were planting for ninety years they would never see, for faces they would never know. And here you are. You are the harvest of someone else's faithfulness. Which means someone is going to be the harvest of yours.

Blessings,

Jonathan