There’s an old kindy rhyme that goes like this:
There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, a hole.
Then mend it, dear Henry, dear Henry, mend it.
The rhyme begins by stating that there’s a problem. There’s a hole in the bucket. To fix the leaking bucket, Henry needs a straw, to cut the straw, he needs a knife, to use the knife he needs to sharpen it. But the sharpening stone has to be damp, so he needs water. But to fetch water, he needs the bucket, yet the bucket is leaking.
We have a hole in our bucket in the diocese. Does that capture the sense of what you’ve experienced in the last year or two?
Several months ago, I asked my chaplain, Simon, to look at national and diocesan statistics to help us understand our current realities. We'll be sharing some highlights from that research at this Synod. The numbers show a picture of a huge harvest field and the workers getting a lot fewer and older! We have a hole in our bucket!
While the population of our country has continued to grow, our diocesan statistics collated each year show a sobering picture. Over 22 years to 2018, our total parish attendance in the diocese fell by nearly 40%. And that is before Covid-19 pandemic arrived. We have a hole in our bucket!
Our situation is not dissimilar to other churches in the West. Global trends are showing a great exodus from church across the Western world for decades. What we’re seeing is that people with no religious allegiance (the “nones”) has grown remarkably and so have those who are “done” with the organised church. I know so many people in this “done” category. The rate of leaking in this category is alarming. We have a hole in the bucket.
It has been said that we are losing a generation that wanted Church but perhaps not God (nominalism) and gaining a generation that are seeking God but not Church. My sense is that there is massive hunger out there for meaning, for connection, for community, for hope but the expectation that the church can help satisfy that hunger is low. We have a hole in our bucket.
Global emerging trends also show that we’re living through a period of profoundly disorienting change as Mark Sayers points out, where we’re shifting from a “complicated” world to a “complex” world. In our complex world, things are a lot more unpredictable. For example, in nature - nineteen of the hottest years on record have occurred since 2000; and in human nature, we’re seeing a lot more social fragmentation. We have a hole in our bucket!
The fact that there are no easy solutions to these complex issues magnifies the burden on leadership, ordained and non-ordained who have to learn to minister in fragility when we’re used to ministering in stability. Many of us feel hope diminish, a lowering of confidence to see real change and a paralysing dilemma of how to stretch dwindling resources. Left untended, all this can easily compromise the vitality of our mission and even erode our confidence in the gospel of Christ.
This is not cause for dismay – it’s an invitation to prayerful and urgent attention to these brutal realities we face, while keeping our eyes on the unshakable hope in the Lord Jesus.
At this Synod, our theme is Grow, the second plank in our Gather, Grow, Go strategy.
By GROW, we mean growing in faithfulness (depth) and fruitfulness (breadth) or growing deep to reach wide! I believe God calls us to grow and healthy growth in depth and breadth is intrinsic to the gospel. The gospel in its very nature grows and bears fruit.
God has provided gifts for us to access in order to flourish in faithfulness and fruitfulness. We now turn to God’s word to reflect on what God says about growth.
5 What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. 6 I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. 7 So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. 8 The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labour of each. 9 For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building.
1 Corinthians 3:5-9
26 Jesus also said, “Here is what God’s kingdom is like. A farmer scatters seed on the ground. 27 Night and day the seed comes up and grows. It happens whether the farmer sleeps or gets up. He doesn’t know how it happens. 28 All by itself the soil produces grain. First the stalk comes up. Then the head appears. Finally, the full grain appears in the head. 29 Before long the grain ripens. So the farmer cuts it down, because the harvest is ready.”
Mark 4:26-29
There are three parables about growing seeds in Mark’s Gospel chapter 4. They all have a different emphasis regarding how God’s Kingdom grows. The parable of the Sower emphasises the power of good soil, the parable of the mustard seed emphasises the potential of small beginnings, while our reading - the parable of the growing seed - emphasises the process of growth itself. So, let's dive in and look at how the church grows.
Both of our readings speak of God who makes things grow. Seeds planted grow in mysterious ways that we cannot explain. It’s the work of God. It’s a miracle!
I have been surprised by the plants I have seen grow in my garden without me doing anything. Potatoes, tomatoes, spinach etc.
When it comes to personal & Kingdom growth, we trust and worship the God of life - God, the Origin of all life, the breath of spiritual new life and the power of resurrection life!
In our weakness and weariness, God’s strength is proved. We’re invited to look up to God. We can pray with confidence because we are convinced that:
This is the God who sustains us, renews us, refreshes us, and by the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead pours His love deep into our hearts so that we reveal His glory in our lives and in our communities.
I think this is an exciting season to be alive and to be in ministry. So, we pray to the God who makes things grow; that He would reignite his fire within us so that the Gospel might take root and flourish in our lives and communities and that we would see Kingdom growth.
I’m calling us to a season of prayer and discernment where we choose not despair but hope as we connect deeply with God in prayer and listen to what the Spirit is saying to us about the challenges and opportunities before us.
Our reading from Mark’s Gospel also reminds us that growth is a process.
28 All by itself the soil produces grain. First the stalk comes up. Then the head appears. Finally, the full grain appears in the head. 29 Before long the grain ripens.
Growing up as a kid, I was kind of impatient with how long a seed took to emerge from the ground. I kept going back to the garden every few hours to check whether the seed I had planted had sprouted. Sometimes I would dig it up to see what was going on. That wasn’t a good idea. Was it? My mother would remind me to trust the process. The seed was alive and active even beneath the surface.
That’s what happens to the gospel seeds sown. Growth is a process. Trust the process of the seasons to bring about the best in a plant. Even in winter, when plants seem to be going through death, something is happening. It’s also the time when the unhealthy stuff dies so that the plant can be healthy. As Fred Bahnson says - soil is not dirt. It is alive, teeming with life in secret ecosystem of work that goes on beneath the surface. You might be surprised by the deep work God has been doing in people’s hearts before the seeds of the gospel are sown.
Perhaps you’re in a season of preparing the soil or you’ve scattered seeds and for a long time that germinating seed isn’t seen from the surface. Trust the process!
Perhaps you’re in the season of watering, weeding external threats and feeding your plants? Trust the process!
Or perhaps, yours is a season of harvesting the fruit – that’s great. Look at the fields ripe for harvest. Trust the process!
Sometimes, we’re blessed to be able to see the entire process from start to finish. Other times, we’re called to plant and water and don’t get the privilege of watching the fruit develop. Growth occurs through the different seasons. Sometimes growth seems obvious, other times, during the dry spell it’s not. Then when the season changes you realise the drought strengthened your roots and you grew even when your soul felt dormant.
Trust the process by embedding healthy rhythms and habits that foster the right conditions for growth.
So, no matter what season you’re in, don’t grow weary – the harvest is coming. It’s not up to us to create growth. Our job is simply to plant and water despite all the imperfections in our labour. The Lord will do the rest—and he’ll do it perfectly.
Trust the process, keep planting, keep watering, keep feeding the plants.
I belong to the Squash club in Nelson. I love playing squash on Thursdays which is our club nights as I get to play a number of players in one night. The host sets a timer and randomly mixes up players so that every 15 minutes or so you get to play with a different person. What I’ve noticed is that by playing with several people on the same night, my skills have improved as each player brings something unique to the game. The aim of Club nights is not winning or losing and there are no points awarded for winning. It's an opportunity to grow adaptability alongside your playing ability. And it’s so much fun.
Final thought from the 1 Corinthians reading. Paul very plainly states some truths that the church in Corinth desperately needed to hear as they were starting to argue amongst themselves about “who they followed”. Paul was quick to remind them what matters most. That they all follow Christ, that growth was God’s work and that their focus was to play their part in the process of growth, whether that’s planting or watering. Paul says "For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building."
Paul is saying Kingdom growth happens in partnership. It’s a team effort/sport! We all play different roles, but we’re in the same waka, paddling together towards the same mission.
I know it’s easy to apply this passage to each single congregation and that’s a good thing. But what if we started to think beyond the concerns of our own patch - and thought instead of ourselves as a single united Diocesan family. A family where we deal with our struggles together, and where we rise together, so no community is left behind. A family where there is no place for division and competition, where we do not allow the hurts of the past to prevent us from moving forward together. Like a building joined together, being built together and rising together in Christ as Paul reminds us in Ephesians 2:12-22.
So, I’m asking us all to work together as whānau, as a unified team to see Kingdom growth, under God.
There is much that God is already doing. But we have a hole in our bucket – we have urgent challenges to address, barriers to growth and amazing opportunities for growth. So, over the next nine months, I’d like to invite us into a season of discerning together God’s invitation to grow in faithfulness and fruitfulness across the diocese.
My prayer for this synod is that as we discern the holes in our bucket. We would have the openness to have our cups filled afresh in order to nurture the gospel seedlings placed in our hands.
My commitment is to continue to listen to God and to you. I am also cognizant of the promise I made prior to my ordination (as bishop), to lead you in God’s mission.
So, as we wrestle with these issues and ask what the Spirit is saying to the church:
Will you join me as WE LOOK TO GOD in prayer for growth?
Will you join me to continue doing the mahi of cultivating the soil, planting, watering and harvesting as WE TRUST THE PROCESS of growth?
Will you join me to hold hands with others as WE RISE TOGETHER to grow into a Kingdom movement of disciples of Jesus, making disciples across the top of the South and beyond?
Lord, would you open our eyes and hearts to hear what the Spirit is saying to the church. In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Check out other articles in the
series below.
More articles in the
series are to come.
We have invited these writers to share their experiences, ideas and opinions in the hope that these will provoke thought, challenge you to go deeper and inspire you to put your faith into action. These articles should not be taken as the official view of the Nelson Diocese on any particular matter.
There’s an old kindy rhyme that goes like this:
There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, a hole.
Then mend it, dear Henry, dear Henry, mend it.
The rhyme begins by stating that there’s a problem. There’s a hole in the bucket. To fix the leaking bucket, Henry needs a straw, to cut the straw, he needs a knife, to use the knife he needs to sharpen it. But the sharpening stone has to be damp, so he needs water. But to fetch water, he needs the bucket, yet the bucket is leaking.
We have a hole in our bucket in the diocese. Does that capture the sense of what you’ve experienced in the last year or two?
Several months ago, I asked my chaplain, Simon, to look at national and diocesan statistics to help us understand our current realities. We'll be sharing some highlights from that research at this Synod. The numbers show a picture of a huge harvest field and the workers getting a lot fewer and older! We have a hole in our bucket!
While the population of our country has continued to grow, our diocesan statistics collated each year show a sobering picture. Over 22 years to 2018, our total parish attendance in the diocese fell by nearly 40%. And that is before Covid-19 pandemic arrived. We have a hole in our bucket!
Our situation is not dissimilar to other churches in the West. Global trends are showing a great exodus from church across the Western world for decades. What we’re seeing is that people with no religious allegiance (the “nones”) has grown remarkably and so have those who are “done” with the organised church. I know so many people in this “done” category. The rate of leaking in this category is alarming. We have a hole in the bucket.
It has been said that we are losing a generation that wanted Church but perhaps not God (nominalism) and gaining a generation that are seeking God but not Church. My sense is that there is massive hunger out there for meaning, for connection, for community, for hope but the expectation that the church can help satisfy that hunger is low. We have a hole in our bucket.
Global emerging trends also show that we’re living through a period of profoundly disorienting change as Mark Sayers points out, where we’re shifting from a “complicated” world to a “complex” world. In our complex world, things are a lot more unpredictable. For example, in nature - nineteen of the hottest years on record have occurred since 2000; and in human nature, we’re seeing a lot more social fragmentation. We have a hole in our bucket!
The fact that there are no easy solutions to these complex issues magnifies the burden on leadership, ordained and non-ordained who have to learn to minister in fragility when we’re used to ministering in stability. Many of us feel hope diminish, a lowering of confidence to see real change and a paralysing dilemma of how to stretch dwindling resources. Left untended, all this can easily compromise the vitality of our mission and even erode our confidence in the gospel of Christ.
This is not cause for dismay – it’s an invitation to prayerful and urgent attention to these brutal realities we face, while keeping our eyes on the unshakable hope in the Lord Jesus.
At this Synod, our theme is Grow, the second plank in our Gather, Grow, Go strategy.
By GROW, we mean growing in faithfulness (depth) and fruitfulness (breadth) or growing deep to reach wide! I believe God calls us to grow and healthy growth in depth and breadth is intrinsic to the gospel. The gospel in its very nature grows and bears fruit.
God has provided gifts for us to access in order to flourish in faithfulness and fruitfulness. We now turn to God’s word to reflect on what God says about growth.
5 What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. 6 I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. 7 So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. 8 The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labour of each. 9 For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building.
1 Corinthians 3:5-9
26 Jesus also said, “Here is what God’s kingdom is like. A farmer scatters seed on the ground. 27 Night and day the seed comes up and grows. It happens whether the farmer sleeps or gets up. He doesn’t know how it happens. 28 All by itself the soil produces grain. First the stalk comes up. Then the head appears. Finally, the full grain appears in the head. 29 Before long the grain ripens. So the farmer cuts it down, because the harvest is ready.”
Mark 4:26-29
There are three parables about growing seeds in Mark’s Gospel chapter 4. They all have a different emphasis regarding how God’s Kingdom grows. The parable of the Sower emphasises the power of good soil, the parable of the mustard seed emphasises the potential of small beginnings, while our reading - the parable of the growing seed - emphasises the process of growth itself. So, let's dive in and look at how the church grows.
Both of our readings speak of God who makes things grow. Seeds planted grow in mysterious ways that we cannot explain. It’s the work of God. It’s a miracle!
I have been surprised by the plants I have seen grow in my garden without me doing anything. Potatoes, tomatoes, spinach etc.
When it comes to personal & Kingdom growth, we trust and worship the God of life - God, the Origin of all life, the breath of spiritual new life and the power of resurrection life!
In our weakness and weariness, God’s strength is proved. We’re invited to look up to God. We can pray with confidence because we are convinced that:
This is the God who sustains us, renews us, refreshes us, and by the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead pours His love deep into our hearts so that we reveal His glory in our lives and in our communities.
I think this is an exciting season to be alive and to be in ministry. So, we pray to the God who makes things grow; that He would reignite his fire within us so that the Gospel might take root and flourish in our lives and communities and that we would see Kingdom growth.
I’m calling us to a season of prayer and discernment where we choose not despair but hope as we connect deeply with God in prayer and listen to what the Spirit is saying to us about the challenges and opportunities before us.
Our reading from Mark’s Gospel also reminds us that growth is a process.
28 All by itself the soil produces grain. First the stalk comes up. Then the head appears. Finally, the full grain appears in the head. 29 Before long the grain ripens.
Growing up as a kid, I was kind of impatient with how long a seed took to emerge from the ground. I kept going back to the garden every few hours to check whether the seed I had planted had sprouted. Sometimes I would dig it up to see what was going on. That wasn’t a good idea. Was it? My mother would remind me to trust the process. The seed was alive and active even beneath the surface.
That’s what happens to the gospel seeds sown. Growth is a process. Trust the process of the seasons to bring about the best in a plant. Even in winter, when plants seem to be going through death, something is happening. It’s also the time when the unhealthy stuff dies so that the plant can be healthy. As Fred Bahnson says - soil is not dirt. It is alive, teeming with life in secret ecosystem of work that goes on beneath the surface. You might be surprised by the deep work God has been doing in people’s hearts before the seeds of the gospel are sown.
Perhaps you’re in a season of preparing the soil or you’ve scattered seeds and for a long time that germinating seed isn’t seen from the surface. Trust the process!
Perhaps you’re in the season of watering, weeding external threats and feeding your plants? Trust the process!
Or perhaps, yours is a season of harvesting the fruit – that’s great. Look at the fields ripe for harvest. Trust the process!
Sometimes, we’re blessed to be able to see the entire process from start to finish. Other times, we’re called to plant and water and don’t get the privilege of watching the fruit develop. Growth occurs through the different seasons. Sometimes growth seems obvious, other times, during the dry spell it’s not. Then when the season changes you realise the drought strengthened your roots and you grew even when your soul felt dormant.
Trust the process by embedding healthy rhythms and habits that foster the right conditions for growth.
So, no matter what season you’re in, don’t grow weary – the harvest is coming. It’s not up to us to create growth. Our job is simply to plant and water despite all the imperfections in our labour. The Lord will do the rest—and he’ll do it perfectly.
Trust the process, keep planting, keep watering, keep feeding the plants.
I belong to the Squash club in Nelson. I love playing squash on Thursdays which is our club nights as I get to play a number of players in one night. The host sets a timer and randomly mixes up players so that every 15 minutes or so you get to play with a different person. What I’ve noticed is that by playing with several people on the same night, my skills have improved as each player brings something unique to the game. The aim of Club nights is not winning or losing and there are no points awarded for winning. It's an opportunity to grow adaptability alongside your playing ability. And it’s so much fun.
Final thought from the 1 Corinthians reading. Paul very plainly states some truths that the church in Corinth desperately needed to hear as they were starting to argue amongst themselves about “who they followed”. Paul was quick to remind them what matters most. That they all follow Christ, that growth was God’s work and that their focus was to play their part in the process of growth, whether that’s planting or watering. Paul says "For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building."
Paul is saying Kingdom growth happens in partnership. It’s a team effort/sport! We all play different roles, but we’re in the same waka, paddling together towards the same mission.
I know it’s easy to apply this passage to each single congregation and that’s a good thing. But what if we started to think beyond the concerns of our own patch - and thought instead of ourselves as a single united Diocesan family. A family where we deal with our struggles together, and where we rise together, so no community is left behind. A family where there is no place for division and competition, where we do not allow the hurts of the past to prevent us from moving forward together. Like a building joined together, being built together and rising together in Christ as Paul reminds us in Ephesians 2:12-22.
So, I’m asking us all to work together as whānau, as a unified team to see Kingdom growth, under God.
There is much that God is already doing. But we have a hole in our bucket – we have urgent challenges to address, barriers to growth and amazing opportunities for growth. So, over the next nine months, I’d like to invite us into a season of discerning together God’s invitation to grow in faithfulness and fruitfulness across the diocese.
My prayer for this synod is that as we discern the holes in our bucket. We would have the openness to have our cups filled afresh in order to nurture the gospel seedlings placed in our hands.
My commitment is to continue to listen to God and to you. I am also cognizant of the promise I made prior to my ordination (as bishop), to lead you in God’s mission.
So, as we wrestle with these issues and ask what the Spirit is saying to the church:
Will you join me as WE LOOK TO GOD in prayer for growth?
Will you join me to continue doing the mahi of cultivating the soil, planting, watering and harvesting as WE TRUST THE PROCESS of growth?
Will you join me to hold hands with others as WE RISE TOGETHER to grow into a Kingdom movement of disciples of Jesus, making disciples across the top of the South and beyond?
Lord, would you open our eyes and hearts to hear what the Spirit is saying to the church. In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Check out other articles in the
series below.
More articles in the
series are to come.
