I put my first 'gardening' exercise into practice last night - worship team pancakes. Rory is in New York (la di da) and was unable to help, so I bought a whole load of stuff (eggs, milk, flour, sugar, cinammon, you know the kind of thing) and made a pot of my usual Saturday morning pancake batter.
After a while as people started arriving, I found myself sliding quietly out of the kitchen and letting my friends take over the stove, while I chatted. Before long, they'd happily made another tub of pancake mix and we were off.
Brilliant. What evolved was one of the best team nights I can remember - and the most wonderful bit of all was that I had very little to do with it!
The idea of 'gardening' of course is that you let go of the strings and let things grow organically. You put seeds in the ground and watch what happens, rather than trying to control what nature is trying to do. You get out of the kitchen.
You can put beanpoles in. You can even choose the environment in which the plants grow, to maximise their chances, but there's nothing you can do about the sunshine, the rain and the beautiful unseen explosion of life.
I sat at home thinking it through. Our vision is to see an amazing team, leading amazing times of worship and writing amazing songs. Is it possible that we can cultivate all of that without making it all about us? I hope so. But what does that mean for the traditional idea of 'leaders'? Perhaps that word needs some re-thinking - no longer organisers, administrators, or speakers, or run-everything-by-me-ers... More cultivators, gardeners and question-askers, putting their feet up in the shed.
I still think I have some internal rewiring to do.
I'll say this for now though: the pancakes were delicious.
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