Yesterday, I gave a quick book review of The Trellis and the Vine and in the book there was a particular paragraph that I found challenging. Here it is:
The other approach is to start with the people in your church having no particular structures or programs in mind, and then consider who are these people God has given you, how you can help them grow in Christian maturity, and what form their gifts and opportunities might take.
The above paragraph lacks a little context so allow me to fill in the gaps. The heading in which this paragraph appears is entitled ‘From Running Programs to Building People’ and the paragraph previous to the one above talks about how churches mainly employ a “top-down” approach to ministry. In a top-down approach to ministry, a church looks to mainly maintain the current structures that are in place (worship service, Sunday School, etc.).
Even before I came across this quote from the book, I had been wrestling with the same topic. I feel like, for those of us in sports ministry, we employ the top-down approach to ministry. We determine the structures as the leaders and then look to fill the gaps with volunteers. To use the analogy from the book, we build the trellis and put it in place before giving any thought to how to help the vine grow. What if we focused on the vine first? What if we looked to equip and mobilize people within our church to use sports to reach people and then unleashed them? In this approach, we fertilize the vine and then look to provide structure as the vine grows.
I’m not sure of a sports ministry that employs this “organic” approach. Do you know of one?
