Measured by the Sowing: Article up at Ref21

I’m back at reformation21 with an article on what constitutes church health when things are declining. Here’s an excerpt:

“Who can change the sinner’s heart?”

Imagine if Jesus told the parable of the sower as if he were a church health guru:

The seed is the word of God. Those ones that fell along the path, snatched up by the birds? They heard the word, but your preaching wasn’t enthralling enough, and so the devil got ‘em. And the ones on the rocky soil? Well, what did you expect? If you call people to repentance, to be completely reconstructed by God’s grace on his terms, they’ll walk away. Duh. And then of course the ones that fell among the thorns couldn’t find the perfect programming tailored for their niche demographic at your church, and so they didn’t mature.

This is preposterous! This absurdity is not how Jesus talks.

And yet something very much like this logic has quietly settled into parts of the modern, evangelical (and dare I say it?), Reformed church. When the gospel does not appear to “work,” we assume the problem must lie in the delivery system—insufficiently compelling preaching, inadequate programming, or a failure to craft the right strategy. The implication is subtle but powerful: if we would only improve the machinery of ministry, the harvest would follow.

But that is not how Jesus tells the story…