How do we grow churches and Christians in ways that work with the grain of creation rather than against it?
This question became the animating force behind “Tending the Vineyard: A Conference on Church Growth,” which my parish, St. Francis in the Fields in the suburbs of Louisville, in collaboration with The Living Church, hosted in 2025. We gathered about 120 clergy and lay leaders for a three-day conversation about what healthy growth looks like in the life of the Church.
Our speakers ranged widely: agrarian thinker Mary Berry of the Berry Center; biblical scholar Dr. Ellen Davis of Duke Divinity School, and church-growth researcher the Rev. Dr. David Goodhew of the University of Durham; Bishops Jenny Andison (Toronto) and John Kafwanka (Northern Zambia); Vice President of the House of Deputies, the Rev. Dr. Steve Pankey (Christ Church, Bowling Green), and the Rev. Scott Gunn of Forward Movement. We ate well, prayed together, enjoyed some bluegrass music, and considered important questions about the health of our ministries and the health of the places we inhabit.
Looking back, I have come to understand that the nexus of agrarian thought and church growth is tragically under-explored, and needs to be considered by scholars, clergy, and the laity alike. Our conversation, albeit fruitful, was also a test balloon of sorts. Like two people dating for the first time, fumbling for the right words, trying to make connections and seeing how this might work out (or not), the connection between church growth and agrarianism is at first an awkward conversation. But it shouldn’t be, at least not for clergy and lay leaders who are attuned to creation and Creator.
A Sacramental Impulse
Part of my formation for ministry included attending two different seminaries—one was broadly evangelical and the other was Anglo-Catholic—both taught me to take Scripture and the created order seriously. I never understood the claim that exegesis or theology could be “impractical.” If one believes in sacraments, then everything is potentially a means of grace; nothing in God’s good creation is irrelevant to spiritual formation.
This conviction made it seem natural to invite people like Mary Berry and Ellen Davis to a conference on church growth (no matter how much it surprised them). Learning to read a text and learning to read a place are not separate enterprises. If we study the grammar of Hebrew or Greek to read Scripture well, should we not also study the contours of the soil, the watershed, and the local economy to understand what kind of ministry can take root where we are? Clergy, leaders and parishioners should exegete their place—not like the scientist pinning a butterfly to the board, but like the farmer who knows the smell of local soil.
An Allergy to Industrial Metaphors
Too often our ecclesial imagination borrows from the Industrial Revolution and the logic of the marketplace. In their 2025 book, The Church Must Grow or Perish: Robert H. Schuller and the Business of American Christianity, Gerardo Marti and Mark T. Mulder argue that the church growth movement was thoroughly a project of modernity. They write that Schuller (1926-2015), pastor of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, and many other clergy of the same era, were informed too deeply by market dynamics. “For the church not only to survive, but to thrive, pastoral leaders would need to adapt managerial processes and principles that resulted in measurable patterns of growth and vitality as seen among American corporations” (p.16). But at what cost?
What if our ecclesial traditions, when correctly inhabited, can form deep disciples and grow the church? When our models of successful church growth are fundamentally corporate, we shouldn’t be surprised when our theology sounds more like the language of Washington, D.C., or Wall Street than the language of the Scriptures and the Great Tradition (and I write this as someone who is a fan of strategic planning).
Rather than models and practices whose aim is not the formation of disciples of Jesus, we need a stronger and more embedded sense of our creaturely nature, and our places within the divine economy. To be clear, this reorientation is not a romantic reaction against the “novel,” but rather emerges from the same desire Schuller and others had, to seek growth; it is from an evangelistic impulse.
The church has often failed to understand how vital truths from seemingly separate spheres (e.g., ecology and the gospel mission to make disciples) can only be known through a place, and create synergy and reinforce one another. For instance, we have failed to grasp that a people who spurn the vital traditions of family farming—passed down through generations—might also come to spurn the tradition of the gospel—passed down from our forebears. To attend to healthy growth, we need to ask what it looks like to grow in scale to our place in the created order.
The Right Kind of Growth
In other words, growth is good—but it must be the right kind of growth. Healthy things grow, but they also eventually die. That rhythm—life, death, resurrection—is written into the cosmos.
Our modern economy offers us many examples of growth that is violent or deforming. In agriculture, this may look like monoculture and depletion of the soil. In ministry, it can look like swelling programs that leave individuals malnourished or atomized from one another. Some of the questions informing the vision of the “Tending the Vineyard” conference were:
- What does slow growth, or deep growth, look like in the life of a parish?
- How do we avoid forms of growth that are gluttonous and self-serving?
- How might we grow to the divine scale, not human ambition, and how might our growth be aligned with shalom?
- What would it mean to grow “with the grain” of creation, not against it?
Mary Berry was quick to say that real growth comes “from the ground up rather than the top down.” The same, I think, can be said of the kingdom of God. Attending to the ground helps us understand the nature of grace, for to exist, to be sustained with breath and being, are to subsist in a divine economy of gratuitous love.
Learning Our Place
Church planters and consultants often speak of doing a “community needs assessment,” which can be useful, but it can also be paternalistic if we aren’t careful. As Bob Lupton has taught, it is much more important that we understand and help unleash capacities and assets of those we serve rather than aiming to address their needs, which can simply reinforce dynamics of dependency. But for this to happen, the church really needs to recover the practice of listening—to the land, to our neighbors, to God. When we’ve learned to listen, this is where our real education for ministry in a place begins.
Dr. Davis mentioned the words of writer and farmer Wendell Berry, which are instructive for us as we consider growing in a place, like the farmer:
As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, … and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must … be born again.1
If our religious rebirth is untethered from our place and our community, is it any surprise that it is often only skin deep?
The Local: Practices in the Parish
Out of the conference, I have been considering what “growing with the grain” might mean for my parish and for my family, even amid the development of a parish strategic plan. Several points emerged, including:
- Serving our place first. We’ve committed to focusing our outreach on the local Louisville community rather than scattering our energy elsewhere, for the near future.
- Raising the bar of formation. We do not want to lower expectations for discipleship; we want to raise parishioners into deeper habits of prayer and learning.
- Embodied presence. While we use technology prudently, we resist the temptation to replace embodied relationships with virtual ones.
- Formation in creatureliness. The Daily Office, silence, and time outdoors help us remember that we are not the Creator. To paraphrase Wendell Berry, Creation is not wild. We are.
- Sufficiency as abundance. This is a phrase borrowed from Dr. Ellen Davis. Recall how St. Francis renounced wealth not to despise creation but to love it rightly. Dr. Davis notes how Psalm 23 shows this posture: “I want for nothing … my cup is brimful.” Growth that honors creation is growth content with sufficiency. The miracle of the manna is the paradigm for this truth. How do we help our people understand that we do not need more? What God has given is enough.
- Relational ministry. We resist ideological violence by practicing a “hermeneutic of humanity”—visiting homes, tending relationships, listening on front porches. We do this by refusing the invasion of “the machine,” as author Paul Kingsnorth notes, committing to stressing embodied worship and offerings over online investment.
One small example: several decades ago, our parish was given a piece of land legally designated as a cemetery, and it sat largely unused ever since. But a few years ago, we began to ask how we might leverage this land for the sake of others, while respecting what it is—a place of rest for the bodies of the departed. Instead of selling or developing it, we cleaned and restored the property to offer free burials for children and the indigent. The first person we buried was a refugee with Down syndrome who died alone on the streets. From the market perspective, there is no measurable “return on investment” in this ministry, and yet it may be one of the most faithful things we ever do. How we care for land and bodies is, after all, inseparably linked. This past weekend, parishioners planted 3,000 daffodil bulbs there, and our planting of bodies will continue with the same dignity and beauty.
Staying Put
Dr. Davis quoted Berry again during the conference: “What will not bring me, more certainly than before, to where I am is of no use to me.”
That thought lingers with me. Stability is not a virtue we often prize in church leadership, yet the monastic tradition often speaks of two types: stability of vocation, which the friar and the missionary can possess, even on the move, and stability of place, which is necessarily embedded in a community (think of those monks who would travel with their belongings in their casket to the place they would inhabit for decades thereafter). Fruitful ministry needs at least one of these forms of stability—and likely both. Jayber Crow, one of Berry’s fictional pastors, says, “To feel at home in a place, you have to have some prospect of staying there.” The Episcopal Church and its parishes are not well-served by short tenures.
For clergy, perhaps God’s call is not always to go, but sometimes to stay: to learn to love a place and a people long enough that both are changed. I fear for our clergy in the Episcopal Church. Many clergy who are competent to grow churches are quickly “promoted” to diocesan positions, or larger churches. Three or four years in a place is usually not long enough to do faithful work. Clergy rarely learn how to experience going through conflict and landing on the far side of it; of being new in a parish, then despised, and then embraced yet again, all in the same community. Those who fail to experience this formational arc will not know how to lead others through the same.
The Table and the Field
If there’s one theme I wish we had explored further, it’s the connection between church growth and eating. A people disconnected from the land that feeds them will also be disconnected from the worship that sustains them. A church full of people who do not value the land will likely fail to value bodies, and the practices that sustain them in health and virtue. Do we not see this today in manifold ways?
When we consume food produced through violence toward land and animals, we easily become a church that instrumentalizes people and places. A consumer economy breeds a consumer faith, for churches modeled on market dynamics are ultimately incapable of creating deep covenant community. If we do not care what we put into our bodies, it should not surprise us what we eventually allow to (mal)nourish the body of Christ. The same people who practice violence over the land will practice violence over bodies, and nations, and people who look different than them. Is it any surprise that a people separated from the land and the source of their nourishment will also be and become a people increasingly separated from one another?
Asking Fertile Questions
Such questions are fertile—they cultivate humility and restore our relationship to the world (to the humus). The fact that drawing a connection between agrarianism and church growth is odd only underscores the need to press further into this area of inquiry, for this disconnect shows the poverty of our leadership and our imaginations. Growth, for the Church and for the Christian, must finally mean learning to grow with the grain of God’s creation, not against it.
The Rev. Clint Wilson is rector of St. Francis in the Fields Episcopal Church in Harrods Creek, Kentucky.
