We are in Autumn. A season I love. Take a leaf from the ground and have a good, slow, long look.
What words come to mind for you as you think about the season of Autumn?
Autumn is the season before winter. It is the season when it gets colder, darker and things begin to show signs of slowing down and even dying.
I want to apply this season to our work in the church. The work of mission. Autumn is not a season that we might find that encouraging. We might want to favour the Spring or Summer season as we talk about mission. We want to see the “harvest” brought in, new things birthing and growing — we value church growth. And there are seasons for this kind of growth. But what does it look like to think about mission in the Autumn season? What season do you think the church is in right now? What season are you personally in right now? You may feel like you are in a spring season or summer in your life. Perhaps there is a lot of life and new things — energy around you.
But since we are in autumn now, let’s think about the Autumn season as applied to mission.
We have recently emerged from Holy Week — we rehearse that story of death and resurrection. We remind ourselves that both are core aspects of our faith. There is no resurrection without death, and death is never final. Death and resurrection are woven into the fabric of the earth. When something dies it goes back to the earth where it is reborn in a new way.
I was reading this week The Church in Ordinary Time: A Wisdom Ecclesiology by Amy Plantinga. She talks about the church’s expansion post resurrection as being a “lenten journey of growth and decline”. She writes that the church has an “inherent fragility, an inbuilt vulnerability”. So growth, she says, is not exponential or progressive and linear but rather “serial” — it comes in installments and waves.
Church growth — that tricky phrase — comes differently in each season. If we think about what growth looks like in winter, it’s different to spring. Growth is still happening in winter though it might be more nuanced, hidden and mysterious. There may be a fallowness to this time as well. So we need to treasure the growth that happens in all seasons.
We have recently emerged from Holy Week — we rehearse that story of death and resurrection. We remind ourselves that both are core aspects of our faith. There is no resurrection without death, and death is never final. Death and resurrection are woven into the fabric of the earth. When something dies it goes back to the earth where it is reborn in a new way.
What does church growth look like in the Autumn season? What does mission look like in the Winter season? Can too much growth be a problem? What are the struggles that come with the Spring season of growth? Do we sometimes need to treasure the slow, deep, hidden, mysterious growth that happens in autumn or even the death that happens in Winter? And I do mean treasure rather than holding our breath for Spring. Can we praise God for these different seasons which reveal to us the different aspects of God and God’s work in our world and church? Can we find God in the descending darkness of Autumn?
In a devotional I use called The Seven Sacred Spaces the author writes “The darkness can be exquisitely beautiful and restful. In the darkness we can view the stars. Seeds need darkness for gestation and growth. The baby grows in the darkness of the womb. Too much light can be blinding. There is a softness in darkness.”
A friend of mine is dying of cancer. She has a month or so to live. As I talk with her, she reminds me of an Autumn leaf on the ground. There’s no doubt, her body is fading fast. And she tells me that she needs to let go well. We talked about what it looks like, what it means to let go well. I think an Autumn leaf knows how to let go well. It knows how to let go of that vibrant green and allow the brown, honey, maple colours to seep through its veins. Letting go is an Autumn discipline.
Franciscan priest Richard Rohr writes “Death and life are two sides of the same coin; we cannot have one without the other. Each time we choose to surrender, each time we trust the dying, our faith is led to a deeper level, and we discover a Larger Self underneath. We decide not to push to the front of the line, and something much better happens in the back of the line. We let go of narcissistic anger, and we find that we start feeling much happier. We surrender our need to control our partner, and finally the relationship blossoms. Yet each time it is a choice—and each time it is a kind of dying. It seems we only know what life is when we know what death is.”
Each season speaks to us different things about mission. Autumn teaches us to let go, to value the darkness, to look for hidden growth, to encounter mystery, wonder. It teaches us to move away from the shiny things perhaps and notice the small things, to slow down to allow for change as we let go of the old and explore tentatively, maybe carefully, the new. We work out what we need to hold onto- the important things. And what we need to let go of.
What is the autumn season telling you about mission as you live and work with God?
Rev. Dr Karina Kreminski, Mission Catalyst – Formation and Fresh Expressions, Uniting Mission and Education. Find out more about the Mission, Growth and Innovation team here.
