Kingdom Pollination

“You know how I know we’re not a cult?” I said as we were all walking into Wendy’s, “You all dress so different.  That’s pretty cool ya know?  No one is alike.”

Some of the apprentices had just joined our family to lead worship and share testimonies at another local church.  The pastor there is a friend and asked Brad to preach while he took a vacation.

Sarah responded, “We should use that for advertising!”.  We all giggled, and then went in to order a bunch of Biggie bags in which we only got half the stuff for.  The Wendy’s here in town could use a little help if you need a job.  

We are about to graduate our fourth class of writing apprentices, which means we’re about to welcome our 6th class of new apprentices in just a few weeks.  

I was mostly joking when I said the cult thing, but it got me thinking about how cool it is that our students are so diverse.  Not only do they come from different theological and church backgrounds, but they are also different socioeconomically and culturally.  

For church yesterday Sarah was dressed like a modern day Mary Poppins, proper and whimsical with the cutest Edwardian heels that she said she won off of Ebay.  Lucy said she was dressed like a high school art teacher— bright flowy dress, tights, and tall black combat boots.  Jenna was dressed in her cool and casual way, cute tee with jeans and Rebekah had on a beautiful long flowy floral skirt.

I thought about it throughout the day, and what started as a joke became an encouragement.  These young people don’t come here to look more like us (I wish I could dress as cool as they do), they come to look more like Jesus.  Their clothes, their likes and dislikes— they are all different.  Sure,  there is overlap, and they have things in common (like they are all homeschoolers), but above all I hope they know that they get to be themselves.  We’re not trying to make them carbon copies of what we think the perfect writer should be, but instead calling out the identity that God has already given them.

 We sat in that Wendy’s after finally getting all of our food, and laughed over chicken nuggets and fries and strawberry Dr. Pepper (gross).  I was sitting on one end, Brad on the other— with all our kids and the apprentices mixed in between.  Rebekah tried to help contain a Hal who had just watched Kung Fu Panda a few days before and was attempting to karate chop everyone.  Lucy chatted about movies and shows, and our kids just rambled on with whomever was nearest them.  

That night we went back to church, our church, and had fellowship and food with everyone.  As I looked around the room I saw a diverse group of individuals, all with all the same goal in mind— to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, minds and souls.  There are young children to 20 somethings to those of us in our midlife and a couple of elders.  Everyone has different upbringings and backgrounds, but in that room it doesn’t matter.  In that room there is fellowship.  

The pastor who was on vacation often comes to our Sunday night church.  He was there last night and after Brad gave the rundown of how our morning across town went, he talked about how beautiful the crossing over of different churches is.  As soon as he said crossing over, I thought about cross pollination.  That churches combining efforts and loving each other is a form of spiritual cross pollination- and that is where the best fruit is produced.

Cross pollination produces more diverse and often more robust fruit.  When different parts of the church come together it produces stronger and more robust Kingdom fruit.  A church alone can do great things, but several bodies working together in real unity?  Unstoppable!

That’s what we experience everyday at The Company— we have so many different people from so many different backgrounds coming together with one goal.  Love Jesus and write stories for Him.  How could there not be abundant fruit from that sort of crossing over?

This has been a year of great fruit for us and our ministry, and as we bless and graduate (art teacher) Lucy this weekend I am certain that she will continue to impact people for Jesus, just like she’s been doing since she arrived two years ago.

That’s pretty amazing and worthy of praise.