The Garden Of The Spirit
The metaphor of “fruits of the spirit” has always been for me one of the most powerful theological and spiritual ideas in Christianity. In part that is because it speaks so directly and concisely to what the character of Christian life should be. But, there is also an important (and often corrective) element of responsibility […]
The metaphor of “fruits of the spirit” has always been for me one of the most powerful theological and spiritual ideas in Christianity. In part that is because it speaks so directly and concisely to what the character of Christian life should be. But, there is also an important (and often corrective) element of responsibility in there as well.
That said, I’m often guilty of seeing this metaphor in a deeply personal and individualist light. So I was bothchallenged and encouraged to read Frank Rees saying,
“…I have found it so much more helpful to consider that the garden of the Spirit, where these fruits grow, is not each and every individual life, but in fact a community, the body of people who are alive in the Spirit. Here again we need to see that in the New Testament the word ‘you’ is almost always a collective, a group of people, a community of people, not individuals.”
I feel at least two challenges here. The first is to see the gifts not in an individualistic sense, but as something that happens collectively. It’sone thing to see these characteristic s in those we admire, it’s another to see them in the group we belong to as a whole, to see our ways of being as marked by that kind of grace.
But there is a further challenge – to be the kind of group or organisation that allows such human fruits to develop. That requires two things that we don’t often see in churches, permission and trust.
[tags] Spirituality, Ecclesiology [/tags]