The Trellis and the Vine

Marshall, C; Payne T, The Trellis and The Vine, (Matthias Media, Sydney, 2009). 166  pages plus appendices. Available in various formats through Matthias Media: http://www.matthiasmedia.com.au/the-trellis-and-the-vine. Reviewed by David Burke.

This little book has only been out for two years but is packing a punch. Ministry leaders from around the globe and in various traditions acclaim it and the language of ‘trellis and vine’ has become a standard ministry metaphor.

The subtitle indicates the book’s goals: The ministry mind-shift that changes everything. Talk about ambition! In summary, Col Marshall and Tony Payne call for disciple-making and disciple-growth to be at the centre of the church’s energies and to be at the heart of pastors and church leaders. The book makes a strong case for this from various Scriptures and then turns to the practicalities.

Nothing new?

In one sense there is nothing new in the book. Since Jesus took the 12 aside for deeper lessons and Paul did the same for Timothy, wise leaders have invested themselves in the growth and training of believers with potential. And I’d guess that most Christian leaders would speak about the importance of someone who took them aside at a formative stage and invested in their growth. In this respect, the book is applied exposition of 2 Tim 2:2 and Eph 4:11-12.

What’s new?

What’s new in this book is the passion with which the case for training is argued and the careful outworking of the training agenda and process. The ministry of training is developed through a vision for recruiting gospel-partners and moving them through phases of growth and service, concluding with a vision for full-on ministry apprenticeships. Marshall and Payne write with many years experience in Christian training. This shows as they work through the details and anticipate challenges.

Quotable quotes

Here are some quotes to whet the appetite (but you really need to read the book to get the point):

·       Is there anything more vital to be doing in our world? It is more important than our jobs, our families, our pastimes – yes, even more important than the comfort and security of familiar church life. (p38)

·       … what happens is the same: a Christian brings a truth from God’s word to someone else, praying that God would make that word bear fruit through the inwards working of the Spirit. That’s vine work. Everything else is trellis. (p39)

·       To be a disciple is to be a disciple-maker. (p43)

·       We have to conclude that a Christian with no passion for the lost is in serious need of self-examination and repentance. (p52-3)

·       A pastor or elder is just a vine-worker with a particular responsibility to care for and equip the people for their partnership in the gospel. (p67)

·       We are always an example to those whom we are teaching and training, whether we like it or not. We cannot stop being an example. (p74)

·       The principle is: do a deep work in the lives of a few. (p161)

What’s good about the book?

I like the way in which Marshall and Payne puts discipling where it belongs – at centre stage in church life and ministry. The wide scope of training to include convictions and character along with competence in skills is refreshing. Likewise, its great to see the focus on gospel growth, not church growth – this is a timely encouragement in a day when numerical growth remains a guilt-trap for pastors. And again, the grounded practicality of the book makes it immediately useful. It’s a book that gives a vision and then gives the small starter-steps to see it happen.

Problem areas

However there are a few problems areas. It would be easy to pick up the impression that church is just a training organisation and that people like pastors are only trainers. Likewise, the brief discussion of what is unfortunately called ‘secular work’ will leave many feeling that their daily labour has no significance before God (pp136-138). It would be a pity if some readers saw these issues and dismissed the whole book as a product of alleged ‘Sydney reductionism’. Finally, it would be a great complement to see even a brief discussion of what kind of trellis work and trellis workers are needed to complement the rightful focus on vine work and workers.

Notes to myself

I wrote a few notes to myself as I read the book:

·       Gratitude for the people who invested themselves in my training as a new Christian and helped my growth and entry to service.

·       Thanks for the privilege of investing myself in the training of others along the way and for the pleasure of seeing God’s fruit in their lives.

·       Thinking about the ministries I now have and the people I touch: how can I sharpen my training contribution and vine focus?

·       What can I do to help shift the focus from trellis work to vine work in my church tradition (Presbyterian)? In particular, what can I do to help shift the focus of the eldership from governance to vine-work?

·       Thinking about myself: what growth do I now need and how shall I access it?

(David Burke has been in full time Christian service since 1979, including 21 years of pastoral ministry and 30 years in ministry training roles. He now teaches at Presbyterian Theological Centre Sydney Australia)

A distant suburb

I saw a production of Julius Caesar today.

In one scene, the wife of Brutus (main plotter) spots that he has a secret. She tries to get it from him and claims a wife's privileges as one before the gods. He refuses. She pleads, asking if she inhabits but the distant suburbs of his heart.

A thought: is God in my distant suburbs or city-central?

Christmas or Christmiss?

A mother wrote to a publication and asked what Christmas is all about and how to explain it to her six year old daughter in a way that would help her on the road to Jesus. I was asked to contribute a reply ..



What great questions you ask! How wonderful that you want to explain this to your daughter and help her on the road to Jesus. That’s great parenting!

I’ll start with a confession. I dislike Christmas!

The reasons are partly personal. One of my parents died soon before 25 December and the other one soon after. As well, Christmas is usually a period of heavy work for me – I spoke at 31 Christmas events one year! On top of that, Christmas was a time of separation from my family during the last 12 years. Put all that together and you can see why it’s not my favourite time of year.

However, my real dislike of Christmas goes deeper. The emptiness of the public festival that we call Christmas gives me dismay. I lived in a major south east Asian city where Christianity was a distinctly minority faith. Yet every shopping centre and public facilities such as airports and major roads were themed for some kind of Christmas. I say ‘some kind of Christmas’ for there was more of a general seasonal goodwill rather than any emphasis on Christ. Can you see that same trend happening in Australia? Public events are ‘Christmas-light’ and Jesus hardly gets a mention. Christmas is meant to be ‘Christ-mas’, or a celebration of Jesus. But what we often see is ‘Christmiss’ – anything but Jesus.

Did you know that it’s artificial to celebrate Jesus’ birth on December 25th? We don’t know when he was born, except that it was probably not December of January. Almost certainly Jewish shepherds would not have slept in their fields in a freeing December. Our 25 December celebration draws on some pre-Christian festivals associated with the northern solstice and New Year. Put simply, the celebration of Jesus’ birth on December 25th was an attempt to Christianise these pagan festivals. Given the modern ‘Christmiss’, I think that the pagans have struck back well.

Should we celebrate Christmas? That’s a serious question. I sometimes wonder if we should skip 25 December and hold our celebration at another time. Not all Christian celebrate Christmas on 25 December anyway. Some through history have not celebrated it at all.

However, I’m guessing that most of us will celebrate Christmas on December 25. If so, how can we use the day to tell our children and others about Jesus?

So what do you say to your daughter? I’d start with Christmas presents. Tell your daughter that we give them to remind us of the best present of all. That best present is God’s love to send his son Jesus into the world to be a real person like us.

That’s breathtaking. It blew the minds of the first people who heard it. Imagine the richest person in the world leaving their mansion and living in an ordinary suburb or town. We would wonder why? Now imagine way beyond that. God who made everything became one of us and one with us. As the Bible puts it: ‘the Word became flesh and lived among us’ (Jn 1:14). Jesus, who is God’s son, is that Word. When he came, it was ‘Immanuel’ which means ‘God with us’ (Matt 1:23).

Why did Jesus do this? He did it to show us what God is like in a way we can best understand (Jn 1:14,18). He did it to share our life and show us what it is to be truly human and without sin (Heb 4:15). And he did it to be the Saviour, who is Christ the Lord (Lke 2:11). As one Bible verse puts it: ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’ (1 Tim 1:15). Indeed, the very name ‘Jesus’ means that God is salvation. Or as that most famous verse says: ‘God loved the world so much that he sent his one and only Son so that whoever believes in him should not die but have eternal life (Jn 3:16).

This is a key thing to remember and teach your daughter. Put simply, Jesus became one of us so that he could go the Cross in our place and take our punishment for sin. The Christmas cradle always has the shadow of the Easter Cross.

So here are some suggestions for you and your daughter:
• Read the Bible stories of Jesus’ birth to her in the weeks before Christmas. (You will find these in Matthew Chs 1-2 and Luke Chs 1-2.) Take time to talk about these and to explain some of the significant sayings.

• Together make up some Christmas gift tags or tree decorations with some of the above Bible verses on them. Use these within your family and to others.

• Visit a Christian bookshop and buy some storybooks that are true to the Bible story and great value as kid’s books. Give these as presents.

• Make it a family priority to meet with other Christians to celebrate Jesus’ birth and maybe don’t distribute Christmas presents until later.

• Keep Christmas presents and meal modest to help keep the focus on Jesus.

• Set a good model to your daughter by yourself putting a big focus on Jesus at that time.

• Together say a big prayer of thanks for all the Christmas presents and especially for the best one of all – Jesus the Saviour.

• Echo God’s love-gift to us by taking your daughter to serve needy people with gifts of time, food or other gifts.

Hmm … maybe Christmas can become likeable after all!

A little correspondence about representations

I recently visited an art gallery specialising in portraits of people who are deemed significant to Australia. (But who decides significance and on what basis?)

My interest is in the messages of the paintings. Not so much the messages of the messages as the manner of the message.

I have little interest in abstract art, beyond examining what viewer-response it evokes. Those responses seem to say more about the viewer than about the work. Such abstract art can evoke or suggest moods or general feelings, but the meaning seems to depend largely on the context of a viewer. In this sense, such works become mirrors of the self.

I suspect that much the same happens with music unaccompanied by text. The aural images are abstractions that evoke moods, just as visual images of abstract art are abstractions that evoke moods. However, the content of the mood depends on the hearer of the music – just as it depends on the viewer of abstract art. Note how this changes when text is added to the music – the text shapes the content associated with the mood.

What was of greater interest in the portrait gallery was to view portraits of people I know something about. Some were clearly representational rather than correspondence in form. That is, the artist did not strive for a ‘photo in oils’ but chose to re-present the subject in some way to bring this or that feature out and to give a message of some kind. Hence portraits of two politicians that exaggerated this or that feature to present what they stood for.

The contrast here is with what I will call ‘correspondence’ portraits. A correspondence portrait has the appearance of being photo-like in that what appears in the image has a close facsimile-like correspondence with the subject. (Of course, a photographer can choose settings that render an impressionistic or representational image but let us set that aside for now.)

Representational portraits have certain honesty about them. By that I mean that the artist intentionally signals that s/he is not attempting a photo in oils.

But what of the portraits that were presented as a photo in oils? The artist’s skill is seen in the attempted production of a facsimile. But is this truly correspondence art in which the painter is just a neutral technician? Or is there a hidden deceit?

Think about the scene:
• A particular artist asks or is asked to do a portrait of a particular person?
• The subject is dressed and posed in a certain pose and in a certain context.
• The artist chooses aspects of the person to represent and others to fade to lesser significance.

And so on.

Each of these steps involves choices. Who makes them and on what basis? The ‘deceit’ is that these choices are concealed rather than being intentionally signalled.

I’m not suggesting the deceit is malevolent or even intentional. But rather, that the ‘photo in oils’ can be taken as giving an impression of a correspondence that it does not have.

Can there be any truly and purely correspondence portrait art? Or are we left with the conclusion that all portraits are representational due to the layers of choice in making the portrait? And that these layers add up to interpretations that block correspondence. If we then add in the interpretative layer(s) imposed by the viewer(s) we seem to get further and further away from the subject. Are we left with nothing but impressions and representations?

These are all old themes in philosophy and what is said of the visual arts can be said elsewhere. Do we, and can we, know anything as it is, or can we only know our ideas and impressions of things? Locke, Reid, Kant and a hundred others have written on these themes.

The same problem occurs with words.

Correspondence theories of language hold to the possibility of a direct correspondence between our words and the reality they refer to. Symbolic, deconstructionist and perspectivalist theories of language hold otherwise. Words can only represent reality, not correspond to it. And when we add the hermeneutical issues of words shared between people and across contexts the problem deepens.

Can words ever be other than malleable symbols, representations and deceits in the sense identified above? Can we say anything about ourselves, the world and God that is other than symbolic representation?

Yet we use words and visual images to communicate and assume on a daily basis that there is significant correspondence. In fact we stake our lives on correspondence. Think of a visual image warning that something is poison or that crocodiles abound in a waterhole. Or think of the words on a Stop sign or in a recipe. Even further, I can use the above words to communicate doubt about words as do many others who write words conveying meaning about deconstructing meaning from and into words.

Is there something being missed in the whole discussion? And does it relate to God who used words to speak creation into life, whose Son is described as the Word of God, and through whose Spirit men were carried along to write words that bring God’s word into our language? In short, is it God who sustains our words and their meaning, just as he sustains all else?

And, when we stand before a portrait, is there something of a shared community of God’s image that means we can catch something corresponding to the person behind an artist’s image, even through all the layers between that person, the portrait and us?

9/11 @ 2011

They say we can all remember what we were doing when we first heard of 9/11.

Interesting that. I wonder what else happened that day. Families lost loved ones. People lost love. Others found it. Some died noticed and others without notice. Some died from preventable causes of diseases easily cured, and of hunger and thirst. (What happened in Darfur that day I wonder.)

But the event that defines the day was the four-part scene in the US.

In itself just another death scene. Perhaps no other single event that day took as many lives as were lost in New York’s World Trade Centre. More (many more) died elsewhere but that’s the one we remember. Why? The intentionality. The originality of this edition of asymmetrical warfare. The graphic images. (Think of that man in the white coat falling through the air.) The sheer randomness of those who died and those who missed an appointment with their Creator.

However, of all the deaths that day, those are the ones we remember. Ten years on we can say it was a day that changed the world. The first mainland attack on the US that shattered it’s self-confidence. A trigger in the path to two Gulf Wars and to the endless Afghan campaign. The day gains its significance as much as from what followed as what happened.

I have been in the US several times since 9/11. In recent years I notice a diminishing confidence in American ‘can do’. The ‘audacity of hope’ has yielded to the collapse of hope. Grim sullenness is omnipresent about the economy, America’s place in the world and its sense of identity. Will the US be the same again?

I went to New York this June and caught a ferry out to the Statue of Liberty. It was a glorious summer day with blue sky, puffy clouds and green grass making for peaceful pleasantry. It was inspiring to see the statue close up, read the inscriptions and consider how this had been a place of hope for so many. They craved the new land in which to carve new liberties. It was, however, poignant to turn and gaze across the water to lower Manhattan and that empty space.

Whither liberty?

Wither liberty?

The loaf and the cup

On my work desk today there are two everyday items: a loaf of Vienna white bread and a container of rich red grape juice. I bought them from a shop as I walked to work and doubtless the ones next to them will soon be put to everyday use.

Later today this loaf and juice will be used in a college communion service that I am assigned to lead.

There they will remain bread and grape juice (no accidental substance change here!).

However, their use will change. Hopefully they will provide pre-lunch refreshment (as we use prodigal portions not puny Presbyterian ones). They will also be presented as symbols of grace.

The loaf reminding us of the body of Jesus. Real incarnate flesh with muscles and sinews and sweat dripping from his brow. (No docetic deceit here.)

The grape juice (sorry folks, no wine in Oz land) reminding us of the blood of Jesus. Real blood, rich in red blood cells, iron and such like, pumping through his heart to blood vessels, tissues and organs. (Wonder what blood group he was?)

The loaf and the juice, the body and the blood. Reminders of the grace that led the Father to send the Son to make atonement for my sins and those of the world. Symbols of the grace that saves and enables people like to reconnect to God, start recovering creational identity, escape sin’s dread hold and to live now in anticipation and hope of resurrection to eternal life.

The loaf and the cup certainly should not be idolised (and our low church order will keep us well away from that). But nor should they be despised or neglected as some are in the habit of doing.

So, as I later break the loaf and pour the cup it will be my prayer that they lift minds and hearts to eternal things as Christ is present in his sacrament by his Spirit. And then, having been thus lifted, we go back to the everyday world of bread and juice and there live worthy of the body and the blood.

Cup of coffee?

I like coffee and in fact I’m drinking a cup as I start writing this.

However, it seems that not all cups of coffee are equal.

In my early adult life instant coffee was all the rage: cheap, accessible, instant and tasty enough. Sure, there were brands that were more or less tasty (cup of International Golden Roast anyone?). However, instant coffee made its mark and was everywhere.

More and more coffee-making devices came along. When I was married in 1972 we were given a percolator that came out for special occasions (and very fancy it was too!). Then came drip-filter machines and the plunger era. More recently, fancy coffee makers have moved from cafes to homes and every dad is a barista. Old technology comes back too: my wife and I recently bought a cheap old-fashioned Italian stove-top device that makes a great cup.

The same upgrade has applied to the ingredients. Good commercial ground coffees are eschewed. We want fresh beans from the best source to process in our home grinder just before brew time.

All this is welcome and I’ll put my hand up as one who likes a decent cuppa. And again, why not pursue excellence in coffee making and enjoy the best that God’s creation offers?

However, something less welcome happened alongside the upgrades. Attitudes also changed. Its now common that instant is regarded as beneath contempt and some skip their cuppa if that’s all that is on offer. A plunger is barely acceptable and we go to great lengths and expense to get the genuine article. This sounds like a coffee snobbery and is found in surprising places. Is coffee-sophistication a new badge of Christian orthodoxy alongside having the latest book from the current guru?

Are we missing something?

What about the grace of contentment with God’s provision, even if its poor instant coffee (Phil 4:12)?

Is our disdain for poor coffee and longing for the best becoming the greed that is idolatry (Col 3:5)?

Is our search for coffee satisfaction an example of the hebel of Ecclesiastes (Eccles 2:1)?

Can we imagine a coffee snobbery in the one who had nowhere to lay his head (let along his coffee machine) and who calls us to deny self in following him (Mat 8:20; Matt 16:24)?

Do we fail to love our neighbour in poor coffee-growing lands by demanding great beans at cheap prices rather than buy through a fair trade organisation?

Hmm … maybe it’s time to brew a cuppa and think about these things.