Our marketing team presented the new logo and “picture” of Oak Grove Church this past Sunday. It looks wonderful and it is very exciting. The team has done a fantastic job of this aspect of our identity as a local Body and how that will be seen by our community. The logo (seen above) represents our history and our future in that, the rings. It is similar to a cross cut from a tree which shows each season of growth over the years. In any good size tree you can see years of growth and fruitfulness. In the same way a church has different seasons of growth from one generation to the next. Some years have more challenges than others but each ring has its start and finish and each one always gives opportunity for something new while not forcing it to be the same. To see that history you have to crosscut through the tree, which usually means that now it is dead. So how do we see this growth without killing the tree?
Healthy Trees and Dead Trees: I have spent the last couple of weekends cutting out dead limbs and removing dead trees in our yard, so I have been looking at the crosscut sections of all kinds of branches all weekend. When I was deciding on what to cut down and what not to cut down, I did not cut through the tree first and then figure out if it was healthy or dead, but I looked up into the tree to see what limbs were showing leaves and looked healthy from the outside. No matter how large the limb, if I saw nothing but bare limbs and no leaves I decided it was dead and needed to be removed from the rest of the tree. It reminded me of this verse in Ephesians 3:
His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, (Ephesians 3:10 NIVO)
If I can speak a little metaphorically, many Christians want to keep crosscutting (constantly) through the church so they can look back and see how thick their contribution was to the health of the church. It often sounds like “the good old days” and longing for the past – why we don’t do it like that anymore. To be quite honest every generation can fall into that… tendency. When each generation only wants to take pride in their “ring” (season of growth), or force the next generation to do what they did, it can create more death than life. Rather than seeing that their spiritual “success” simply provides an opportunity for the next generation to produce new fresh growth by growing over top of their previous generations spiritual success, we can start killing the growth of the tree. Crosscutting through a tree only allows us to look backward and usually kills the ability of moving forward.
Since we are Oak Grove Church the picture of a fruitful and healthy tree is not that unrealistic to compare ourselves to. If you could look at a crosscut or a cross section of our Body you would see how each generation has added unique growth to our Body. But if you stand back and see the full tree (or church, in this case), you will see the manifold fruit of the Spirit of God exposing everyone to the manifold wisdom of the whole Body, and not just one generation over another. If we have a mindset that church is only about: my generation, making my life significant, or leaving my mark, then we are at risk of cutting through the health of the Body. If we want to manifest the full wisdom of God, we will see the church as one tree with many branches, growing in different directions, producing different seasons of growth as it expands and exposes the world to the manifold wisdom of God. Where one generation advances the health of the tree, where the next generation may grow differently, it all contributes to the health of God’s purpose for the church.
Pastor Brad
