When you live in an area of high desert, wise cultivators of the land learn how to slow the water down. Our corner of Central Asia gets just as much rain as London, but it’s concentrated in two main periods of rainfall, our equivalent of the early rains and the late rains mentioned in the Old Testament. This means that most of the abundant rainwater is lost in runoff and not available during the long periods of dryness.
The more parched and eroded the land is – often due to poor management or abandonment – the worse it gets at retaining the water. But when humans (or beavers in other climes) simply slow the water down with things like small dams, a local ecosystem is transformed. More water remains in the ground, meaning plants stay green longer into the dry summer. Plants grow and develop deeper roots, and thus retain more of the nutrient-rich soil. This in turn leads to even more plant growth, which attracts animals. Quite literally, the desert blooms. If you go on YouTube and search for permaculture projects in Arizona, the Sahel, or the Middle East, you can see some amazing examples of this.
We saw our own example in the traditional courtyard of our previous house in Central Asia. We had a well on the property, so we were able to begin regular watering of the fruit trees and bushes that lined the courtyard walls. We slowly planted more and more herbs and small trees in this border area and eventually planted grass in the center yard areas as well. In spite of the intense heat, the plants flourished now that they had regular access to water and weeding. Olives, pomegranates, figs, loquats, grape vines, rosemary, lavender, roses, tequila plants, and lavender all grew happily. And the animal life followed. By the end, our courtyard was home to scurrying geckos, croaking toads, chirping crickets, scampering mice, and cooing pigeons. Our house was surrounded by cement city, but our courtyard was a little green oasis. In its old stone walls, it had dirt, water, and humans who sought to cultivate the land. So it came to life.
Those living in Central Asia and the Middle East have long known the importance of using water effectively. Persians built underground water tunnels to their cities and royal gardens, patches of cultivated green where our word for paradise finds its origins. Assyrian emperors like Sennacherib built aqueducts to bring the waters of the mountains to Nineveh to water his palace gardens (likely the true location of the famed hanging gardens of “Babylon”). For centuries, careful systems of irrigation kept the fertile crescent, well, fertile. When particularly brutal conquerors came through and slaughtered local populations, as the Mongols did, the land itself “died” a little more as these careful water management systems broke down. Modern wars, agriculture, and mismanagement have made these regions some of the most water-endangered places on the planet.
But the water is still there, in the rain and in the mountain streams. So, much of the land could be resurrected if the government and the locals simply prioritized wise ways to slow the water down. To this day, I don’t understand why the rainwater collection tanks which were standard for my childhood homes in Melanesia are not used in our part of Central Asia. Or, why policies like those of Bermuda roofs are not adopted to mandate roof construction so that more of the precious rain can be collected? Wells we have aplenty, but they are systematically exhausting the groundwater reservoirs. And we have some large dams, mainly for hydroelectricity, but very few of the smaller rock dams or other permaculture practices are used that can make one valley sustainably green, while the next valley over is parched and brown.
Among the countless good works that missionaries in our region could do to commend the gospel message, there is much room for Christians who know how to make the desert bloom. Our locals love their land and delight in their little patches of greenery in a way I’ve seldom seen in the West, so this could be the kind of platform work that locals highly value – and one that buys considerable space for controversial gospel work. Despite my description of our previous courtyard, I am not a natural green thumb or farmer. For me not to kill it, it needs to be simple and hardy. Hence the rosemary and tequila plants. But I know there are many skilled farmer-types out there, some who perhaps have never thought about how a love for the soil and a love for the nations can come together.
However, I recently learned that slowing the water down is not the wise thing to do in every context. In some regions, to care for the land you need to speed the water up. I learned this while visiting some friends who are church planters in Eastern Kentucky, where they have too much water. There, to have land that you can cultivate, you need to get yourself some very effective drainage. Otherwise, the ground is simply waterlogged clay. Rather than dams, they need ditches, and lots of them. In Eastern Kentucky, wisdom calls for speeding up the water.
In all of this, I am reminded of the different emphases of different seasons and places of ministry. I have written long and often about the need to slow down when it comes to missions and church planting in Central Asia. Spiritually speaking, it is a desert. To resurrect the church in these regions we need to take the time to learn the language and culture, to invest years on end in discipleship and character development in order to see qualified leaders raised up. In the harsh summer sun of Islam and persecution, rapid church planting and movement methodology have led to churches that quickly bloom and just as quickly wither like the grass on the traditional mud rooftops. Instead, we need churches that are like olive and oak trees. Yes, they are slow-growing. But they are hardy – and they can last and steadily multiply for a thousand years.
But this does not mean that there is never a time and a place for speed in missions and church planting. Any student of church history will know that there really are seasons of remarkable spiritual awakening. Even in my own parent’s story, I hear an echo of this. They were missionaries in Melanesia and were supposed to be church planters. But they never planted any churches because the churches were planting themselves. Instead, they invested in eight different churches over a short period, providing interim leadership until a local pastor could be found. Relatively speaking, they moved fast. They still sought to disciple believers faithfully, but the pace of ministry there was simply running at a faster rate than we have seen in Central Asia.
That being said, one key mistake of contemporary missions is the assumption that we can reverse engineer movements of the Spirit and replicate them anywhere on the mission field. It’s Finney all over again, “Revival is a work of man” and all that. But the other ditch is to live as if revival or awakening might never break out in our ministry context. The steady wisdom of most ministry contexts says to slow the water down. But wisdom also says that this might not always be the case. What if you find yourself in a metaphorical Eastern Kentucky?
Just because man-made revivalism is out there doesn’t mean that we should discount the possibility of genuine revival – or a genuine movement. When the Spirit is truly moving, when it’s a time of spiritual deluge, we should have a category for moving faster than we would otherwise be comfortable with. I imagine the disciples were a little uncomfortable with what they were required to do when they had 3,000 or 5,000 a day becoming believers during and just after Pentecost. “Jesus spent three and half slow years with us, are we really ready to vouch for this pilgrim from Cyrene who only just heard the good news of the kingdom for the first time this week?”
Yet another time to move fast is when it’s clear that a given person or church is already saturated with the truth. When this is the case, it’s no longer time to sit and soak. Instead, it’s time to get up and start pouring out. For some of our Western churches that are awash in rich resources and mature disciples, the need of the hour is to start asking questions like, “What would it take for us to send a church planter out every year?”
We need to rightly discern the context and the season of ministry in which we find ourselves. Much of the world is the spiritual equivalent of desert. We need to figure out how to slow the water down. But other places and seasons may call for an unusual burst of speed, for helping the water to move even more quickly. The key here is to not presume that we can somehow produce this latter season, yet always to keep faith alive that we could see a season or two like this if we continue in faithfulness.
As for me and the literal land, don’t be surprised if you find me someday building some small rock dams across the stream of a desert valley. Even for those of us who are not wired to be gardeners, there’s something ancient that lingers from that old great-grandpa Adam. Deep down in our bones, we are made to make the desert bloom.
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Entrusted to the Dirt 