The Very Rev Albert Bogle highlights the opportunity of Easter in making new plans for the future.

TRUTH appears to be hard to uncover in today’s world of spin and counter spin. What surprises me is that this style of influencing, where you say what is convenient at the time to bolster your argument, though it is blatantly untrue, seems to work.

And if you want the truth – well the truth is, people forget so quickly as they move on to the next piece of hot gossip. What seems to be in vogue is an adolescent rebellion against facts, and an unwillingness to accept our need to alter our actions in light of moral or scientific or spiritual facts. Climate change is the big example of how this works, but it is the same attitude that prevails in so many of our personal and corporate decisions.

It has even begun to be manifest in the corporate life of the church. Earlier last month I was in company where someone spoke openly stating that to their mind, the Church of Scotland was not in crisis, in fact as far as this person was concerned every congregation in their presbytery was doing just fine. To talk about falling numbers and finance is seen to be unspiritual – a lack of faith. After all it’s not about numbers but about faithfulness. (This kind of comment is hard to take when you know that the numbers of parents and children and young people frequenting worship, which is our core business, has fallen drastically in the last fifty years ).

The implication behind this thinking is that because we have faithful people in our pews and the gospel is being preached from the pulpit, we are fulfilling our purpose. I’ve heard this argument using “faithfulness” so often that it seems to me to be used either to try and justify the status quo, or perhaps a justification for inactivity or perhaps a lack of impetus to reach out beyond our comfort zones in more creative ways to explain the gospel and make disciples.

Now please don’t get me wrong: I’m not blaming individual church leaders and I’m not trying to heap up more guilt suggesting we all become more busy. I’m suggesting the whole structure of how we do church needs to change in order to inspire all of us to be faithful witnesses to Christ and not slaves to a system that is broken. In creating larger presbyteries we need to guard against having 12 or 15 over centralised structures controlling the local and ending up costing more than the central Church at present and creating more centralised programmes.

What if God is calling us all to do a new thing in order to be faithful? To think differently, to be less anxious? To disconnect from what is not working and to engage with our world and our generation using different communication tools and skills and different metaphors for church? To move from the court model to the fruit model? To grow a healthy branch to the Vine. To grow branches that bear fruit. To grow branches of the church bursting out with fruitful worship and praise. Knowing that to grow means a time of pruning, even a fallow season. But to know growth will come because the ground has been prepared.

Very shortly Holy Week and Easter will be at the centre of our lives . Once again we will be faced with the truth that God wants us to flourish and not just survive. Did Jesus not say: ‘I have come that you might have life and life more abundantly’? If we are to be faithful can we not also be fruitful? Then we can grow develop and flourish.

We are all unique and planted in different soils. But if God our Father is the gardener, surely he will nourish each of us patiently in the right soil. This may mean sometimes he has to uproot us so that we flourish in another part of the garden where the soil will suit our growth better.

The choices we make matter. And the choices we make as congregations and Kirk Sessions matter. Collectively as communities of faith our genetics, experiences, combinations of personalities all go to make us unique expression of the Vine. We all bring our unique contributions as the fruit of the Vine. However when we refuse to listen to each other. When “we cut a hand off “or “shut our eyes” from seeing something that might challenge us, we are in fact being unfaithful to the growth of the whole garden not just ourselves. When we do the pruning we do so expecting a harvest. So let’s begin to plan for the generations and people who are on their way to faith. But let’s not make the same old plans. It’s time to make new plans.

The Very Rev Albert Bogle is a Pioneer Minister of Sanctuary First Church Online at www.sanctuaryfirst.org.uk