The Trellis and the Vine

by Colin Marshall

As I have sat on my back verandah and observed the two trellises, it has occurred to me more than once that most churches are a mixture of trellis and vine. The basic work of any Christian ministry is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ in the power of God’s Spirit, and to see people converted, changed and grow to maturity in that gospel. That’s the work of planting, watering, fertilizing and tending the vine. However, just as some sort of framework is needed to help a vine grow, so Christian ministries also need some structure and support. It may not be much, but at the very least we need somewhere to meet, some Bibles to read from, and some basic structures of leadership within our group.

What’s the state of the trellis and the vine at your church? Perhaps trellis work has taken over from vine work. There are committees, structures, programs, activities and fundraising efforts, and many people put lots of time into keeping them all going, but the actual work of growing the vine falls to a very few.

And that’s the thing about trellis work: it tends to take over from vine work. Perhaps it’s because trellis work is easier and less personally threatening. Vine work is personal and requires much prayer.

Which is easier: to have a business meeting about the state of the carpet, or to have a difficult personal meeting where you need to rebuke a friend about his sinful behaviour?

It’s a commission that makes disciple-making the normal agenda and priority of every church and every Christian disciple.

The focus shifts to preserving traditional programs and structures, and the goal of discipleship is lost. The mandate of disciple-making provides the touchstone for whether our church is engaging in Christ’s mission.

We will be arguing that structures don’t grow ministry any more than trellises grow vines, and that most churches need to make a conscious shift—away from erecting and maintaining structures, and towards growing people who are disciple-making disciples of Christ.

The other approach is to start with the people in your church, having no particular structures or programs in mind, and then consider who are these people

This is a revolutionary mind-shift: when we think about our people, it moves our focus to putting them first and building ministries around them.

Churches typically adopt an ‘event-based’ approach to evangelism.

However, at one level, this tactic is failing. In our post-Christian, secular age, most unbelievers will never come to our events. Even our members are patchy in their attendance.

In the end, an ‘event approach’ distracts us from both training and evangelism. If we want our strategy to be people-focused, we should concentrate on training, which increases the number and effectiveness of gospel communicators (i.e. people who can speak the good news both in personal conversations and in public settings).

If all the members of your congregation are given the opportunity to be trained in evangelism, more unbelievers will attend our events.

But please note: this is a chaotic strategy—an inconvenient strategy. It takes time to train evangelists.

It will mean we will have to relinquish control of our programs for, as the gospel is preached, Christ will gather his people into all kinds of fellowships that may or may not fit into our neat structures.

Then they burn out, their ministry is curtailed, and we find that we have failed to develop their Christian life and ministry potential. Instead of using our volunteers, we should consider how we can encourage them and help them grow in the knowledge and love of Christ, because service flows from Christian growth and not growth from service.

But if we just focus on gap filling, we’ll never move out of maintenance mode: we’re just keeping existing ministries afloat instead of branching out into new ones.

We should start with the people that God has given us, not our programs. We need to consider each person as a gift from Christ to our congregation, and equip them for ministry accordingly.

So instead of thinking, “Who can fill this gap in our personnel?”, perhaps the question we need to consider is “What min...

common feeling among Christians is that they only get prayed for and visited when they’re sick or out of work.

we don’t want to create the kind of ministry environment where the only way people can relate to one another is by discussing their problems.

If ministry in our churches is based on reacting to the problems people raise, many will receive no attention because they are more reserved in sharing their problems.

“warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ” (Col 1:28).

So ask yourself whether your ministries are reactive or proactive. If you are mostly reacting to people’s problems, you won’t have the energy to put into proactive training and growing new work.

If you take a problem approach to ministry, people with the most critical needs will dominate your programs, and these needs will wear you out and exhaust you...

there are a number of ways in which the practice of ordination hinders ministry training in churches.

if the only ‘real’ ministers are people ordained by the denomination, our churches will not have any incentive to encourage others who are not ordained to test their gifts of preaching and teaching.

Secondly, if the policy is limited to filling ministerial gaps in vacant churches, why look for evangelists and church...

ignoring the fact that some gifted people may not fit comfortably in traditional ministries, and that their gifts could potentially lead them to break new ground for the gos...

Church members are often opposed to team ministry for a variety of reasons.

training appears elitist

some Christians only want the ‘real’ minister to preach or visit, and are not happy when his place is take...

the time that the minister spends training the team is often perceived as a distraction...

Another way to think about it is that elders and congregational leaders should be active vine-growers themselves before we consider giving them responsibility for oversight. They should be the kind of people who are reading the Bible one to one with others and sharing Christ with their neighbours.

The urgent crowds out the important, and everyone thinks that their agenda should be dealt with first.

But the trap for them is that they become so caught up in the management exercise, they weaken the ministry of teaching and training. How many hours per week does your minister spend attending committees, managing property, organizing programs or conducting church business?

Could you train others to take over some of this work? Could your minister be relieved of some of his administrative workload so that he can devote time to training one or two new leaders?

should be to encourage some of them into further formal training in theology so that they might progress into denominational or missionary ministry. We must be exporters of trained people instead of hoarders of trained people. In a resource-poor church, this can be very hard to do.

What would you immediately think or say? Would you start thinking of some event or program about to start that they could help with? Some job

However, if the real work of God is people work—the prayerful speaking of his word by one person to another—then the jobs are never all taken.

Now if you’re a pastor reading this book, your reaction at this point might be something like this: “Okay, right. Now I really know these guys are living in a dream. In their fantasy world, I’m supposed to have time to meet individually with all the members of my congregation, and personally train and mentor them so they can in turn personally minister to others. Have they seen my diary?

it that you are angry with us? When are you going to do something to turn this around? Because don’t forget that the whole thing is your idea. You planted the vine in the first place—cleared the ground for it in the backyard, dug a hole, put up the trellis—and we flourished. But now look at us! We’re being eaten alive.

Apart from the last two sentences, which are a direct quote, the rest of this little outburst is a re-phrasing of the 80th psalm, which was written at a time when Israel felt like many churches do today.

Modern churches (at least in the West) may not be under the direct attack and disaster that Israel was experiencing, but we certainly still wonder what God is doing in the world. Is he still listening? Is he going to act? I thought he was the Lord and Master of all—if so, what’s the plan?!

Many of the psalms plumb these depths. But Psalm 80 has the distinction of exploring these ideas via the image of Israel as God’s vine:

It is at this low point in the history of God’s plans that the psalmist cries out for mercy and rescue. It is also at this point that the prophets cry out with God’s answer—that there will be judgement in the first place for Israel’s sin, but that there is also the promise of mercy, rescue and restoration, in God’s own time and way.

But the path to these glories would be through suffering and judgement. There was no avoiding the consequences of sin.

(1 Pet 1:10-12)

This is what we see happening in Acts. We call it the Acts of the Apostles, but a better name would perhaps be ‘The Acts of the word and Spirit of God through the Apostles’, because that’s how it seems to go. The apostolic task is to preach; to bear witness; to proclaim the word; and to do so under the power and enabling of God’s Spirit.

Then four times in Acts we are told that the “word of God (or the Lord)” increased and multiplied and spread, almost as if it had a life of its own.