Bishops’ News: Dandelion Seeds

Last week my attention was caught by the logo of a local counsellor which had a large dandelion head being blown and its seeds being launched. “What a great image of the Church”, I thought, “coming to maturity and flowering so that by the wind of the Spirit, seeds of new life could be spread afar”.

Of course it’s not a novel thought and many of you have probably noticed the metaphor in the image before, but it seemed a lovely confluence of happenstance that I was talking about it with a colleague in Kāpiti when she said, “Oh the image is in the Bishops’ office and I have been carrying around a gift for Bishop Ellie that also includes that image!”

Over the years I have come to accept that confluences of images and messages are one of the ways God speaks to me. But just what is God saying? That’s the work of prayer and discernment that happens around the confluences.

Throughout the lockdown period the image of harvest, which seemed so oddly out of place when we were so restricted in movement, was a recurrent theme in our prayers and reflections as leadership teams in the diocese and in my parish. It didn’t make a lot of sense at the time, other than the affirmation that generation of a harvest is entirely God’s own work and that God was preparing a harvest and that we should be ready to bring it in. If we consider the parable of the sower, the goal of sowing the seed is a great harvest. We notice that the sower distributes seed with careless abandon, generously (or wastefully as some would see it) spreading the seed even where it has little chance of growing. We may also notice that the seed has no control over where it lands and what happens to it; some of it never fruits, others are picked up by birds and taken to other places to grow, some starts to grow but the context is too difficult to maintain growth. Even the seed that falls onto good soil has no control of the harvest it is able to yield; some seeds yield a hundredfold, others 60 or 30.

That Jesus would paint God as an extravagant and careless sower is the kind of image of God that should cause us to stop and take stock. Really? God is willing to risk wasting seed, willing to waste time and money, in order to get the seeds of the word (Jesus) into every possible place that God can.

On a dandelion the seeds are at the end of each little carrier flower on the seed head. When the dandelion is mature it only takes a little wind to blow the carrier flowers off and have the seed carried away to take root elsewhere. I believe God is blowing on his church, fanning embers into to flames; wanting to see carrier flowers with seed, dislodged from where they are and carried to other places. I am reminded of Bishop Justin’s words when he began his ministry as Bishop in this diocese nine years ago- we will strengthen the sense of family, we will equip for discipleship and then we will see a time of commissioning and sending at every level. The question will be asked “who will go?” and we will see many answering that call “I/we will go”. We have been seeing small glimpses of this call and answering, but I believe that God is going to breathe on us by his Spirit in such a way that we will see a wave of movement, of seeds spread so that there may be the harvest that God so desires.

Coming up in Movement by Mail soon you will see the advertising for our Diocesan Training Day on 5 September. This day is an open invitation as part of our bigger Ministry Leaders’ Family Camp taking place over that whole weekend. The theme for our gathering is Whole-hearted Faith – so come ready to enter fully into what God may have in store for us as we gather and as we continue to live Christ-shaped lives. Fill your waka and bring people along – anyone who would like to is welcome to come on the day and participate in the variety of workshops that will be on offer.

We want to have God breathe on this Church and fan into flames the faith we carry. We want to see the Holy Spirit blow us from our homeostasis into the dynamic movement of God, as we are carried by that sacred breath, that holy wind to who knows where. Come and be refreshed.

Archdeacon Julie

The Dandelion’s pallid tube 
Astonishes the Grass, 
And winter instantly becomes 
An infinite Alas-

The tube uplifts a signal Bud
And then a shouting Flower,-
The Proclamation of the Suns
That sepulture is o’er.

Emily Dickinson