bored has left a new comment on your post "Mark Braun WELS, WLC - Soil Testing To Make Fuller...":
Modern science believes that soil is merely an inert medium with minerals in it, so when modern practitioners test soil they only measure minerals. Testing the soil in a garden will mostly deal with N P K, three very important nutrients. The more expensive tests will give a detailed report of present micro-nutrients, magnesium, iron, manganese, calcium, etc.
What these tests can't measure is the very thing that makes soil special--countless species of microscopic critters eating and excreting, responsible for millions of chemical reactions responsible for everything from low-light photo synthesis to natural plant-created pest protection. Science refuses to believe that the biome known as "soil" is God's way of feeding and regenerating the earth. They refuse to measure the thing that makes the constituent parts work. The ignore the fact that there is more life, pound for pound, under the soil's crust than above it.
So, with the confidence that accompanies all post-modern reductionism, Scientists do their soil tests, looking only at one millionth of the equation and scornfully deeming the rest to be unimportant. They apply their synthetic fertilizers, chemically burning to death all the invertebrates, and causing plants to grow "fat", retaining free-nitrogen. Free nitrogen is candy to pests, insects and fungi.
This is metaphoric of "soil testing" for churches. Mark Braun, Paul Kelm, Mark Jeske ad nauseam, are the Church's equivalent of modern science. They "test" for the elements they think are the important ones--and this edges out the Holy Spirit and the Word. They define what growth is, and then apply any and all means that cause their definition of growth to occur. Rock music and Cell groups just happens to be the synthetic nitrogen of the day. All the problems come from it: False Justification, anti-nomianism, legalism, junking of the Sacraments, Missionary Mimes and the whole bit.
The solution is simple in gardening and evangelism: Compost is to the garden as the Word is to the lost. Both are God's ordained way of feeding. Both are simultaneously complex and simple. Someone could write a whole book on this comparison.
