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| Patriot Hosta |
My introduction to Hostas came at an evangelism conference. The LCA leader said he ran into a bunch of people going to a Hosta convention. Recently I got a coffee table book on Hostas, endorsed by Prince Charles, the elderly king-in-waiting. The variety is endless.
I did not grow them until recently, and then I noticed how interesting they were - all sizes, all colors, spreading on their own, easy to maintain, all sending up a spike of flowers for hummingbirds.
Yesterday I went out to look for the yellow and green Hostas, but they were just starting with a little white sprout. Then I saw a small Patriot Hosta poking through the mulch. Gardeners in early spring are anxious to see everything come up at once, and the plants are not designed for instant appreciation. Older roses are budding but new roses are only showing their early red leaves.
Clethra look dead and Joe Pye is still hiding. Chaste Tree will flower later. The beauty of roses is their flowering all summer. The others, because they take turns being in full bloom,
keep insects and birds happy.
The Military Gardening Group, always ready to spot new flowers, is already using the Overwatch (the front porch) to look for progress while drinking pour-over coffee.
The Hostas gave me a flash-back to the evangelism conference, about 42 years ago. Stick with me for the lesson. A fine lecturer described the changing church scene. Not long before, half the babies baptized would be in confirmation class. In the future, very few of the children would still be around for confirmation. He had some gloom and doom predictions which I recalled. He might have been a Fuller Seminary, but I do not recall him talking about his sources.
Gardening made me think about the conference - and the difference between mourning the lost plants and keeping up with new beginnings. The expert only discussed sociology (which is the study of middle class people). There was no Gospel content, no efficacy of the Means of Grace. Every expert from that point on, whether LCA or LCMS or WELS, lined up to tell people all was lost without their advice, grim days were ahead.
One of the big theories was keeping everyone busy as a way to have a healthy church. All the sociology morphed into marketing (sociology for junk food vendors). Churches could buy packaged programs for generating members' activities, spiritual gift inventories, and the rest of the nonsense.
In the LCA, I asked if we had any message better than "Let's march downtown and cause some destruction." That cleared the room. In WELS, it was "We are so pure, you can't help but join our tiny sect." Nobody offered anything that grew, and anyone questioning the plan was to be shunned like a skunk at a picnic. I kept asking why WELS was using material directly from the LCA, down to the graphics and fakey charts. Instead of spending so much money on Christian Ed in WELS, why not buy directly from Fuller Seminary? Wearing a Fuller sweatshirt at WELS gatherings was my way of fitting in, but it was not well-received - or WELS-received.
"Fuller has a vast accumulation of missionary data," one WELS pastor told me. Notice the tilt - the people who sell their buffoonery have the data, so they must be honored, used, financed, and respected.
Back to gardening - I could sow the seed (some always survives) and plant the seedlings, or I could explain to everyone why it is so hard to grow roses, unusual herbs, and special plants. The only way to have a garden is to work it all the time, even long into autumn with a winter season of mulch turning into rich soil ahead.
An abundance of gardening work turns into an abundance. If a congregation cannot confidently teach faith in Jesus Christ - once the theme of all churches of the Reformation - it is bound to starve, like my boyhood churches. The Congregationalist (UCC) church is gone. The large Disciples church closed and could not find buyers for a long time. The Augustana Synod church, which became LCA and ELCA, was advertising their Blessing of the Animals service when we last drove by...without stopping.
