If you’ve ever been to a farm show or even the county fair, you know that inventions, crop hybrids, and new ways of farming are always popping up. Some people are just wired to find the path to a better crop that can serve more people with greater value and efficiency.
Take the person who figured out that you could grow tomatoes upside down, the tomato slapping device (creates more antioxidants) or the cucumber straightener, along with any number of farm contraptions and systems.
God has inventors, too. They are called apostles and are distributed throughout his body.
If you are a church farmer, running a farming operation (a congregation), apostles are going to come to your church. In fact, they are already in your church. Many are entrepreneurs, but they come in every vocational shape. They are not “Capital A” apostles (there were only a few originals), but they certainly are gifted as pioneers in the body of Christ. The term pioneer is a pretty useful way to describe them.
Often, they will present a new idea or a suggestion about how the church could be better. When that happens, how do you respond? How does the church staff respond?
As a farmer, you wouldn’t expect that someone who is a visionary, capable of networking, building teams, scaling growth, and seeing new opportunities would be a good fit as a farm hand on your current farming program. They are driven to plant something new or original, or invent something that will revolutionize farming and take production to a whole new market. From the church's perspective, they represent the promise of invigoration for the Church and the expansion of the Kingdom.
While they might serve on one of your farming teams for a while, they will always be pushing the boundaries or looking for ways to tweak programs because they are wired for vision and passion. Identifying that tension is one way to spot them.
Ralph Moore, the founder of Hope Chapel in Hermosa Beach, shared how when someone started to cause friction in the church, he identified that as leadership and positioned them to start something new. He is credited with at least 700 church plants and an estimated 2600 church starts as a result.
The pioneers who have come to your farm need a field, a barn, or an ag laboratory to work on their vision.
That’s a place that hasn’t been pre-programmed- it’s probably not one of your existing active fields or barns. If you turn them loose in one of those places, you can be confident that new vision and change will follow. Some of those fields probably need something new.
But their place is on the farm, because that apostle needs relationship and accountability. And they need to be deeply connected to the farming community. But, since they bring their own vision, they need the freedom to launch, wrestle, and own their successes and failures.
Some will want to innovate on the way they do church, evangelism, missions, outreach, or disciple-making, and they’ll do it differently.
Some of the other workers on your farm will want to be part of those ventures, and you should support that. And if you follow the work of the Apostle Paul, putting teams on the journey together is a great way to go.
For its health, the Kingdom venture will always need R&D and agricultural innovators, which create experiences of risk, or liminality as Allen Hirsch describes it, as the requirement to form real community. It’s a huge mistake to place those experimental operations far away where they can’t access the wisdom of the farm community or its resources. When they start, they need to be kept close enough to support, but far away enough to let them try.
How will this all sit with your farm manager? That’s the person who is trying to keep production on schedule. They're the one who has to hire and keep the crews on task, the tractors running, the crops picked and sent to market on time. Most likely, they’ll tell them to pick up a hoe and join the weeding crew, sign up as a tractor mechanic, or help as a chicken hatchery worker. Or perhaps they’ll hear the new idea and explain that that’s not the way that this farm runs, because you already have a way to get that task done. They might not even be polite when they answer.
Introducing some chaos isn’t just a function of bad weather and pests, it comes in the form of a gift that God has packaged in the form of apostolic people, who are wired to expand the farming community, to keep it growing, adapt it to culture, and keep the Gospel seed spreading to every ethnos and culture. He is sending those people to your farm (actually His farm).
So like Boaz, set aside the corners of your field. Or, like George Washington Carver, plan for experimental plots and laboratories where everyone expects some funky peanuts and farming contraptions, and sometimes transformational change. In the U.S, more than 20 billion is spent annually on agricultural R&D, and that is considered far too little to sustain our competitive advantage. Experimentation has to be part of the farm budget and its culture.
And don’t send them away because they might disrupt the farm operations, keep them in the family. In fact, do more than give permission. Resource these pioneers and even lay your hands on them. Some will “do exploits” in His name, but with your support, they will all grow in character, faith, and community because you believed in them and understood that they were created to innovate.