Consider The Humble Dandelion

A Let Go and Let God Strategy

“The wind blows where it will . . . . but you do not know where it comes or where it goes but so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” John 3:8

As kids growing up, one of the games we used to play was blowing Dandelion seeds from the Dandelion stalk and seeing how the wind took them. Great fun we thought but not Dad who had just dug half a dozen Dandelion weed plants out of his treasured lawn. However, that blowing in the wind game, where we do not know where the wind will take the seed or which will take root and grow, can I think act as a metaphor for how God transmits the gospel. As Jesus taught us in the quote above.

Here we see the differences between ‘Planned’ (Causative) and ‘Let go and let God’ approaches to mission. Most missional strategies are still highly Planned, i.e. an initial decision is made to plant a church in a particular place. Then there is a significant amount of planning into what will be done, this will often involve a further lengthy period of planning in preparation to send a group of Christians into a particular area in the community, perhaps a school hall, and start a new fellowship there. In advance, a planning group may meet in someone’s lounge room for a time, and there will be efforts to achieve an often-significant fund-raising target. Then will come the day to publicly launch the new fellowship in the selected venue.

From the beginning everybody involved has a reasonable clear idea of what they were expecting to happen, and what is the intended end result, indeed they work to ‘Cause’ a certain thing to happen, this the ‘Plan’.

Contrast this with a process of ‘Let go and let God’. New fellowships arising in this way come about by a process of ‘organic emergence’ where there was either no original intention to create one, or what developed was not planned but something that God brought about. At the beginning there is no clear idea as to what the end product will be, only an intention to be a loving Christian ‘let go and let God’ Community among the non-Christians around, a winsome community that will ultimately draw people to Christ by being a Gospel presence, and by both service and word.

A living example of this is the Harrow Language Café – London – (Anglican). With no intention to start a church, a Christian noticed the growing alienation between her congregation and the surrounding community. She also noticed that a number of women with mostly Muslim backgrounds had poor English skills.

So she gathered a team to enter the culture of the ethnic women initially by starting a weekly afternoon tea to which the women were invited to discuss a topic in English. As time went on they put up a prayer board and invited requests which brought in the Christian dimension, and then they developed a Bible study. (This is exactly the same basic process one Australian church followed, to turn a good church playgroup into a ‘Church for Those Who Come’ See Here)

There has been much fruit from the Harrow café, including people coming to faith from this initiative which developed into a (what I call an Unbounded Church type) ‘church’. It began not as a deliberate church planting initiative but by listening to the needs of the community, then ministering to (serving) them. What then ensued was a God-driven ‘Let go and let God’ process  which is easily multiplied, as it has been.

Lest this be seen as some novel light-bulb initiative we should look more closely at how the New Testament church grew. The apostle Paul was clearly a strategic thinker who planned his missional activities which frequently resulted in churches being planted. However, even the great apostle had to accept at times, not always that speedily, that God had other ideas and that he needed to change his plans, including his target audience and location, (e.g. Acts 16:6-10, 18:1-11) and his style (Acts 17:16-33).

But the spread of the gospel was not just because of Paul’s church planting strategies but to a much larger extent also due to Christians who were converted in his main mission bases, the major trading and communications centres of Ephesus and Corinth. From there these new gospel-hearted Christians as they continued on their business journeys or returned to their home provinces carried the seeds of the Gospel to the far flung reaches of the Roman empire. Paul, like us with the Gospel Dandelion seeds, had no idea, or control over where they would go, nor where and in what form the gospel seeds would settle, root and bear fruit. It was a case of where the Spirit blows and in what context the Spirit would cause the gospel seed to sprout and bear fruit.

So also with expressions of a Dandelion strategy the gospel will spread “Where the wind of the Spirit blows”. So those involved in such a strategy as gospel ‘seeds’ must be willing to be moved to and be changed for, and even be prepared to MUTATE in places and in ways not expected. This is a case of “let go and let God”.

A problem with most current mission strategies is that they are usually ‘causational’ i.e. are so planned as to what we intend to ‘cause’ to happen. These tend to be quite rigid such that there is little opportunity for the ‘Gospel Dandelion seeds’ to be blown by the wind of the Spirit. In this way we lock God into a box we have designed and do not allow the Spirit to ‘Blow where he will”.

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For a spiritual ‘Dandelion strategy’ to be missionally fruitful in our 21^st century mosaic of tribes requires an ‘Unbinding of the Mind’, a setting free from the mission thinking of yesteryear, still the majority thinking today. Fundamentally, an ‘Unbound Mind – Lets Go and Lets God!; it allows the Spirit to dictate where, how, with whom and to whom we do mission as we go. Certainly, it will have causational elements as did the Apostle Paul’s evangelism, but it will allow far more ‘Organic emergence’ processes to take place than is currently generally the case.

So yes! We should consider the humble Dandelion, for –

‘Where the Wind Will Blow (its seeds), We Do Not Know’,

and ‘Let go and let God’.