5 Rules for Gardeners (and Organisers)

A few weeks ago I found myself planning a service around Matthew 13:31-32 because I have been thinking for a long time now about what happens when institutions or activists try to ‘do’ justice without understanding power. The service ended up structured around five rules for growing God's reign. As I wrote them, I kept hearing echoes of every community organising training I have ever sat through. Here is what I think Jesus' parable tells us about organising. I wonder what they might mean for how we talk about justice in church contexts.

Rule 1: Remember that it is not actually your garden

In community organising, we talk about self-interest properly understood. Not selfishness - self-interest. The question is never ‘What do I want to do for these people?’ but ‘What does each individual, group or community I meet want and/or need, and how does that connect to my own wants and needs?’ The moment an organiser starts thinking they are the saviour of a community, they have stopped organising and started performing charity. Charity isn’t bad in and of itself, but it’s not organising.

The mustard seed is tiny, hidden, and entirely dependent on the soil it falls into. The sower does not stand over it micromanaging the pH levels. Jesus is clear: this is God's field, not ours. We are co-workers - gardeners - not creators. The church's temptation is sometimes to colonise - to plant a service, a project, a mission initiative, and then claim the harvest as our own growth metrics. The organising tradition says no. We are there to build relational power that belongs to the community. If the institution gets bigger but the people do not get more powerful, we have failed.

Rule 2: Do not try to control the neighbourhood

In the first century, the Roman Empire was the power analysis nobody needed to spell out. Everyone knew who owned the bricks, who paid the soldiers, and who bribed the tax collectors. Jesus' audience was not short on political clarity. What they were short on was a strategy that did not simply replicate the empire's logic of us-versus-them.

Community organising does power analysis. We map who holds what, who can give us what we need, and who will block us. But the organising tradition - at its best - does not do polarisation for the sake of it. It does agitation. The difference is crucial. Polarisation says, ‘You are the problem.’ Agitation says, ‘You have the power to solve this problem, and we are going to hold you to it.’ If you think someone is the enemy rather than a potential actor with interests that can be negotiated, you become a part of the problem. For me, this is one of the key differences between organising and activism.

Jesus plants a seed. He does not build a wall. The mustard seed was not a prestige crop. It was a weed. Useful, medicinal, disruptive - and impossible to control once it takes root. That is the organising choice. Not domination. Disruption that grows shade for everyone.

Rule 3: Choose what you plant carefully

In the parable of the mustard seed, Jesus is riffing on a story about another plant, a story in Ezekiel about a great cedar where every bird nests . But Jesus changes the plant in the story. He knows his audience and he is making a point. Like all good story-tellers, he is drawing on a story that his listeners will know and subverting it. Now the tree is not a noble cedar, not even a tree. In Jesus’s story, it becomes a mustard shrub. Something ordinary, even annoying, but deeply useful to people under threat.

In organising, this is the discipline of strategic action. We do not campaign for everything. We campaign for things that are winnable, concrete, and specific. We choose the seed that will grow in this soil, at this time, with these gardeners. A campaign that looks noble but cannot take root is not a campaign - it’s a performance. The mustard seed says: plant what the neighbourhood can actually use. Medicine, not a monument.

Rule 4: Make friends with other gardeners

Broad-based organising is built on institutions. Not individuals. Institutions. Churches, synagogues, mosques, schools, trade unions. Why? Because institutions have longevity, accountability, and - crucially - they force us to meet people who are not like us. The whole point of a broad-based organisation is that you have to sit across from someone whose theology makes you wince, whose politics make you flinch, and find the shared interest that means you can act together. If activism is critical of institutions, organising is savvy about them, recognising their flaws and acknowledging their potential.

Jesus plants a seed that becomes a tree where every bird nests. The ‘every’ here matters. Not just the birds who agree with the tree. Not just the birds who were here first. Every bird. In organising, we call this the one-to-one relational meeting. The deliberate, sometimes uncomfortable conversation where I discover that your self-interest and mine overlap in ways I could not have predicted. Sometimes our temptation is to build fences when under threat. Jesus plants a seed that grows into a plant which will creep under and around and through every fence going.

Rule 5: Wait for new life to rise up

This is the hardest rule for the church. We are built in a way which tends to reward fast numerical growth. We want the baptism numbers, the social media metrics, the annual report paragraph. Community organising massively resists the quick wins. It works on a ten, fifteen, twenty-year horizon. You build a relationship before you ask for an action. You win a small campaign before you attempt a large one. You develop leaders who will outlast you.

The mustard seed does not grow into a tree by Thursday. It has to die in the soil. Something has to give - to break - to make that possible. The seed becomes a husk. New life rises, but not on our schedule, and not always in the shape we expected (one day I might write about the time I thought I planted beetroot and ended up with chard…). The question for the church is whether we are willing to let our own institutional ego die so that something wild and hard to control can grow. Can we recognise the new thing when it is not our thing? Can we wait?

What this means for worship

I wrote this service because I care deeply about the seeds scattered amongst the grassroots and worry that we trample them by accident when we misconstrue our gardening roles. I sung Spencer LaJoye’s ‘Ploughshare Prayer’ in the service that this blog is about - ‘I pray that this prayer is a plowshare of sorts’. This lyric is the organising impulse in prayer form. LaJoye is not asking God to make the church more comfortable. He is asking God to break us open so we can grow.

The kingdom is not a building we design. It is a mustard patch we inhabit. The organising tradition, at its best, teaches us to be small, strategic, relational, patient, and disruptive. How is this the word of God for us today?