Individual Trees or a Collected Vineyard?

Being that it's been about 5 months since my last blog, I figured that it's about time I give this thing another shot. I like the idea of blogging in general, but being consistent at it will be a challenge for me.

In high school I was a half-way decent sprinter, but a terrible long-distance runner. I could never pace myself over a longer period time, and so I would exhaust myself in the first half of the race and have nothing left in the tank at the end. Hopefully that won't be indicative of my blogging experience. The way I see it, the fear of inconsistency should never be reason enough not to experiment with something.

Anyway, the name of this blog comes from Jesus' teaching on the vine and the branches, specifically John 15:8 "This is to my father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples."

The underlying question I hope to wrestle with in this blog (and all of life) is what does the fruit look like that Jesus expects of his disciples? In what way does it bring the Father glory? What does it mean to be a collection of people (the church) bearing fruit together such that the Father is pleased to dwell amongst our vineyard? OK, that was more than one question. But they all fall under the umbrella of wanting come to some understanding of what it means to be a part of God's mission in the world (more on "mission" later).

The only thing I'll mention here is that Jesus talks about fruit in the context of community. I'm convinced that we're so individualized in America that we can read "I" into just about anything. Part of what I'm coming to grips with is that God calls a people to reflect his presence to the world because an individual is incapable of that task alone. How could we expect to represent God to the world as individuals when God himself is a community of 3 in 1?

Whatever it is that he's calling us to (the kind of fruit), he's calling us to produce it together. The "you" in "you bear fruit" is plural in Greek, suggesting that the disciples identity as fruit-bearers of the kingdom was bound to each other as much as it was bound to Jesus. Their unity, together under Christ, is what was going to tell the world about the kind of God they served.