Gardens, Not Walls 

When I realized that Jesus was the ultimate fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant, I had my answer to the question: What on earth is God’s calling for His heaven-bound people? Are we supposed to build walls or plant gardens? I now knew that getting a spiritual green thumb was my calling!

This was a revelation to me. For many years of my ministry as a pastor, I’d thought wall-building was my assigned task. After all, God calls us Christians to holiness, right? So surely walls must be built to keep the evil out. God calls us Christians to righteousness, right? So surely walls must be built to keep the troops in (line). 

God calls us to justice, right? So surely walls must be built to threaten injustice, right? Surely. But really? I was never quite sure, and that uncertainty kept me restless through the “culture wars” of the last generation. One example of how all of that came together for me occurred all the way back in 1991. As the senior pastor of Irving Bible Church (IBC), I joined Operation Rescue and started getting myself thrown in the hoosegow for illegally (though passively) blocking the Routh Street (Dallas) Abortion Clinic’s doors during their peak business hours on Saturday. I’d go down to that infamous abortuary on Saturdays with a group of my culture-warrior friends (once with the newly converted Norma McCorvey, the original “Jane Roe” of the infamous 1973 Supreme Court case) with my game-face on and my Bible verses proving the humanity of unborn children at the ready. 

I did not appreciate the “pain grips” that the Dallas police dutifully but unnecessarily applied to our necks to keep this passive, frumpy group of Ghandi-like protesters under control as they hauled us away to the paddy wagons. But I confess I did truly understand their aggravation at (I’m sure) an inordinate number of sore “Blue” backs due to our impertinent insistence that the police carry us like so many sacks of uncooperative potatoes. (I confess that I enjoyed that part. A lot.) And I also must confess that, on the occasion of my first incarceration, I enjoyed the shocked look on then Dallas Seminary President Dr. Donald K. Campbell’s face when I was unexpectedly able to introduce him as the preacher at IBC that Sunday because I was released earlier than expected from Dallas’s Lew Sterrett Correctional Facility. He didn’t know what I’d been up to until I said, “So glad I could get out of jail in time to introduce you, Dr. Campbell.” His face turned three shades of red as he replied, “Um, thanks very much, I think.” Hey, my newly created rap sheet was just an emblem of my contribution to the culture war, the latest volley in fulfilling my perceived purpose of fighting the good fight by building a big wall.

All that changed when it became clear to me that God wanted me to plant gardens, not build walls, and that getting a spiritual green thumb and not notches on my spiritual pistol-grip was my calling. God doesn’t always call His people to be spiritual Seal Team Six fighters, but many times He calls us to be shalom-restoring ambassadors and place-makers of peace: “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5:18–20).

Jesus is the Master Gardener. He desires that people far from God would find shalom in the gardens He has planted. He is calling people far from God into the garden. As Simon Holt expresses it, “Far from the task of rescuing people from the world, the mission of the church is to embody the transformative presence of God in and for it.” There it is again. Do you see it? “Blessed to be a blessing.” N. T. Wright says it a different way. “We are called to be part of God’s new creation, called to be agents of that new creation here and now. We are called to model and display that new creation in symphonies and family life, in restorative justice and poetry, in holiness and service to the poor, in politics and painting.” Whoa now! Could the good Dr. Wright say again what our calling is, please? “Called to be agents of [the] new creation.” I believe another way of saying it is that we are called to be place-makers of peace and shalom restoration artists,.