Ending Leadership Erosion

In the March 8th Christian Century, Kyle Childress has written a wonderful piece about the thought of philosopher/farmer Wendell Berry. He quotes Berry: "During the last 17 years ... I have been working at the restoration of a once exhausted hillside. Its scars are now healed over, though still visible, and this year it has provided abundant pasture, more than in any year since we have owned it. But to make it as good as it is now has taken 17 years. If I had been a millionaire or if my family had been starving, it would still have taken 17 years. It can be better than it is now, but that will take longer. For it to live fully in its own responsibility, as it did before bad use ran it down, may take hundreds of years."
You can find this quote in Berry's The Art of the Commonplace (Counterpoint Press, 2002), a book to which I have returned after reading Childress's comments. Berry is worth reading if you don't mind being knocked off balance a bit. He is not your blue-blooded evangelical, but he gets your attention.
Berry's hill reminds me of some churches and some people. Churches left exhausted, eroded, wasted by careless leadership (Diotrephes in III John comes to mind). People whose personal issues are heaped up to a point where there seems to be no solution (King Saul?).
Berry would be quick to tell you that there has been a whole genre of farmers over the years who have raped the land, draining its topsoil of nutrients and leaving it to the mercy of the winds and the rainy run-off. Then they abandoned it and went on to other places where the agricultural raping happened again. But Berry stayed, and it's taken him 17 years to marginally restore what the farmers before him so wantonly destroyed.
Seventeen years to restore a hill? So how long does it take to truly convert a person then? How long does it take to bring a church-community back from the wounds of disillusionment and distrust?
Berry's a patient man, it seems to me. I visualize him returning to that hill for 17 springtimes and doing a little more each year of whatever it took to bring the soil back to pasture-like standards. And I take note of his humility: "For (the hill) to live fully in its own responsibility, as it did before bad use ran it down, may take hundreds of years."
I'm not sure that most of us have that kind of patience. The God of the Bible does.

by Gordon McDonald