The Church of the Bonsai

I know this confession will fuel the fire of those who think my brain never leaves the church office, even on my day off, but sometimes a great object lesson is just too hard to resist. One of our latest escapades with our granddaughters brought Debbie and me to the Montreal Botanical Garden and its collection of bonsai trees, one of the largest outside of Asia. (Those reacting with sympathy to the plight of two little girls being dragged to the botanical garden for an afternoon should know that the object of the day was actually a visit to the live butterfly exhibit, and that the outing eventually degenerated into a snowball fight where Grandpa proved he can still throw a curveball!)

But back to our bonsai trees. The term bonsai comes from two Japanese words that literally mean a planting in a tray, or in a low-sided pot. The tradition, which finds parallels in several other Asian cultures, confines a growing tree to a series of small pots that restrict its growth, and uses pruning of the crown, the branches and the roots to produce over time what essentially appears to be a scaled down model of a fully grown tree. Some of the bonsai trees on display in Montreal are almost a century old, but are no larger than a small garden shrub.

When I first heard about bonsai, my initial reaction was that given our inclement Canadian weather, it would be great to have miniature fruit trees that could be more easily kept indoors to lengthen the period during which fresh fruit is locally available, but I quickly learned that the growth stunting process used in the art of bonsai is not friendly to fruit production. There is a completely different part of the agricultural sciences that focuses on developing dwarfed fruit trees where food production is the purpose, but this is not the point with bonsai. The ancient art was meant to encourage contemplation through the beauty of the small tree, and it stressed the patient skill of the artist who crafted the trees over several decades with hundreds of small, measured cuts and prunings. While I don’t want to risk being thought some kind of neanderthalic philistine with no appreciation for the finer, artistic, pretty things of life, I confess to being at a bit of a loss to understand the value of decades of slow, painstaking work that results in a tree that’s sort of nice to look at, but in the end, produces no fruit, offers neither shade from the sun or shelter from the wind and will never play host to a bird’s nest.

It struck me as I stood staring at one 90-year-old fruitless bonsai that perhaps many of our churches were very similar. Growth is often hampered because we keep them confined in small containers, never quite allowing them to stretch beyond the comfort of the four solid, stone walls of our beautiful gothic architecture. Hours, years and entire decades are invested in beautifying, trimming and clipping and making sure that every branch and every leaf looks just right and is perfectly balanced; but, those branches never bud into flower, and the flowers never yield fruit.

Much of the time, when we read the story of the early church in Acts and the Epistles, we focus on the fine theological details of what the church believed. We also spend a lot of time thinking about the structure and governance of the early church and the way these might be appropriately translated to our day and context. But we so often overlook the fact that the most frequently mentioned characteristic of the church in the book of Acts is the fact that she was a fruitful, growing church. From the outrageous outburst of Pentecost that added 3,000 people in a single day, to the steady stream of new disciples who joined the movement in every city the apostles visited, it quickly becomes clear that the church was a living, growing organism that was stretching and adding branches and producing fruit.

My most startling discovery about bonsai trees was that unlike dwarf fruit trees that are genetically engineered to be small, the bonsai artist starts with a regular specimen—a tree that has all the potential to grow and produce fruit, but that is prevented from doing so by restrictive containers and repeated pruning.

As we care for our buildings, we can spot the tell-tale signs of water infiltration in the basement and we respond before too much damage is done. We feel those cold drafts coming in around the side of the windows, and we quickly correct the insulation problem. We hear the out of tune organ and immediately call the tuner to tinker with the pipes until they are set just right. How do we respond to the fact that for many of our congregations, it has been years since we baptized a new adult disciple, or since we welcomed someone who was embracing the Christian faith and committing to following Jesus for the first time? As for any other living organism, growth and fruit should be the norm for our churches rather than the exception.
I wonder what Jesus would have thought about a beautiful, well groomed, perfectly maintained tree that was full of nicely manicured leaves … but that produced no fruit?