When my husband and I were brainstorming ideas on how to further unify the churches in Whittier, I was doing a lot of writing at the time surrounding John 15, Jesus’ vine and branch teaching. This imagery grounded us in our dreaming. We saw clearly that nourishment from the Vine needed to be an integral part of the planning, execution and leadership of GreenLeaf. Anything apart from that would lead to burn out and compassion fatigue. Just like the branch when severed from the Vine withers and falls, so do we when not first deeply rooted. We decided a core value would be to ‘lead dependent’ by example. The first tenet of the organization would be this: We cannot be a fruitful branch without first becoming a deeply rooted one.
We knew too, that any effort on our part to help the churches towards engagement with our city would have to be committed to equipping and encouraging the Body of Christ first. So, GreenLeaf could not be just another service project. Yes, service to our city is a main goal: making disciples, feeding and clothing the poor, serving and blessing and loving our neighbors as ourselves. Greenleaf is meant to function less as another program to meet these needs and more as a focusing agent. If our churches are light, and we believe that they are, we are often all off flickering in our corners. Greenleaf acts like a prism: coalescing those flickers and beaming the light toward our city’s deepest wounds.
The second tenet would be the interaction of the branches with one another: a commitment to radical unity. We aim to obey the Scriptures’ clear instructions on this: not just agreeing with those like us, or saccharine politeness and arms length embracing from those we don’t. We value purposeful, death to self, gospel kind of unity Paul preached, an ‘eagerness to maintain unity of the Spirit.’ We see within ourselves our intrinsic homogenous nature: we like being around those who are like us. Instead we submit to the eclectic picture we are given of God’s people: as different as eyes and ears, as fundamentally other as an eyelash would be from a spleen. We take by faith that it is because of these differences and not in spite of them that we will grow up into the full measure of all that God has for us.
Just as no two leaves are alike, we are all unique, bearing the fingerprints of our Creator. We dreamed of GreenLeaf being a place where everyone’s gifts are welcomed, nurtured and utilized. Just as a body missing parts suffers loss so we suffer loss without all our members working together; your gifts are needed here. So we hope you join us on this creative venture, as we walk by faith, following Christ as He leads His Church.
