Shake the Trees!
May 2023
Imagine a father taking his sons into the dense forest in the Inyo Valley near Mono Lake in Eastern California. As hunter-gatherers living around 2800 BC, the father could be teaching them to hunt anything from what would now be the extinct Dwarf Pronghorn Antelope to the Steppe Bison. These animals are drawn back into the forest after the undergrowth began to flourish again due to the Mono tribe instigating a controlled burn to clear the underbrush and cultivate new life. Bristlecone Pines are thick across the region, and as these tribesman followed the prints and droppings of a foraging animal, maybe one shook the tree as he climbed one of these coniferous plants causing its fertile cones to be flung to the ground. The seeds took root and grew a strong shoot which became a towering 60-foot-tall pine tree on the slopes of the White Mountains. As such, it would have produced its fruits in its season for the next 4,850 years!
It was in 1957, then, that a dendrochronologist from the University of Arizona named Edmund Schulman discovered just such a Pine tree he named The Methuselah Tree. The location of this ‘world’s oldest tree’ remains a secret for its protection from pillagers and vandals.
The local New Testament church itself is likened to a plant when Jesus told His disciples that he had called and ordained them that they should “go and bring forth fruit, and that [their] fruit should remain” (John 15:16). I see the picture of a great tree whose roots, trunk, and limbs may be very old, but the fruit of her limbs are as young as this year’s season. As a tree, the local church is to be deliberately producing seasonal disciples who can be flung to the farthest reaches of the field, not by happenstance but by Providence (Mat.13:38, 28:19, Act.13:4). The question, then, is this: regardless of the age of your church or its dominating dynamic, is it or is it not producing its intended fruits of missionaries for God to fling into the field? The local church is the plant through which God ordained that they should be produced. If the world is suffering from a lack of laborers for the harvest, then maybe we need to shake the trees!
Praying & Pleading!
Rodney Myers
GFF General Director