What’s with the strawberry?
At Entheos we believe that God is both good and wise. The strawberry illustrates this point in several ways.
First, strawberries look good. Bright red and easy to see! They also smell good. They even feel good to your touch and on your tongue. All that goodness works together to get us to discover for ourselves that strawberries also taste good.
Why does God go to all this effort? Because He wants to get the goodness of His wonderful strawberries inside of us because they are good for us. God is very wise to do it this way. His goodness and wisdom run through the entire process in order to do us good.
Another interesting thing about strawberries is that they reproduce very efficiently in three different ways; first by seed, then by runners, and finally by cuttings. Any one of these approaches will do.
And, because strawberries are a ground cover, left to do what they have been designed by God to do, they will eventually cover every inch of bare soil with a new strawberry plant until the entire field is thick with beautiful, red, firm, aromatic, delicious, nutritious strawberries!
A good church is like a strawberry, and it grows a lot like a strawberry plant.
A good church delivers all the goods that God intended. It’s a neighbor-loving, welcoming, place. It’s beautiful. It feels good. It sounds good. It also tastes good as members share a wonderful meal with one another following the gathering time each week. And, it’s all good for you.
A healthy church grows by reproducing itself. It is constantly being renewed in fresh new congregations. It does not normally grow by unlimited expansion into a huge megachurch. And, isn’t it interesting that it reproduces in much the same three ways that strawberries reproduce— by seed when a seasoned believer in Christ begins gathering new believers into his or her own home, or by runner when an existing neighborhood church sends out a small band of believers to plant a new church in a nearby neighborhood. and finally, by cutting when a cluster of neighborhood churches send out a missionary team to some faraway place to start an entirely new “strawberry patch” of new neighborhood churches.
Entheos intends to be a new network of good and healthy neighborhood churches spreading across the Portland Metro Area.
We are quite small right now. Just one little church gathering in a home. But it only takes one seed to get things going.
Because God is both good and wise, we expect to grow, like a strawberry plant, with all our “seeds,” and “runners” and eventually our “cuttings” producing new neighborhood churches across the Portland Metro Area and beyond. Our vision is to be a network of tiny churches, churches like strawberries that look good and feel good because they actually are good— and also good for you, and good for the neighborhoods that they serve.
If you can, go find a nice ripe strawberry right now, bite into is and experience for yourself the goodness and wisdom of God. Then ask yourself why you wouldn’t want to be part of something wonderful like that.
Psa. 34:8 Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good; Blessed is the man who trusts in Him!