When you make a thing do you keep adding to it until it's complete?

That's how I make soup. I put the water in. Then a soup bone. Then some pot barley, spices, vegetables, salt. Then a potato to soak up the extra salt. Then when it tastes good I stop adding stuff and it's done.

That's also how people build houses. When I make a list of the things a person will need to build their house I start at the bottom and work up. Rebar, insulated concrete forms, concrete, floor joists, plywood, lumber, trusses, windows, shingles, insulation, siding, drywall, paint, trim, flooring, and so on. When the house sheds water, stays warm, and looks nice the builder stops adding things and tells the customer it's complete. You add until it's done.

Not everything works that way. Sometimes when you make a thing you take away until it's complete.

If you make wood or metal things on a lathe that's how it goes. You start with brass rod and keep taking brass away until you have a mallet head with a threaded end.

That's also how it works with carving. To carve a horse you take a block of wood and cut off everything that doesn't look like a horse. This picture below isn't my carving because I don't know how to carve a horse. It's not that I don't know how to cut chunks of wood off a block, it's because I don't have a clear idea of what a horse looks like. Once upon a long-ago time ago, I made this little scoop for Donna. I carved off far more wood than I left on it. I kept removing wood until it looked like a scoop then I quit and called it complete. There was nothing wrong with the wood that I cut off - it was all the same walnut block - but it wasn't part of the scoop.

There are a few activities that require both adding and taking away. Gardening or farming are both like that. Planting is required but there's a lot of removing and separating that happens on the way to a harvested crop. Flower gardeners keep their blooms looking nice by dead-heading - cutting off the blooms that looked great in July so that new ones can spring up and it can still look great in August. Pottery is like that too. Clay is added, formed, and removed as the potter makes a piece.

Your experience may be different but when I think about either my faith or about the church I think about adding. I grow in faith, hopefully. The church grows, hopefully. We add new people and programs. We add new skills or enthusiasm for mission or persistence in prayer or time spent in Scripture or whatever it is. We want to be healthy and growing so we add and maintain, then we add and maintain some more.

That's great and good but not always what's needed. Sometimes faith or the church are formed by removing, like a carver or gardener would. Maybe a program that was important in the '70s isn't much used forty years later. Maybe it was fun and inspiring in the '90s to have twenty committees and a chart about how they relate to each other and elect people to 85 different roles but maybe that feels like running around in circles towing a sled now. Maybe the devotional practice that helped me see God's presence in new ways when I was in high school is preventing me from seeing God's presence in new ways now.

I would like to start a conversation about the health of our church and our own health as Christian people in it. What good things need to be carved off so that a true thing can be revealed? What practices that have fed and encouraged us need to be snipped off so that new practices can grow up to feed and encourage us? Are we trying to carve a horse when we don't know what a horse looks like and we should carve a scoop instead? Is it OK to celebrate when a thing gets smaller because it might become closer to its intended form? Does your faith sometimes get both smaller and closer to God?