Orchard Evangelism

So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.

— 1 Corinthians 3:7 (ESV)

Two years ago, we set out to reinvigorate the orchard program here at Olderkesi Development Project. Anyone who has ever planted an orchard will tell you the same thing: this is not a short game. You do not plant trees in the morning and eat fruit in the afternoon.

That first season, we planted 73 new trees — mangoes, oranges, and avocados — into the Olderkesi soil. When we returned, 20 seedlings had failed to thrive. A 30 percent attrition rate.

We could have read that number as failure. We could have said to ourselves: thirty percent is too high; maybe we should redirect our efforts toward beans or maize — crops where we can see immediate results. And honestly, the temptation was real.

Instead, we accepted the attrition rate, and we replaced the 20 trees we had lost.

The following season: 7 seedlings lost. The rest were beginning to thrive. We replaced the 7. The season after that: 2.

This is orchard keeping. This is the long game. And this — if we have eyes to see it — is exactly what proximity discipleship looks like in the field.

As Kingdom workers, we are wired to want immediate results. We put ourselves out there, we witness for Jesus Christ, and when nothing visible happens, something inside us whispers that we failed — that we didn’t use the right words, that we read the moment wrong, that the Spirit was somehow absent.

This is the lie of the enemy.

We gravitate toward large events where hundreds of souls make public faith proclamations, because that feels like deep Kingdom work — and perhaps it is. But if we are honest, we are often not in a position to tend that fruit. And in the vacuum of discipleship that follows, there is frequently a failure to thrive for the new seedling.

Paul named the deeper problem nineteen centuries ago. Writing to a church that had already begun to measure the wrong things, he said: I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6–7).

We are invited to tend. We are not asked to produce.

I have been working alongside Rev. David and Mako for seven years.

That sentence deserves a moment to sit. Seven years. In a culture oriented toward immediacy — toward metrics, quarterly reports, and the question but what has it produced? — seven years of sustained presence alongside two men in southern Kenya can look, from the outside, like very little.

But I was at a breakfast table in Olderkesi last week, long after the plates had been cleared and the morning chai had gone cold, and Mako opened his Bible.

He read aloud from 2 Corinthians 4:1–2 — unhurried, unhesitating. And what followed was not a teaching moment. It was not a discipleship session in any formal sense. It was three men gathered around the same Word, each sharpening the others. Rev. David, Mako, and me — not teacher and students, but three disciples in the same orchard, tending together.

That morning was fruit. But it did not happen that morning. It happened over seven years of planting and watering and returning — season after season — trusting that the One who gives the growth had not forgotten what had been sown.

There is one more dimension to this, and it is woven into the deepest root of proximity discipleship.

We cannot become orchard keepers — cannot become true disciple-makers — until we first learn to draw near to the heart of Christ and let Him be the Master Gardener in our own lives.

This can be painful. An orchard requires pruning, and so do we. There are things we have allowed to grow in us — habits, pride, fear, self-reliance — that are not of Him. The Master Gardener does not leave them. He tends to them. And sometimes the pruning is the part that hurts.

Isaiah puts it this way: Precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little (Isaiah 28:13). Formation is not an event. It is a season. And then another season. And then another.

As much as I once wished otherwise, I did not become capable of serving the Kingdom as I am now — overnight. It has taken years. Drawing near enough, long enough, and holy enough to build relationships, to integrate language and culture, to earn the trust of brothers like Rev. David and Mako. But if I am honest, even those things did not begin to truly flourish until I first drew near to Him — near enough and long enough that His holiness could begin to shine through me. Then, and only then, did the other parts begin to bear fruit.

And yes — there were painful seasons. Much has been pruned by the Master Gardener in my life. Much still is. I need Him daily at work in me.

The same long game we must embrace in disciple-making is the same long game we must embrace in our own formation. You cannot tend what you have not first allowed to be tended in you.

The Maasai have a phrase that Rev. David and I have taken up as a kind of mantra for our work in the North: esiai Laitoriani mara peechu — the work of the Lord is not in vain.

Not the results of the Lord are not in vain. The work.

The planting is not in vain. The watering is not in vain. The seasons of attrition — the twenty trees that didn’t make it, the conversations that didn’t close, the years of presence before the fruit came — those are not wasted seasons. They are orchard seasons. They are the seasons that make the harvest possible.

We are not harvest workers. We are orchard keepers, tending what belongs to Another, trusting the One who gives the growth.

Thank you for your continued prayers and partnership. It is your faithfulness that makes this work possible — and it is work worth doing.

Soli Deo Gloria,

Mathew

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