You Can’t Make It Grow.

In the 1930s, scientists finally isolated the hormone that drives the growth of a plant. The thing that pushes a shoot up through soil, bends a stem toward the light, turns a seed into something with leaves. They needed a name for it, so they reached back to an old Greek verb, auxein, meaning to grow, to increase. The hormone has been called auxin ever since.

Here is the part I cannot get over. It does its work mostly where you are not looking. In the root tips. At night. In tissue you would have to tear the plant apart to see. The quiet engine of all that growing runs almost entirely out of view.

I find that quietly maddening. I would much prefer that effort and outcome sat right next to each other. Push harder, grow faster. But growth does not work like that, and neither, it turns out, does almost anything worth having.

Centuries before anyone had a microscope, Paul used that same verb. Writing to a church that had fractured into factions, arguing over which leader was best, he ends the whole debate in two lines. 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). The word for growth there is auxanō. The same root those scientists would one day borrow.

It is worth knowing what kind of word it is. Auxanō is an agricultural word, an organic one. It belongs to the world of seeds and soil and lilies, not to machinery or construction. You cannot manufacture it. You cannot schedule it or force it. It is the kind of growth Jesus pointed at when he said the kingdom is like a man who scatters seed and then sleeps and rises, night and day, while the seed sprouts and grows, and he does not know how (Mark 4:27). The farmer does not know how. He just wakes up to find it has happened.

And the grammar is doing something I think he meant on purpose. Planted and watered are finished actions. The workers turned up, did their bit, went home. But the growth itself, the giving of it, is written as something ongoing. Continuous. Never stopping. So while we come and go, doing our small and visible jobs and clocking off, God is the one quietly at work the entire time, down in the part of the soil none of us will ever see.

And it is not a one-off word. The same root runs all the way through the New Testament like a signature of God’s quiet expansion. The word of God increased in Acts. The church grows into a holy temple in Ephesians. The whole body, Paul tells the Colossians, grows with a growth that is from God. Same root every time. The growth is always his.

Because if you lead anything, lead a business, pastor a church, teach students, parent a child, are committed to the growth of your marriage, mentor a friend, and most importantly are leading yourself, sooner or later you feel the pressure to be the one who makes the growth happen. To force it. To engineer it. To lie awake at night wondering why it is not coming faster.

But you cannot make it grow. You genuinely cannot. It was never your job and never your power. You plant. You water. You show up and do your bit, and then, and this is the part I find hardest, you go home and you sleep, trusting that the One who has actually been doing the growing all along did not clock off when you did.

Two things break loose when you actually believe this. The first is that it kills the messiah complex. If you cannot grow anyone, and you cannot, then the weight of another person’s transformation was never yours to carry. Neither was the growth of a whole church. That is the difference between a ministry that is sustainable and one that slowly crushes you. You were never the source. You were only ever a hand in the soil.

The second is that it quietly dissolves rivalry. Remember what the Corinthians were actually fighting about. I follow Paul. I follow Apollos. Picking sides over who was the better leader. Auxanō ends the argument. If the increase belongs entirely to God, then keeping score over who planted and who watered is meaningless. There are no stars on a team where God gives all the growth.

I remember feeling completely overwhelmed when we started FOUNT in 2013, back when we were still called C3 Brooklyn. And in the middle of all of it, God gave me a picture so simple it almost seemed silly. You are a gardener, he said. Just be a gardener. Sow the right seeds, water the right things, and I will do the rest.

It set me free. Looking back, I think that was the moment the church actually began to grow, and not just in numbers. It grew in every area, and most of all in people’s lives. But the picture was powerful for a reason I did not expect. It changed how I led, and then it changed how I trained everyone else. I stopped raising people up only to do tasks and started raising them up to be gardeners too. And when a whole room of leaders stops striving to manufacture growth and simply starts sowing, watering, and trusting, the effect is not additive. It is exponential.

The most important work is the part you will never see.

We are all gardeners. Sow the right things, water the right things, and then…

Get some sleep.

Josh Kelsey is the founding and lead pastor of FOUNT Church NYC, which he planted in 2013 with his wife and co-pastor, Georgie Kelsey. He writes on theology, the city, and a life shaped by Jesus, the true Fount.

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