How Does Your Garden Grow?

 For church this month, Pastor Dave Mitchell preached a series asking, "How Does Your Garden Grow?" looking at how we are cultivating our gardens in attempt to produce spiritual fruit in all areas of our lives. For these messages Dave didn't preach a traditional sermon. Instead, he assembled several panels of West Ridge members and interviewed them onstage. 

For the first he had a panel of five regular attenders (three women, two men) tell how they are living out kingdom values in their workplaces. 

One man, an electrician, is employing and mentoring several young men who have grown up attending West Ridge. Another woman started a business helping adult children find living arrangements for aging parents with a decidedly Christian-themed website and mission. A physician's assistant talked about showing Jesus' love as she cares for people on their worst days. 

I thought about our business, Franklin Lawn Service, and how my husband, David, and I have been using it to cultivate our corner of the garden.  When we started in 2003 Dave had already been mowing the lawns of several elderly neighbors for years. As we advertised in neighborhood newsletters, the new customers we gained were often elderly, and many were widows. 

Franklin Lawn Service- In 2003, Dave started with a push mower and his first ZTR (zero turn radius) mower.

The Bible has at least twenty passages instructing believers to care for widows, so from the beginning, we have made a point to serve widows well. We quoted them a fair price for our service and didn't raise it for years. We spent a little extra time in chit chat. Dave would do little odd jobs that they couldn't, like unscrewing a hose from a faucet, programming their sprinkler system, or moving something heavy. We got phone numbers to communicate with their adult children, we reported when things were amiss. We kept mowing periodically until the house was sold. We attended their funerals. 

As we cared for our customers, God continued to provide for us. I was a stay-at-home mom, so we were depending on this business alone to support our family, and He was faithful. In summers, our kids had built-in summer jobs working in our business. We paid them generously, and they had money to buy (mostly) what they wanted. They learned to work hard, and they also learned what they needed to do to advance their own careers so they would no longer have to work for their parents. 

While the parents are away- Harrison, 14, and Caleb, 16, run the business for a few days in August of 2012 while we leave for a vacation.

Once people know we have a lawn service, the next question is always, "What do you do in winter? Do you do snow removal?" Our answer is, "We used to." When our kids were still home, if a snow was heavy enough to cancel school, we would work all day clearing the driveways of our customers who'd requested it. We often made enough to cover our mortgage and give the kids money too. However, some years in Wichita we don't see much snow. Also, since our summers were busy with mowing, we increasingly looked on winter as our vacation time.

In 2018 when Harrison was stationed in Oregon with the Coast Guard, we took 23 days to drive up the Pacific Coast Highway and help him move in. In 2020 we spent 27 days driving down the coast and stopping for a visit with him and his wife, Olivia. An RV purchase led us to check out Florida for 42 days in 2022 and 49 in 2023. 

Our freedom to travel has been unexpected bonus, one that we are loathe to relinquish as we sometimes contemplate other vocations. We are grateful for God's provision for our family.

Lawn mower maintenance- Dave gets his mowers ready for the 2021 season.

Remembering Share Prayer and Dare

Sunday was a blast from the past. Pastor Dave Mitchell's sermon series, "How Does Your Garden Grow?" has really brought to light many inspiring stories from the people of Westridge as we attempt to cultivate the corners of the garden where God has placed us. 

Last week I started a blog about the five-person panel Dave assembled to bring a "sermon" about how they are bringing Christ into their diverse workplaces. I didn't get very far on my blog last Sunday night, but I still plan to share those thoughts as well.

However, I want to talk about yesterday. The panel was made of four Westridge members who are in different stages of preparing for full-time ministry, one already has her degree, others just beginning.

The one at the first end of the panel was Brady Long, who is a sophomore at Tabor College. He has recently decided to pursue youth ministry. Onstage, Brady said he was forgoing his earlier notes to talk about a campus ministry he was involved with at Tabor. 

Brady grew up at Westridge (I remember teaching him in 1st grade Sunday School) and he attended youth group, but he said the ministry that brought him closest to God was Share Prayer and Dare at Tabor. Brady said the usual format was someone would share their testimony or a hard time that God had brought them through. Often the talks were deeply vulnerable and personal. After the sharing, the large group would break into smaller groups where they would discuss what they felt God wanted to teach them through the sharing that night, and what they would take away from the presentation. 

Brady said those nights were so powerful and life-changing that he wants to become a leader who will continue to create that experience for others. 

And around that point in the program, maybe because my husband, Dave, and I were sitting close to the front and nudging each other, Pastor Dave Mitchell pointed out that David Franklin had started that ministry years ago.

"Contributed to it," my husband clarified. "In the late '80s."

Which was news to Brady, so we gave him a brief history of the start of Share, Prayer, and Dare afterwards when we went to congratulate him and thank him for sharing during the service.

David Franklin and Brady Long

Last night, I did a deep dive into my chronological stack of The Tabor College View student newspapers (of course I saved them. I was a reporter and then editor for all of my time at Tabor).

According to the View, the group Share, Prayer, and Dare started at the beginning of the 1988-89 school year. It was a ministry of the Campus Ministries Council and run completely by a committee of students. It replaced Tabor Fellowship, a group that had been meeting in the Schlicting Center, an intimate venue that easily held the handful of students who regularly attended. 

Share, Prayer, and Dare started in the Schlicting Center as well, but soon outgrew the small space and was moved to the cafeteria.

What changed? The View articles don't give the back story, but I remember. We have to go back to 1983.

My husband, David Franklin, and some of his friends became Christians while attending Fellowship of Christian Athletes. As sophomores at Wichita North High, they were excited about their new faith, and they set out to invite others. They held weekly Bible studies crammed in one friend's basement. When they outgrew that, it became his parents' front lawn. When that was no longer feasible, the high school students rented an elementary school gym for the evening. They passed a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket for contributions to pay the $50 rent for the gym. 

Eventually, the group found a home for their city-wide non-denominational Thursday night Bible study downtown in an old coffee bar called The Dandelion. Several adult mentors (in their twenties and thirties) came alongside, like Earnest Alexander, Terry Williams, and Robert Lang. By that time, the Bible studies were regularly attracting 100 to 200 kids. Friends were telling friends. High schoolers were preaching. Everyone was praying. Kids were getting saved.  

David Franklin, who by this time had graduated from high school, left this environment to go play football at Tabor College. He chose Tabor because on his campus visit people seemed to genuinely want to follow Christ. But he found the Tabor Fellowship group to be lacking. 

So, he started inviting Campus Ministry Council leaders and others to attend the Thursday Night Bible Study in Wichita. Carloads would leave campus and make the hour-long drive to the Dandelion where they would see students worshipping, praying, sharing, and learning to live out their faith.

As a freshman, I started attending. I loved the excitement, the energy, the openness, the love, and the unity. As the semester wore on, some became too busy to continue attending, but I managed to find time on Thursday nights to catch a ride to the Bible study. A few times it was just David Franklin and me in his Subaru hatchback. We talked a lot on that hour drive there and back. But that's another story.

The Tabor students who had attended the Thursday Night Bible Study had caught a vision. That spring, they re-imagined what Tabor Fellowship could be, and they started with a new name that would describe what they would do:  share their struggles, pray for each other, and dare each other to live it out.

Dave Barton, a football player who David Franklin had invited to the Thursday Night Bible Study, became the chairperson. Another on the committee was Brenda Wichert, who wrote in the yearbook that the move to meet in the cafeteria ushered in a new tradition they called the "Table Game," where first arrivers would grab a partner and move the tables out of the way so the group could sit in a circle. Brenda reported that the 10-20 students in the group grew to 100 as the year progressed (a fourth of Tabor's student population at the time). "Many students gave their testimonies and shared with the group the changes they were making in their lives and how they were growing," Brenda said.

So it was good to hear from Brady that lives are still being changed through Share, Prayer, and Dare. The group now meets in the historic Mennonite Brethren church, which was moved to Tabor's campus in 1989.

And the Thursday Night Bible Study? Terry Williams, one of the "older" leaders who got involved went to seminary, came back and started River Community Church in Wichita. One of the other Bible study leaders was Dave Mitchell, who served as an associate pastor at River until starting Westridge in 2012.

Hebrews 10:24-25 "And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another--and all the more as you see the Day approaching."