During my time serving overseas as a missionary, I lived in rural West Africa. Rustic doesn’t quite describe the living conditions. No electricity. No running water. That meant water had to come out of the ground, and it had to do so by hand. I had to draw water from a well.
Drawing water from a well became a frequent analogy in my ministry. The daily trip to the well is, in many ways, not too different from our spiritual vitality as believers and as churches. On the equator, it gets hot and that water is refreshing. It is more than refreshing; it is essential; it is life-giving. Without water a village cannot exist. The daily trip to the well was a nonnegotiable part of life. The water was, in many ways, the source of vitality in the village. What is more, without a bucket, a person had little chance of gaining access to the water. Wells are deep.
My first experiences with drawing water were laughable. You would think it is a cinch, but you would be wrong. I can remember my first trip to the well, bucket in hand. I was the new guy and only Westerner in the village and everyone knew it. So, on that fateful first voyage to the well everyone nearby stopped what they were doing to look on for some entertainment. I’m sure they knew what was about to happen. I walked over to the well, peered down inside, and pitched the bucket on the rope into the dark water at the bottom. It hit with a splash, and that’s when I discovered an important truth.
Here’s the dirty little secret: buckets float.
When you drop a bucket down in a well, unless you do it right, it just sits on top of the water. Even if the bucket is metal it still does not settle into the water in a way where you can pull it back up full without the right technique. It is unfortunate how many times I lifted the bucket back up the rope and repeated the same process before someone came to my rescue.
It took someone showing me how to use the tool correctly for me to benefit from it. After multiple failed attempts, one of my neighbors sent over their little girl to instruct me in drawing water. Let that sink in. Here I was the confident adult Westerner, recently moved into their village to teach them a thing or two, being tutored by a seven-year-old in a task so rudimentary everyone knew how to do it by the time they were three.
Of course, it’s easy to see how this analogy compares to our spiritual vitality. Wells are a common occurrence in the pages of Scripture, and their significance was certainly not lost on the original audience. In John 4, we find one such encounter where Jesus confronts a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. Using the well as his illustration, Jesus says, “Everyone who drinks from this water will get thirsty again. But whoever drinks from the water that I will give him will never get thirsty again. In fact, the water I will give him will become a well of water springing up in him for eternal life” (John 4:13-14).
The life-giving water is Christ, and that bucket becomes our means of access, the tool used to drink of that life-giving water. For the individual, this may be their routines of spiritual discipline, their prayer life, and time spent in the Word of God. David Mathis refers to these as “habits of grace” in his book of that name. The habits or disciplines become the means through which grace is administered and applied to the Christian life. Think of these habits as the bucket through which we access our life-giving water.
However, this analogy extends past the individual believer to a whole gospel community, or local church. For the church as a whole, these may be programs, systems, and resources used to facilitate the spiritual vitality of the congregation. Corporate worship services, music, preaching, small groups, and curriculum are all buckets used to facilitate that vital relationship between Christ and his church.
So the word picture has personal and corporate ramifications. We as Christians are told to abide in Christ, to be part of the vine. Local church leadership is tasked with equipping the saints for the work of the ministry, to present their congregations mature in Christ. When it comes to this relationship between the source of our vitality and the means through which we access it, there are at least two ditches into which we often fall. My hope here is to simply point those out and encourage you to avoid the ditches.
Don’t praise the bucket instead of the water.
In all my time in Africa, I never once heard someone praise their bucket as though it was the thing that gives them life. It’s obvious when we’re talking about buckets and water, but often not so when we’re talking about spiritual vitality. Too often, we’re guilty of praising the bucket instead of the water.
In an Instagram age, it can be tempting to do the quiet time for the sake of that nice morning snapshot. You know the one. The sun is rising over the verdant horizon off the back porch (or the waves of the beach), the coffee cup is in one hand steaming into the air and the open Bible in the other, complete with its highlights and well-worn marks of deep study. I’m not saying your picturesque moment shouldn’t be captured. I am saying to watch out lest your spiritual formation become performative. I am urging you to resist the temptation to make your means of spiritual vitality more desirable to you than your source of it. Sometimes, we want people to see our bucket, because it shows everyone that we are the kind of people with really nice buckets. We have really good spiritual habits. We are disciplined and serious about our faith.
Perhaps you are not the Instagram type. Maybe you prefer Twitter (or X if you will), where picturesque photos of scenic solace with your savior give way to confident assertions concerning the proper techniques and tools for the spiritually mature and doctrinaire. Threads abound declaring the right ways to do all kinds of spiritual formation, lauding the right buckets. As many threads, perhaps more, exist decrying the downgrade of all the other buckets. Scripture calls us to contend for the faith (Jude 3:1). However, make sure you do not pass the abundant commands to reject foolish and ignorant disputes (2 Timothy 2:23) and to reject a divisive person (Titus 3:10-11). Paul writes yet again to make “every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3). After all the Lord hates “one who stirs up trouble among brothers” (Proverbs 6:19). Beware warring over the proper shape and style of the bucket instead of drinking deep of the water it provides.
The temptation to praise the bucket extends to the church community as well. Simply put, programs alone don’t fix a church’s spiritual vitality problem. We must remember that life, spiritual vitality, comes from the source of living water. In John’s gospel, Jesus tells us that he came that we may have life, and have it abundantly (John 10:10). He continues a few chapters later by telling his disciples that he is the True Vine and that they are merely branches (John 15:5). The analogy is clear: the vine gives life to the branches so that they may produce fruit.
Endless means can be poured into designing the perfect system, perfect service, perfect outreach program, perfect curriculum and it will not refresh the soul. Only Christ himself refreshes the soul. Only Christ satisfies and brings life, passion and drive to the mission of the church. Christ is the water, and the program or process is just the bucket.
The first ditch is praising the bucket instead of the water.
But don’t neglect your bucket.
Without a bucket, you cannot get the water. Sounds simple enough, yet there are many reasons why well-meaning Christians fall into this ditch. Some, in an effort to reject the dangers of legalism, claim we must not focus too much on rules in our lives like reading the Bible every day or spending time memorizing Scripture. These things do not save! And it is true, they surely do not. But denying the importance of daily time in the word is akin to denying the importance of daily conversation in your marriage. It is not much of a marriage if you only talk to your spouse once every week or so. It is not much of a relationship with Christ if you do the same to Him.
A subtle and more common error is not denying the importance of these habits but disregarding their priority in our daily and weekly routines. We are prone to acknowledge their importance without making the actual space in our lives. They are reserved for that time, right around the corner, when life slows down. Or, they are only to be done when our emotions and desires align with our freetime. That’s a mirage, of course. Dry, waterless Christianity is the result of an undisciplined life.
I often hear well-meaning exclamations today that the church does not need any programs, processes, or procedures. While I understand the heart behind such statements, it is an overreaction to say we do not need any of these things. In fact, it’s actually an impossibility for a group of believers to stay organized as a church without some form of structures and systems in place. If you choose to meet at the same time for worship and fellowship each week, then you have already created a program. We should not lament this reality, as long as we understand the difference between the water and the bucket.
In The Trellis and the Vine, Collin Marshall and Tony Payne pick up this metaphor in a way that is profoundly helpful for conversations about church ministry. Throughout Scripture, the church is described in organic terms. In this way, Marshall and Payne claim the church is like a vine. It grows and thrives based on the things that nourish life. However, for vines to grow well, they need structures to support them. This is why vine dressers build a trellis for their vines. You want your church to worship together, but that requires (among other things) having a place and time that you all agree upon doing so. You hope that your church members can grow in their understanding of Scripture together, but that requires some structure and guidance in study and facilitation of the conversations where members can do this. You hope that your church would multiply by sending members to be missionaries or church planters, but that requires processes that identify called members who can be equipped and sent. For a vine to grow to its healthiest potential, it needs a support structure, a trellis.
Faithful local church ministry requires us to understand this difference. The real trick is not confusing the priority and purpose of the trellis and the vine, or in my analogy, the water and the bucket. The church is a vine, not a trellis, but it needs structure and tools to support its life and growth. In the same way, Christ is our source of vitality and spiritual formation. He is our water. These programs and processes are merely the buckets. They are our means of accessing that water. If we understand this distinction, then we praise the right thing and we have a means of measuring the effectiveness of our programs and tools. A bucket is not successful in itself but only when it brings us the water we seek to live. In fact, a plastic bucket draws as much water as one made out of gold. When we confuse the bucket and the water, we become guilty of being that church that says, “look how nice our bucket is,” instead of the church that says, “drink this and you will never thirst again.”