I once covered a wall with maps of my city. Streets, suburbs, neighbourhoods, printed large and pinned edge to edge. I stood back to admire the thing. Then I froze, because I had no idea where to start.

Marko, a colleague, did the same thing. Different city, different wall, different maps, same sinking feeling.

I had a plan, a neat one, and the city laughed at it.

The city does not sit still. You do something today, come back tomorrow, and the whole thing has shifted. People move, pressures change, a sure thing dries up, and a dead end sprouts life.

What I really wanted was a shortcut, an instant answer, someone to just tell me what to do. But cities don’t hand out shortcuts.

For years I treated ministry like a factory, pushing the button and expecting the product. Crowds without community. Decisions without disciples. Fruit without roots.

We’ve been farming like this for a century. It’s monoculture farming, where you wipe out everything else and plant one crop for maximum yield. It’s efficient, linear and repeatable, and it looks impressive on a slide.

But it is fragile.

Monoculture needs pesticides and artificial fertiliser just to survive, and it erodes the ground it stands on. When pests come, you don’t rethink anything. You just spray harder. More money, harsher poison.

But if your only reflex is to push harder, you will eventually have dead soil that no longer produces. You will crush the very people you were sent to reach. Cities expose monoculture. Because a city is not a simple field. It is a living ecosystem.

Regenerative farming thinks differently. It looks at depleted land and says: we are going to restore life here. Over time, with a healthy team, with practices that restore and sustain. Not simply seeking the biggest harvest at any cost.

You feed the soil first. You plant, you wait, and then you feed the soil again. That is the rhythm.

There’s a documentary our team keeps returning to called “The Biggest Little Farm.” A couple take dead, cracked ground and spend years coaxing it back to life. Worms return. Birds return. The soil breathes again. It’s slow, it’s messy, and it’s beautiful.

That is the Kingdom.

Jesus never rushed the soil. He walked, he ate, and he asked questions. He built a team, not a crowd.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.” (Matthew 13:31–32)

Small. Buried. Hidden. And then everything.

But here’s the part we keep missing. The mustard seed doesn’t need our spraying. It needs our patience. It needs soil we’ve bothered to tend, and hands willing to wait for worms.

I took the maps down eventually. Not because they were wrong, but because I had been standing up, looking at the whole city, when the work was down at my feet.

Kneel down. Put your hands in it.

Restore the soil.