“I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”

Henry David Thoreau

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 auxānō. The same root those scientists would one day borrow.

It is worth knowing what kind of word it is. Auxānō 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. Auxānō 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. Stop 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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Gethsemane.

The garden where Jesus sweat blood was named, in advance, after the very thing that was about to happen to him. He went to the press to be pressed. He chose the place on purpose.

Olives do not give oil voluntarily. The fruit has to be broken. In the ancient method there were three pressings. The first, gentlest, produced the finest oil, the kind reserved for the temple lamp, for anointing kings, for healing wounds. The second pressing was heavier, and that oil went into cooking pots. The third crushed the pit itself, and the rough oil that came out burned in clay lamps until morning. Nothing was thrown away.

The Hebrew Bible never apologizes for this image. Samuel pours oil on a forgotten shepherd boy and that boy becomes king. A widow with a creditor at the door pours her last jar into every empty vessel she can borrow, and it does not stop until there are no more vessels. Psalm 23 puts the oil on the head of a man who has just walked through the valley of the shadow. The thing that comforts and consecrates and heals the people of God is, almost every time, the product of something that has been broken.

Some of you carry losses I do not know about. Some of you carry a public version of pain that has been written about by people who got the details wrong. Some of you are lying awake at three in the morning replaying conversations. Some of you have been told, in spiritualized language, that what you are walking through is a gift, and you are too tired to argue but too honest to agree.

While others make light, and others look on and judge, while others mock, while others betray even when no wrong has been done, the press keeps doing its work. That is the part nobody warns you about. The crushing rarely happens in private. There is usually an audience.

The crushing is not the gift. The crushing is the crushing. Olives do not enjoy the press. Jesus asked three times for the cup to pass. He did not perform peace. Mark uses a Greek word in 14:33 that translators have wrestled with for centuries: ekthambeisthai. Something close to horror. Something close to being struck out of yourself. He was not romantic about what was coming.

And when they took him out of the garden, Pilate said it out loud three separate times in John’s gospel: oudemian heuriskō en autō aitian, I find no crime in him. The press did not pause for the verdict. The mockers kept mocking. The betrayer had already left the room. The disciples slept through the worst hour of his life. Innocence did not stop the crushing. It never has.

So the question is not whether the press hurts. The question is what comes out.

What comes out of his press is the part the prophets could only hint at. Centuries earlier, the sons of Korah wrote a song about a king anointed with shemen sasson, the oil of gladness, above all his companions. Isaiah, working in the same root, said the Servant would come to give shemen sasson in place of mourning, oil of joy where the ashes had been. Both prophecies share a Hebrew word with the garden itself. Shemen. The very thing pressed out of broken olives. The oil of joy is the oil of crushing. Same word. Same substance. It does not exist apart from a press.

We rarely choose the press. Most of us would not choose it if we could see it coming. He saw it coming and walked into it on purpose. No one takes my life from me, he said, I lay it down of my own accord. The disciples were dragged toward Gethsemane in the dark. He led them.

What flowed out of him there, and out of him at the cross, and out of him on the third morning, did not stay with him. Fifty days later it fell on a hundred and twenty people in an upper room, and Peter stood up and said, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel. The oil pressed out of Jesus is the Spirit poured out on us. Christos means anointed. Christian means marked by the same oil. Every steady voice that has ever ministered to you in a hard season was carrying, somewhere underneath, oil that came out of his press, not theirs. His was the pressing that changed everything. Ours only ever participate in his.

Paul writes to the Corinthians from inside his own press. Afflicted in every way but not crushed. Perplexed but not driven to despair. Struck down but not destroyed. The Greek verbs pile up like things that did not finish him off. Then, as if abstraction will not do, he says we always carry in our body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may be visible in our body.

In this last year, the people who have steadied me are not the ones with the perfect lives and not the ones who circled back when it was safe. They are the ones who listen first, do not assume and then when they do speak their voices have a particular timbre, a steadiness underneath the words, that you only get from having been crushed and having let the oil flow out instead of hoarding it. You can hear it, though I cannot quite tell you what you are hearing. There is no faking it, or if there is I have not figured out how. The oil tells the truth about the press.

The opposite is also true, and harder to say. You can be crushed and produce nothing. You can be pressed and let the fruit rot. The rottenness pouring out in our words, infecting others and our own hearts. You can take the press personally, as if it were a verdict, and seal yourself shut. The oil is not automatic. The pressing alone is not the ministry. What you do with what comes out, or fail to do, is.

There is a woman in Mark 14 who breaks an alabaster jar over the head of Jesus. The text is precise: she broke it. The perfume could not have come out otherwise. Jesus calls what she did kalon ergon, a beautiful work, and tells the disciples that wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her. She did not save the jar. She did not protect the asset. She ruined it in front of everyone, and the room smelled of her brokenness for the rest of the night. Jesus carried that fragrance into Gethsemane the next evening, into the courtroom, and to the cross.

The oil that anoints other people comes, every time, from a jar that has been broken.

If you are in the press right now, I am not going to tell you it is fine. It is not fine. Olives do not enjoy the press and neither do we. But the oil is real. What is happening in you is not a waste. People you have not met will be steadied by the timbre in your voice that came out of this season.

Ministry is others being blessed by the oil that came from what crushed you.

The press will not have the final word. The press is not the end of the story. The oil is.

Most days I almost believe it. Some days I do.


- Josh Kelsey

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Both crossed the same line. Both ran the same 26.2 miles. One of them did it in 1 hour, 59 minutes, and 30 seconds. The other took 12 hours and 16 minutes.

I want to tell you why both of them are heroes.

The First: Sabastian Sawe and the Two Hour Barrier

Sabastian Sawe is 31. Kenyan. Quiet. Until Sunday morning, the kind of elite marathoner most casual fans couldn’t pick out of a lineup. By Sunday lunchtime he had done what generations of physiologists swore was impossible. He ran an officially sanctioned, record eligible marathon in under two hours.

For context, a year ago the world record was 2:00:35. The barrier of 2:00:00 was a wall. Eliud Kipchoge famously dipped under it in Vienna in 2019, but everyone knew the asterisk: rotating pacers, engineered conditions, no record possible. It was magnificent. It wasn’t real.

Sunday was real. Point to point from Blackheath to The Mall. World Athletics rules. Tested, ratified, in the books. Sawe ran a negative split. 60:29 for the first half, 59:01 for the second. He ran the 24th mile in 4 minutes and 12 seconds, the fastest mile ever clocked inside a marathon. He had been injured in January and only started training in February.

After the race, he barely talked about himself. The man who just moved marathon running’s four minute mile told the BBC, “Approaching the end of the race, I was feeling strong, and my fellow Ethiopian was so competitive, I think he was the one who helped a lot.” A line moved on Sunday that will never move back.

The Last: Clair Roberts and the Finish Line in the Dark

Clair Roberts is 35. From Milton Keynes. Not an elite. Not an athlete by any measure she would recognise. She crossed the finish line at 12 hours and 16 minutes, well after the elite tents had been taken down, after the streets had reopened, after Sawe’s medal was probably already in a drawer somewhere.

She finished last. Of nearly sixty thousand people, she was the final one in.

Seven years ago Clair was in a place where she didn’t want to be alive anymore. She made one phone call, to the Samaritans. That call kept her here. She has volunteered for them ever since, answering the line for the next person on the worst night of theirs. On Sunday she ran 26.2 miles to raise money for the charity that kept her breathing.

She raised around £2,000. She was helped over the final stretch by tailwalkers, volunteers who walk with the slowest runners after the roads reopen, guiding them to a secondary finish line at St James’s Park because The Mall has long since closed. She had never pushed her body that hard before.

She told the BBC, “I was battling a lot of emotions on Sunday. It was so much harder than I thought it would be. But to be the last person to cross that line feels really special, and I’m proud of myself.”

On the Samaritans, she said: “During a really tough time in my life, they saved me from myself. I plunged into very dark times, but it is amazing what one phone call can do.”

The Same Medal

Here’s the strange and holy thing about a marathon. The medal Sawe got is the same medal Clair got. Same ribbon. Same weight. The clock disagrees about who is greater. The medal does not.

The marathon, as an event, has always quietly insisted on something the world doesn’t believe. That finishing is the point. Speed is a category. Perseverance is the discipline.

I’ve run a few marathons myself. I know what 26.2 miles asks of you. And the more I think about Sunday, the more I think the harder question isn’t what those miles took from Sawe. What does 26.2 ask at hour eleven, in the dark, with the volunteers gone home and your legs failing and the only crowd left being the streetlights of central London?

This isn’t false equivalence. Sawe is the fastest marathoner who has ever lived. But the same finish line waits for the fastest human ever timed and the woman who comes in last with the streetlights as her crowd.

The Race Called Life

The writer of Hebrews knew none of this and all of it. Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us (Hebrews 12:1). The Greek word for “race” there is agōn. Agony, struggle, contest. The instruction is not “win.” The instruction is “run, with endurance, the one course set in front of you.”

Paul, near the end, didn’t write I won the race. He wrote, τὸν δρόμον τετέλεκα, ton dromon teteleka, I have finished the race (2 Timothy 4:7). And here is something that has not left me since this last Easter. The verb Paul uses for finished, teleō, is the same verb Jesus used from the cross. Tetelestai. It is finished.

Paul didn’t measure his life in splits. He measured it in fidelity to the course Jesus had already finished for him.

Most of us won’t be Sawe. Almost none of us will be the first at anything. The world will hand its podiums and its records and its trophies to a tiny number of people, and we won’t be them, and that is fine. But every one of us is running. Every one of us has a course. And every one of us will, eventually, come within sight of a finish line.

The question is not how fast.

The question is whether we finished well. Whether we kept faith. Whether we ran for something larger than our own time. Whether we, like Clair, kept moving when the official crowds were gone and the volunteer at our shoulder was the only one left to cheer. Whether, when the line came, we were still on the course.

A Word, If You’re Winning

Some of you reading this are not at mile 22. Some of you are at mile 23 of something that’s actually going well. The career is rising. The work is growing. The kids are thriving. The finish line is close and you’re going to cross it ahead of the field.

I want you to look at Sawe again.

Here’s what struck me about his interview after the most extraordinary marathon performance in human history. He talked first about Kejelcha. The man stride for stride beside him. The runner who, in Sawe’s words, “was the one who helped a lot.” He wasn’t running for history. He was running with someone competitive enough to keep him at world record pace. The history happened on its own.

Before the race, he had also voluntarily asked the antidoping authority to test him more, not less, because Kenyan distance running has been dogged by suspicion and he wanted his name above it.

He told reporters, “For the new generation, it shows to run a record is possible. Everything is possible with a matter of time.”

That is what winning well looks like.

It looks like running for the person next to you, not the cameras above you. It looks like inviting accountability you don’t owe. It looks like an interview that names a friend instead of yourself. It looks like crossing the line and saying, “It’s a day to remember for me,” when half the planet just watched you make history.

If you are winning right now, the temptation isn’t to give up. It’s to forget. To forget who carried you here. To forget the people still running. To forget that your gift was given.

The way to win even further is to win like Sawe. Quietly. Honestly. With your friend in the lane next to you.

A Word, If You’re Tired

If you are reading this and you are somewhere around mile 22 of something hard. A marriage. A calling. A grief. A battle for your own life. Let me say what Sonya Trivedy of the Samaritans said of Clair when she came in long after the crowds had gone home:

“When it comes to something as amazing as completing a marathon, you don’t finish last, you just get to celebrate the achievement for longer.”

The race has already been finished for you. Tetelestai. What’s asked of you now is not speed. It’s the next step.

Two Questions for the Rest of Us

Most of us spend our lives watching the front of the pack. We celebrate the Sawes. We measure ourselves against the people breaking tape and breaking history, and we wonder why we feel behind.

But the back of the pack is where the gospel actually lives.

So two questions.

Who in your world right now could you be a tailwalker for? Not the ones winning. The ones limping. The ones at hour eleven of something hard. The ones who wouldn’t finish if someone didn’t walk the last few miles beside them. Pick a name. Walk with them.

And who could you be a Clair to? Clair didn’t get to The Mall on her own. Seven years ago, a stranger picked up a phone and gave her another day to live. She is the answer to that phone call. Maybe you are someone’s phone call. Maybe you’ve already been picked up off the floor of your own life by grace, and someone in your orbit needs you to be the voice on the line.

The race is not just about finishing your own. It’s about who you carry with you.

Run on.

Josh Kelsey

www.joshkelsey.org

If this landed, the kindest thing you can do is forward it to one person at mile 22.

It struck me because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what we’ve lost in our rush toward digital everything, and more importantly, what we might be able to get back.

For thirteen years, Georgie and I have built FOUNT Church around a simple idea we call the Dinner Party model. Every Wednesday night, groups of eight to twelve people or as many as your place can hold, gather in homes across New York City to share a meal, have honest conversation, and explore what it means to follow Jesus together. No screens. No slides. No performance. Just people around tables, doing what human beings have done for millennia: breaking bread and sharing life.

When we started in 2013, this felt like a nice addition to church life. Today, it feels like a form of resistance.

What we didn’t expect was how far this simple idea would travel. Over 700 churches have now gone through our Dinner Party training, and many have renamed their small groups from “connect groups” or “cell groups” to simply “Dinner Parties.” There’s something powerful in not having to explain to someone what a cell group is. The name immediately creates a sense of connection and invitation. Everyone knows what happens at a dinner party, you share food, you have real conversation, you connect.

What we’ve gained and lost

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not anti-technology. I’m writing this on a laptop, I’ll publish it on a digital platform, and you’re probably reading it on your phone. Technology has connected us in ways that seemed impossible when I was growing up in Sydney. I can FaceTime with our church planters, collaborate with leaders across the globe, and stay connected with our community when I’m traveling between New York and Australia.

But somewhere in our rush to stay connected to everyone, we’ve become disconnected from the people right in front of us. We’ve gained access to the whole world and lost the art of being present with our actual neighbors.

The data backs this up. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared loneliness a public health epidemic, with health impacts equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Despite being more “connected” than ever, people report feeling more isolated, more anxious, and more hungry for authentic relationship than previous generations.

I see this every week in our dinner parties. People walk in carrying their phones like security blankets, checking notifications even as they’re saying hello. But something happens when we sit around a table with food and real conversation. The phones go away. The walls come down. People remember what it feels like to be known.

The theology of the table

There’s something deeply theological about sharing meals. Jesus didn’t build his movement in synagogues or lecture halls. He built it around tables. The disciples’ most profound moments with Jesus happened over bread and fish, at wedding feasts, in homes where he was invited to dinner.

When Jesus wanted to give his followers something to remember him by, he didn’t create a creed or a ritual. He gave them a meal. “Do this in remembrance of me.” Break bread. Share the cup. Be present with each other.

The early church understood this. They gathered in homes, shared meals, and “had all things in common.” The Greek word they used was koinonia, which means deep fellowship or shared life. It’s not something you can experience through a screen.

This isn’t ancient history. It’s a blueprint for how human beings are designed to connect.

Why screens can’t replace presence

I’ve watched what happens when we try to build community primarily through digital means. During the pandemic, we had no choice. We moved everything online, and I’m grateful for the technology that kept us connected during those impossible months. But we also learned what doesn’t translate through screens.

You can’t comfort someone crying through a Zoom call the way you can when you’re sitting next to them. You can’t share the spontaneous laughter that happens when someone spills wine on themselves during dinner. You can’t pray for someone with your hand on their shoulder when they’re a thousand miles away.

Digital connection is efficient. Physical presence is transformative.

This isn’t just about church or faith communities. It’s about the fundamental way human beings are wired. We’re embodied creatures. We need eye contact, physical presence, shared experience in real time and space. We need to smell the food cooking, hear the laughter from the kitchen, feel the awkwardness when someone shares something vulnerable and we don’t know how to respond.

We need to remember that some of the most important work in relationships happens in the margins: the conversation that happens while cleaning up after dinner, the moment when someone lingers after everyone else has left, the way people naturally cluster in the kitchen even when there’s a perfectly good living room available.

The dinner table as resistance

In a culture that values efficiency over depth, speed over presence, and broadcast over conversation, the dinner table has become a form of resistance.

When you invite people into your home for dinner, you’re saying that they matter more than your to-do list. When you cook for others, you’re investing time and resources in relationship rather than convenience. When you turn off the TV and put away the phones, you’re choosing presence over entertainment.

When you ask real questions and wait for real answers, you’re choosing depth over surface-level interaction.

This is countercultural work. It takes more time than texting. It’s messier than Zoom calls. It requires vulnerability, patience, and the willingness to be interrupted by real life. But it’s also where transformation happens.

I’ve watched marriages heal over dinner party conversations. I’ve seen shy people find their voices around tables where they felt safe. I’ve witnessed authentic community form among people who never would have connected otherwise.

Making it practical

So how do we reclaim the table in a screen-first world? Here are a few things we’ve learned from thirteen years of dinner parties in one of the world’s most fast-paced cities:

Start small. Invite two or three people over for a simple meal. Don’t overthink the menu or worry about having the perfect setup. Order pizza if you have to. The food is just the excuse to gather.

Create phone-free space. We put a basket by the door for phones during our dinner parties. It felt awkward at first, but now people expect it. Amazing what happens when everyone knows they have each other’s full attention.

Ask better questions. Instead of “How was your week?” try “What’s one thing you’re learning about yourself lately?” or “Where are you seeing God at work in your life?” Questions that require real answers create real conversation.

Make it regular. One-off dinners are nice, but community happens through consistency. Weekly, monthly, whatever works, but make it predictable so people can count on it.

Include everyone in the work. Cooking together, cleaning up together, setting the table together—all of this builds connection. Don’t try to host perfectly. Let people help.

Why this matters now

We’re raising a generation that knows how to connect online but struggles with face-to-face conversation. We’re seeing record levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness, especially among young people. We’re more politically divided, more culturally fragmented, and more isolated from our neighbors than ever before.

The dinner table won’t solve all of these problems. But it’s a place to start.

When we gather around tables, we remember that we’re more than our political opinions, our career achievements, or our social media personas. We’re human beings created for relationship, hungry for connection, and capable of building the kind of community that can change both individuals and cities.

In a screen-first world, the dinner table isn’t just about sharing food. It’s about sharing life. And that’s something no app can replace.




About Josh Kelsey

Josh Kelsey is the founding pastor of FOUNT Church NYC, planted in 2013 with his wife and co-founder Georgie Kelsey. Over 700 churches have implemented their Dinner Party model for community building.

Josh has been featured in RELEVANT Magazine, Yahoo Finance, Business Matters Magazine, and CEOWorld for his work in church planting, community development, and leadership. He writes regularly about faith, leadership, and building authentic community.

For more resources on the Dinner Party model, church planting, and community leadership, visit joshkelsey.org.