Originally posted July 25, 2007.

The nature of religion is like a grove of mighty trees planted of many different seeds. One tree takes root, extending its reach deep into the soil. Its trunk grows high into the sky. Many broad branches stretch from near to far, sprouting or dropping leaves over the cycles of each season.

Faith is the acorn planted in the grove. The soil in which it extends is like our “roots”; human history, the natural world, the archaic foundations in the Earth and cosmos. The trunk is the Christian faith itself. Each branch is a denomination or sect of the Church of all believers, universal and catholic. The leaves are the believers themselves, always full of the potential to grow, living and dying with each passing generation.

Many different types of trees grow in the grove: birch and pine, spruce and ash. Some trees are tall and mighty, while others are thick and shrub-like. Some are even green all year round. Each type of tree is like a religion. Eastern and Western, religions of the goddess and the gods, religions of transcendence and religions of immanence, otherworldly esoteric and this-worldly practical.

There’s room for many different kinds of vegetation in the grove, and each living tree bears a distinctive beauty. We believe this not merely because tradition tells us so, or because reason dictates this truth as the outcome of logic, and not because of allegiance to a human philosophy ideology, but because we sense and recognize the life force of the Creator in every type of living thing. We all are born of seeds; we sprout roots; we grow trunks; we grow branches; leaves renew themselves continually. With variations, of course, the processes of growth bring the acorn to life for decades or centuries.

It’s all good, because it all comes from God. Beyond the differences, there is an invisible unity that can be experienced and known as truth. We say this in the tradition of monotheism, as believers in Jesus Christ as a revelation of the truth about human life and destiny, and as practicing members in different branches of the tree of Christianity.

The Integral Christian believes in Jesus Christ as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. This means affirming the distinctive worth of the Tree of Christ as one tree among many others in the grove of God’s design and Spirit’s domain.

The Way, the Truth, and the Life is not to be confused with the form of any particular type of tree, or any single tree. Ultimately, Christ is present in all the trees of the grove as the drive towards the fullness of life, death, and resurrection.