Adapted from Remissioning Church by Josh Hayden. ©2025 Josh Hayden. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press.

One of the most formative practices your church can engage in remissioning is to regularly bury your preferences for the sake of a greater mission. Regularly give up some of the things you prefer collectively so you can find new ways to bear fruit.

There is an episode of Radiolab, a podcast that describes itself as being on a “curiosity bender,” that describes how trees of different species living in a forest have an underground network that allows them to share food, nutrients, and resources so that they might all live. It’s called the “Wood Wide Web” (Jad Abumrad, Robert Krulwich, and Suzanne Simard, “From Tree to Shining Tree,” Radiolab, podcast transcript, July 30, 2016). We might expect trees to grow stronger and taller and block out trees of other species, sizes, or age, but instead they are caught up in a network of relationships.

In forests there are eyelash-size threads in the soil that can measure miles and miles long connecting trees to each other. While we might assume the tree’s roots are what provide the tree with nutrients, it’s actually this small tube-like fungus connecting the trees that helps them receive nutrients from the soil. In return, the trees make sugar to help the fungus live. Eventually the fungus and the roots intertwine, the tubes wrapping themselves into the root system so tree and fungus can work together.

What’s even more beautiful, complicated, and amazing than this (check out the whole episode if you get a chance!), individual trees will use the fungus to communicate when they need more nutrients, minerals, or resources. The trees can also send warning signals to each other through the fungus. They send a chemical into the fungus that’s like a cry of pain or danger, and the fungus helps them produce a chemical that makes them taste bad to an attacker (say an invasive beetle). But here’s the most amazing part:

Suzanne Simard: As those trees are injured and dying, they’ll dump their carbon into their neighbors. So—so carbon will move from that dying tree. So its resources, its legacy will move into the mycorrhizal network into neighboring trees. . . .

Robert Krulwich: When sick trees give up their food, the food doesn’t usually go to their kids or even to trees of the same species. What the team found is the food ends up very often with trees that are new in the forest and better at surviving global warming. It’s as if the individual trees were somehow thinking ahead to the needs of the whole forest.

Suzanne Simard: So we know that Douglas fir will take, a dying Douglas fir, will send carbon to neighboring Ponderosa pine. And so why is that? . . .There’s an intelligence there that’s beyond just the species. (Abumrad, Krulwich, and Simard, “From Tree to Shining Tree”)

There is something profound in the way God has created trees to be caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality (Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. James M. Washington [New York: HarperCollins, 1991], 290). Trees need each other. Trees look out for each other. Individual trees lay down their lives for trees that come after them and are more equipped to withstand current pressures and long-term issues. Whatever affects one tree directly affects all of the trees indirectly.

If even trees can die with purpose, how might our churches be more intentional to invest ourselves in a future we may not ourselves enjoy? If trees can bury their preferences for their own lives, their own species, and their own well-being for the sake of the whole and for those trees coming after them, how much more purposefully and intentionally can we in our churches learn to bury our preferences for the sake of the mission God has for us? When we fail to live this out together we short-circuit the development and discipleship of our people.

One of the common ways established churches learn to bury preferences is by moving from a Sunday-centric discipleship plan to a gathered and scattered plan. Many churches create discipleship opportunities before and/or after the worship service on Sundays: youth, children, and adults all meeting in classes before worship created convenience, easy ways to track participation, and a collective experience. Other activities would happen on Sunday evenings. However, as youth sports, schools, and other extracurricular activities now occur regularly on Sundays, churches are discovering that when a family misses a Sunday they miss . . . everything. When the gathered rhythms of a church’s life are confined to one day, it leaves out a host of families who are not able to participate in worship and discipleship groups weekly.

Many churches have learned to bury their preference that Sunday be the only day for discipleship opportunities. This means that previously left out or unconsidered families can have an opportunity to experience community and discipleship. In my church this looks like having some core programming on Sundays (worship and some discipleship groups) while multiplying the number of scattered discipleship groups that meet during the week and different times of day. We have groups based on age as well as affinity. We also create one-page discipleship guides connected to the Scriptures we use in worship as a way to foster connection to one another even when we can’t be in worship together. These discipleship guides can be used by individuals and groups to create community and shared spaces for the Spirit to work even while scattered.

Disrupting the status quo of Sunday-centric worship and discipleship can frustrate some church members because it reveals the loss of a time when church was experienced as a central part of a person’s week and rhythm of life. Burying the preference for Sundays to be the end-all-be-all of making disciples often reveals other unnamed expectations (e.g. worship attendance as the governing metric to define success, Sunday School as the “proper way” to pass on the faith, and groups that meet during the week don’t “count”).

The language of “burying our preferences” for the sake of our shared mission is language we can use in every area of work. Too many mission opportunities? How might we bury our preferences together and prune where necessary so we can bear healthier fruit? Unclear discipleship pathways? How might we bury our preferences together and prune where necessary so we can bear healthier fruit?

Burying our preferences is a helpful way to shift disciple-making from creating consumers to developing citizens of the kingdom. Practically, the process follows these principles:

• Set limits. Establish an agreed-upon time frame for a program, event, or format to bear fruit.

• Talk directly about preferences and the need to lay them down for a shared mission.

• Give people space to identify preferences and grieve losses.

• Put manure on it, i.e., give something a chance to bear fruit before you prune it or cut it down.

• Situate burying preferences within the bigger story of how God transforms us. (It’s not just change for change’s sake!)

• Create opportunities to reflect on the experience of burying preferences and invite people to share what they have learned.

• Encourage people to live it out before they decide if they believe it.

As a leader, be honest about how you are burying preferences in your own personal life and in your shared life at church. (Most people will assume that everything that happens in worship, discipleship, and so on is your preference!) Burying your preferences as a church will help you practice repentance with your whole life. And it will create a clearer pathway to communal transformation.