We Learned This Story Every Year in Church. I Think We Missed the Point.

The parables of Jesus were a staple of Sunday school.

Every year, like clockwork, we would cycle back through the same handful of stories. The Good Samaritan. The Prodigal Son. The Lost Sheep. And somewhere in that rotation, always, the Parable of the Sower. You didn't need to remember what year you were in or who your teacher was. If you stayed in church long enough, you were going to hear those stories again.

And not just hear them. Re-enact them. Color them in. Act them out. Turn them into craft projects that involve glue, paper, and whatever random household container someone had brought from home.

Which is how I found myself, at some point in primary school, holding an old plastic margarine container that had been repurposed into a theological teaching device. Someone had packed it with cotton wool, soaked it in water, and handed out seeds like we were about to discover photosynthesis for the glory of God. We were told this would help us understand the Parable of the Sower.

So we did what we were told. We sprinkled the seeds on top, placed the container on the windowsill, and came back the next week to check on them like a group of highly invested amateur farmers.

And to be fair, it worked.

Little green shoots started pushing up, and for a brief moment, we were all quietly impressed with ourselves. It felt like we had done something meaningful, even if we did not fully understand why.

Then, over the next week or two, everything started to fade.

The same shoots we had been so proud of thinned out, slumped over, and died. It did not happen all at once or in some dramatic collapse, but slowly enough that you could watch it and realize there was nothing you could do to stop it.

Looking back, it is not exactly a mystery.

There was no soil, no depth, nothing underneath to sustain what had started. The whole thing was never going to last, no matter how carefully we checked on it or how much water we added.

What I remember most is not the explanation that came with it, but the disconnect. We were watching something fail in conditions that could never support it, and somehow still being told we had learned something important. Even as a kid, there was a quiet sense that those two things did not quite line up, although I would not have known how to say that at the time.

What stuck with me was not the lesson, but the image. Something that looked alive for a while, that gave you a brief sense of success, and then slowly, almost politely, disappeared.

What Jesus Actually Said

If you want to read the full parable, you'll find it in Matthew 13:1–23, but here's the basic shape of it.

Jesus tells a story about a farmer who goes out to sow seed, scattering it across the ground. The seed lands in different places, and each environment produces a different outcome.

Some of it falls on the path, where it is quickly eaten by birds. Some falls on rocky ground, where it springs up fast but has no depth, so it withers under the sun. Some falls among thorns, where it grows but gets choked out. And some falls on good soil, where it takes root, grows, and produces a harvest.

That is the story.

But this is one of the rare moments where Jesus actually explains his own parable, which is probably why it gets taught so often.

He says the seed represents the message about the kingdom. The path represents those who hear it but do not really take it in, and it is quickly taken away. The rocky ground represents those who receive it with enthusiasm but have no depth, so when things get hard, it does not last. The thorny ground represents those who hear it but find it slowly choked out by worry, wealth, and the general noise of life. And the good soil represents those who hear it, hold onto it, and see something real grow over time.

It is a clean explanation. It is also the version most of us were given.

And once you hear it like that, the question is sitting right there, whether anyone says it out loud or not.

What kind of soil are you?

How It Actually Got Used

No one stood up and said, "We are the good soil." They didn't have to. It was just… assumed. We were in church. We were listening. We were doing the right things. Of course, we were the good soil.

And the story sort of organized everyone else.

There were the people who didn't believe. That was the path. There were the ones who got excited for a bit and then disappeared. That was the rocky ground. There were the ones who got distracted by life, money, stress, whatever. That was the thorny soil.

Which, to be honest, felt good when you were inside it. The story made sense of things. It explained why some people stayed and why others didn't. It reassured you that you were in the right place, doing the right thing.

But it also quietly did something else.

It meant that whenever something didn't grow or didn't stick around, there was already an answer waiting, and it wasn't a curious or compassionate one.

They just weren't good soil.

It just sat there as the obvious explanation. If someone drifted away, if someone struggled, if something didn't take root, the categories were already in place.

The Questions We Never Asked

Once you've got everyone neatly sorted into soil types, you stop interrogating the rest of the story.

You stop asking what the seed actually is, because for us, that part was already locked in. The seed was "the gospel," which in practice meant telling people they were sinners, that Jesus died for them, and that if they believed the right things, they could go to heaven one day. That was the package. Learn it, repeat it, and scatter it as widely as possible. We treated it like spiritual confetti and hoped some of it would stick.

But is that actually what Jesus meant by seed?

In his story, the seed is something that carries life within it and produces growth over time when it lands in the right conditions, which, to me, doesn't really align with it being a memorized set of statements that people are expected to agree with on the spot. What we were handing out often felt more like a script than something capable of taking root and sustaining a life.

Then there is the soil.

If the whole point of the parable is that the condition of the soil matters, it is strange how little time we spent thinking about it. We did not ask how soil becomes good soil, or what prepares it, or what actually helps something take root and last. We mostly assumed people either were or were not the right kind, which is a convenient way of avoiding responsibility. If you have ever spent five minutes in a real garden, you know no one stands there looking at a patch of dirt and saying, "Wow, this soil is clearly the problem," and then goes inside for a cup of tea. You get in there, you turn it over, you pull out whatever is strangling it, you add what it's missing, and you keep working it until something has a chance to grow.

We were not doing that. We were more like people flinging seed in the general direction of other humans and then standing back like judges on a reality show, quietly deciding which ones had what it takes and which ones clearly did not.

Maybe We Should Have Focused on the Soil

If the whole point of the parable is that the condition of the soil determines what grows, then it is strange how little attention we gave to it. Instead, we focused on getting the seed out there. We made sure people heard the message, responded in the moment, and knew what they were supposed to believe. We measured attendance, involvement, and visible commitment because those things are easy to see.

But we did not spend much time helping people deal with what was actually going on beneath the surface. We did not create much space for people to process pain, unlearn harmful beliefs, confront fear, or make sense of their own story. We expected something to take root and grow, without doing much of the slow, uncomfortable work that makes growth possible in the first place.

There is research that backs this up, and it is not especially flattering.

The Reveal Study, which surveyed over 100,000 churchgoers, found that involvement in church programs does not automatically lead to spiritual growth. You can show up, serve, stay busy, and still not develop much depth.

On top of that, work highlighted by Dallas Willard in Renovaré points out that churches tend to measure attendance, participation, and activity, because those things are easy to count, while depth and transformation are much harder to measure and therefore often receive far less attention.

Research closer to home has described a kind of spiritual malaise in modern church life, where people regularly attend but largely consume. They sit, listen, and absorb content, but are not necessarily being formed in any deep or lasting way.

And perhaps most telling of all, studies on spiritual engagement have found that personal practices like reflection, engagement, and internal processing are far more predictive of growth than simply attending church. Being in the room is not the same as growing roots.

Put all of that together, and it starts to look less like a mystery.

We built systems that were very good at throwing around seed and very good at measuring visible activity, but not very good at tending the soil where actual growth happens.

We just told people they need to be "good soil."

We just did not do much to help them become it.

Maybe We Misheard the Point

Maybe the point of the parable was never to divide people into fixed categories, because when you read it carefully, it does not describe different kinds of people so much as it describes what happens under different conditions. It shows what happens when there is no depth, when something gets scorched, when something gets choked out, and when something is given the space to grow.

That is not a judgment. It is an observation.

And once you see it that way, the focus shifts. The question is no longer, "What kind of soil am I?" but "What is happening beneath the surface, and is anything being done about it?"

Because growth is not automatic. It is not guaranteed by hearing the right message or being in the right environment. It depends on whether anything is actually being cultivated, whether there is space for roots to go down, whether the things that choke growth are being dealt with, and whether anyone is paying attention to what is going on beneath the surface.

That is the part we seemed to miss.

We became very good at explaining the categories and very confident in our ability to identify them, but we did far less to help people actually develop the kind of depth the story assumes is necessary.

And looking back, I cannot help but think about that Sunday school experiment.

We watched something begin, we watched it look alive for a while, and then we watched it slowly fade, all in conditions that could never sustain it. Somehow, we still walked away believing the problem must have been the seed or the soil, rather than the system it was placed in.

It turns out that what we were holding in our hands was not just a children's activity.

It was a warning.

Because you cannot expect something to grow simply because you have scattered the seed. And you cannot keep blaming the soil if no one is doing the work required to make growth possible.

At some point, you have to ask whether the problem was never the people at all.

Dan Foster is the author of "Leaving Church, Finding God: Discovering Faith Beyond Organized Religion."

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