The Baobab Tree

W. Carl Ketcherside

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     Africa is a land of peculiarities. The baobab tree is one of them. In his beautifully illustrated book The River Nile, Bruce Brander describes the trees as having "fat tubs for trunks and antlers for branches." Indeed the trunks sometimes reach thirty feet in circumference and the natives hollow them out for huts in which to dwell. There is an interesting legend of the Arabs that the devil picked up the baobab tree and thrust its branches into the ground leaving the roots sticking up into the air.

     This may be what has happened to the church in a lot of areas for it would appear that things are the reverse of what they were in the beginning. And we will never turn the world upside down until we get the church right side up. If the church is to be like Jesus it must

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begin coming to minister and not to be ministered unto. It must also be willing to give its life in order to gain it and to die in order to live.

     The early church gathered around a table, the modern church sits before a pulpit. Then they loved the brethren and talked about Jesus, now they profess to love Jesus and talk about the brethren. Then they had no church buildings and sounded out the word, now they have their own architecture and sound the word in. The primitive saints went everywhere preaching the word, their modern counterparts go anywhere there is word of preaching.

     Jesus used the cross as a hammer to batter down middle walls of partition; now men use the same cross as an excuse to build them up again. Once the believers would give their lives for the brethren; many now would rather die than give their brethren recognition.

     The congregations are not generally lithe, lean, trim runners in the race of life. Many of them, like the baobab tree, are fat tubs, preoccupied with their own little rounds of trivia, living for self, loving their own concerns, leaving the world to flounder in a morass of problems, with no helping hand extended for fear of getting the robe of righteousness soiled and sticky. The world is in a pretty sticky mess and the idea seems to be to stay out of vital contact with it until it straightens itself out and decent folk can again afford to associate with it and take the credit for its improvement.

     Actually the church is more affected by social mores and standards in our affluent culture than it affects them. It is like a client of a poverty relief program who learns the technique of profit and loss, and waxes wealthy only to look with disdain upon his former associates. Or like a teetotaler who starts out to rid the world of the curse of alcoholism and ends up taking a nip on the side with the bottle winning the battle.

     I suspect the Arab legend about the baobab tree is sheer imagination. I do not think the devil is particularly interested in trees since men quit carving gods out of them. But I think it is quite possible he has turned the church upside down and I wish a lot of the members of it were as interested in it as he is.