*Man leaving tunnel into the wilderness.*
*Photo by* *Mantas Hesthaven* on *Unsplash*

Despite patterns of exclusion and an institution focused on preserving itself, for years I couldn’t imagine leaving my denomination. I felt required to remain “loyal” to tradition: “After all, this church tradition nurtured my faith! For all its flaws, where would I be without its great chain of witnesses?” In my ordination paper, I even declared myself “happily un-Emergent,” decrying the hubris of church innovators for seeming to disregard the value of historic traditions. And so I stayed, begrudgingly so — as if just staying put was itself a mark of faithfulness.

Of all things, it was studying 1st and 2nd Kings that helped open my eyes and loosen my feet.

As our young congregation stumbled through COVID and a national reckoning with race, it was clear that there was no returning to “business as usual.” I turned to Kings, seeking wisdom for these disorienting times, and made a striking discovery: The biblical tradition itself is one big pointer to how and where God moves when our most cherished institutions collapse.

Read from front to back, the story is a complete bummer. A total tragedy. The opening chapters narrate Solomon’s rise, Jerusalem’s wealth, and the detailed construction of the temple – a narrative of political and religious flourishing. But by the time you arrive at the final chapters, it’s as if you’ve entered an episode of Black Mirror. With chilling symmetry, they narrate the end of Solomon’s legacy, Jerusalem’s destruction, and the temple reduced to rubble.

Kings was most likely written from the experience of exile, for people trying to make theological sense of a life after the temple’s destruction and the monarchy’s end. So what’s the intended takeaway? That all institutions eventually fail? That unchecked leaders undermine healthy communities? Those lessons matter, but on closer inspection, Kings offers more than just a counsel of despair.

A new perspective emerges if you read Kings not in a linear way, but in circles – or as scholars call it, a “chiasm,” where layers of the story draw our attention to the center, the one big bullseye that God doesn’t want us to miss.

*A dartboard bullseye illustrating the chiastic structure of 1 & 2 Kings*

Those concentric story rings mark the rise and fall of Israel’s institutions, as the appointed leaders grossly neglect both love of God and neighbor. This is a pattern epitomized in the story of how King Ahab and his wife Jezebel murder their neighbor Naboth in order to take control of his vineyard, a sin that God won’t let the powers-that-be sweep under the rug. But what do we find at the heart of the whole book of Kings?

In 2 Kings chapters 2-8, we find something unexpected: a seemingly random series of miraculous acts by Elisha, all peripheral to the story’s drama about the kings and the temple.

But look closely. What are these miracles about?

God providing oil for a widow… so she can pay off her debts and save her two children from slavery.
The miraculous birth and then resurrection of a child… for an elderly couple who otherwise didn’t have a future.
The multiplication of food… to feed a hundred hungry people.
The healing of a foreign military officer… an unexpected mercy to an outsider.
The rescue of a borrowed axhead fallen into water… so a man wouldn’t fall into crippling debt.

What do these miracles have in common? Yes, they display God’s power and presence, but it’s the how and where that matters most.

They show God working through this prophet, to defend the poor, help the weak, welcome the outsider, and feed the hungry. In other words, it’s godly power used to create more just and flourishing communities - where neighbors, even outsiders, are loved, protected, cared for, and valued for being the image-bearers of God that they are.

And none of this takes place in the temple or the royal courtroom!

Read from front-to-back, Kings is a tale of institutional decline and the bewilderment of those who depended on them. But read as a chiasm, Kings becomes a roadmap to hope, especially for those in exile: it points to alternative, unexpected places where God continues to work.

The narrative ultimately shifts the center – from temples and palaces, and those who lead them – to ordinary people and places where acts of compassion bring justice to life. Ironically, Kings isn’t truly about kings and temples, but about where real holiness is found when the old centers fail.

The text hammers home this point with one small set of often overlooked details. At the very center of Kings, as Elisha travels performing acts of kindness, one family continually hosts him. The wife tells her husband, “I know that this man who often comes our way is a holy man of God. Let’s make a small room on the roof and put in it a bed and a table, a chair and a lamp for him. Then he can stay there whenever he comes to us” (2 Kings 4:9-10). The details read like a furniture list from an Ikea catalog – why mention all these objects?

Well there’s only one other place where those types of furnishings show up in Kings. When Solomon furnished God’s temple, he installed in it an altar (the same Hebrew word as “bed”), a table (the same word we get for Elisha’s “table”); a lampstand or menorah (similar to the “lamp” placed in Elisha’s room), and then Solomon places all those in the temple’s holiest space, marked by the ark (a word related to “chair” in Hebrew).

Do you see the massive shift the text has made? In a story all about how the big, official, long-standing, beloved religious buildings are literally crumbling, it is Elisha’s ministry of kindness and justice that is demarcated as temple space, sacred space. And this ministry happens in what we might call marginal places, among everyday people.

The gospels follow suit. Mark narrates the arrival of God’s kingdom through the Messiah Jesus by quoting Malachi 3:1, which originally reads: “I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple.” But Mark cuts out the part about God’s arrival in the “temple” and instead splices in a verse from Isaiah about God’s presence in the wilderness, so the version we know reads: “I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way — a voice of one calling in the wilderness…” (Mark 1:2).

God’s arrival has relocated from the temple to the wilderness.

Later, Jesus curses a fig tree on his way into the temple (Mark 11:12-14). The curse is a symbol of how a once spiritually healthy institution (what fig trees represent!) has been corrupted and now faces collapse. Yet Jesus does not leave us without hope. He directs people to the presence of his resurrected body as the new temple (John 2:19-22). Once again, the lesson of the gospel traditions is clear: our religious institutions can spoil and die, yet new life is found out in the wild places where everyday people, empowered by Christ’s risen Spirit, are planting seeds of justice and love.

Like the family that hosted Elisha, the Wild Fig Network is simply an attempt to create a home base – a relational and renewing root system – for those ministers and ministries that seek to embody God’s healing, love, and justice in alternative spaces beyond established institutions. The goal isn’t to build something permanent; just to support and resource those following God’s movement in the wilderness.

Maybe this attempt is total hubris. Maybe it disregards the traditions that have formed us. Or perhaps it’s an act faithful to the very heart of our tradition. Perhaps this has been the invitation of scriptures and Spirit all along: to not just look for God in what has been, but to search outside, look ahead, and join in the new thing God is already doing.

When our once-trusted institutions are dying, where do we go?

Why “Wild Fig Network?”