The Danger of Monoculture
August 15, 2021
My parents had this old farming manual at home, cloth bound, musty, yellowed pages, black and white photos. In flipping through it, one thing stood out and has stayed with me. The key for farming is diversity. When you have diversity, raising different crops, relying on different sources of income, if one crop fails, you still have other crops to receive income from. If one product of your farm has a bad year, you still have other products to sell. Diversity helps insulate you from forces outside your control.
That’s not how most farming works anymore. Farmers raise corn, or wheat, or sunflowers, or cattle, or pigs. This is largely because of the infrastructure needed for farming. Farmers maximize size to maximize profits. With more size comes more labor, which encourages more mechanization. Machines are expensive, so having a lot of one crop means you don’t need separate machines for separate crops. Efficiency, and therefore profit, is increased by planting (or raising) in monoculture—having only one type of crop.
This makes sense and is all good and well until something goes wrong. If you only raise corn, and it’s a bad year for corn, your unfortunate year just got downright wretched. But where you have diversity, usually something will have the ability to persevere through whatever crisis occurred, and hopefully enough somethings will persevere that you can stay afloat.
It’s interesting that this same industrialization of agriculture which led to planting monocultures, is reflected in church growth circles. There’s actually good psychological support for the practice as well—groups form better when everyone is similar. It’s easier for people to relate to one another when they have a lot of shared experiences.
And it’s interesting that God isn’t a fan of monocultures. Perhaps we should have expected this—the God who created the vast array of climates, colors, and crustaceans is clearly a fan of diversity! It shouldn’t surprise us when we come to 1Cor. 12 and see that the church is a body which is supposed to honor all its members. It shouldn’t surprise us when we come to Rev. 7 and see people from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, crying out to God with one voice.
It would make sense for us to only associate with people who look like us. It might even help the church to grow numerically. But that is not God’s way. God calls us to show the world a different path, a more difficult path, but a better path. God calls us to show the world that our differences do not have to divide us, but that we can love one another because of those differences and how they reflect the wisdom of our God. And we may just find that we are stronger as a result of our diversity, so that when some rejoice we can all have cause for rejoicing, and when some weep, we all weep together.
—John Coffey
