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Prayer and the wood-wide web

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Prayer and the wood-wide web

27 July 2025

Series: Trinity

Topic: Connectedness, Growth, Prayers

Book: Colossians, Luke

Prayer and the wood-wide web

Ian Banks

“So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.” Colossians 2:6-7

If you were to walk through a woodland – maybe a thick grove of pines in Formby or ancient oaks in Ringley Woods – then you’d be surrounded by strength. Tall trunks rising like cathedral columns, stretching toward heaven.

But what you don’t see is what makes that forest stand tall: the roots.

Not only are the roots deep, but research tells us that they are connected too. There’s some debate about it’s true extent but there’s evidence to suggest that thanks to underground fungal networks, trees share water, nutrients, even warnings of danger. Strong trees help weak ones. Mature trees support young saplings. If you like your films, then you might recall that it was an idea picked up in the James Cameron film, Avatar. The forest stands because it is rooted and connected. The technical name is a ‘mycorrhizal network’ but scientists jokingly call it the “wood-wide web.”

Being rooted

And so it is – or so it should be – with the Christian life.

Paul tells the Colossians: “Just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him.”

We don’t just start with Christ – we continue, we grow in Him. And how? By being rooted.

To be rooted in Christ means: Drawing our nourishment from Him; standing firm together in times of adversity and remaining grounded in truth.

Roots don’t develop overnight though. They’re slow and hidden. They can be deep or widely spread, just like our spiritual growth. A seedling may sprout in a flash, but only deep roots will keep it alive.

Paul says: “rooted and built up… strengthened in the faith… overflowing with thankfulness.” Notice the movement: Downward in roots, upward in growth, overflowing and outward in fruit.

Trees of life

That’s not an idea that was new to Paul. Psalm 1 and Jeremiah 17 talk about a person who delights in God’s law as being like a tree planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in season. Proverbs (3:18 and 11:30) describes Wisdom and the righteous as being ‘trees of life’.

Think again of the forest. A single tree alone in the middle of a field is vulnerable, but in a forest, trees are linked together. Their roots intertwine. Their shared strength helps them through storms.

In the Church, God has not called us to be potted plants or cut flowers! We need to think of ourselves as being like a wood or a forest, linked together by the Spirit. One person’s prayer strengthens another. One person’s faith carries a friend through crisis. Hebrews 10:24-25 calls us to “spur one another on” and not “give up meeting together.” Galatians 6:2 tells us to “bear one another’s burdens.”

When your roots are in Christ, you are intertwined with all those who call themselves His people, wherever they may be.

The Lord’s prayer

So, how do we stay rooted and connected? The answer is prayer.

In Luke 11, the disciples come to Jesus and say, “Lord, teach us to pray.” It was common for Rabbi’s to summarise their key messages in a format that was easy for their disciples to remember. More mature disciples were expected to improvise on those key themes, not just recite them. John the Baptist seems to have taken a similar approach. We don’t have a record of what he said but no doubt repentance featured heavily – along with sartorial advice on wearing hair shirts and leather belts plus dietary advice on the benefits of locusts and honey.

And, so, Jesus gives them what we call the Lord’s Prayer, though strictly speaking it’s the Disciple’s Prayer. It’s a slightly different memory to the longer version in Matthew. It’s not just a ritual to be said —it’s a pattern to be lived by: We call God Father—that’s about relationship. We pray “Your kingdom come”—that’s purpose. We ask for daily bread—that’s trust. And we seek forgiveness and deliverance—that’s restoration.

Relationship, purpose, trust and restoration. It’s from the Lord’s Prayer that our weekly Collects are modelled. We start with an aspect of God, then make our requests, then finish with a doxology, a word of praise. And those requests can be big things, like the coming of God’s kingdom, to seemingly small but important things like having enough to eat. God knows there are people in the world today who would be happy to have something to eat.

Like the disciples of old, it would be a good exercise for each of us to try and think through the elements of the Lord’s prayer and put them into our own words for our own changing circumstances, rather than just recite them.

Stories

The author, John Steinbeck, once wrote: ‘We are lonesome animals. We spend all our lives trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, “Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it.”

Jesus loved telling stories. Stories that both provoked and connected with his audience. And here he tells a story to illustrate his teaching about prayer, a story with which his audience could empathise: a man knocks on his friend’s door at midnight. At first the door is shut, but because of persistence, the friend rises and gives what is needed.

Then Jesus says: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” Or as our Psalm today said: ‘When I called, you answered me.’ Persistent prayer is like sending your roots deeper into the soil. It may feel hidden. It may be slow. But over time, it brings strength, stability, and fruit.

Shameless

However, in the story, ‘persistence’ isn’t the best translation of the Greek word that was used. A better word is ‘shamelessness’. The man at the door is shameless at waking his neighbour up – and, to avoid the risk of shame on the community at their potential lack of hospitality, the man who was asleep gets up to help his neighbour and in doing so brings honour to them both.

I wonder, then, if our prayers should be more shameless! Should our prayers lack inhibition? Not filtering out what we think we should or shouldn’t pray for. In our OT reading, Abraham was brazen and shameless with Yahweh in his negotiations about Sodom and Gomorrah. He seemingly didn’t know when to stop. A tree sends out its roots because it needs to – not because it thinks it’s the polite thing to do.

Thinking more about shame and honour, as the visible presence of God, our actions – how we live our lives – influences how God is seen and perceived by the rest of the world. The extent to how we align with God’s holy hallowed name, how our forgiving of others, how our not ceasing to forgive, should be in response to how we ourselves have been forgiven. Whether we like it or not, to the outside world, God’s trustworthiness will be judged by our trustworthiness. The Lord’s prayer isn’t just a prayer – it is, or it should be, a way of life, a way of being…

What kind of tree

So, let me ask you: what kind of tree are you? A mature one or a young one? Are your roots deep or shallow? Are you intertwined with others or isolated? More of a shrub than an oak? Are you dry right now or, maybe thanks to the help of others, are you feeding on Christ through prayer and His Word?

You may be in a time of drought. Maybe prayers feel unanswered. But remember roots grow deepest in dry seasons. Don’t stop seeking. Don’t stop knocking. The Father loves to give the Holy Spirit to those who ask. (Luke 11:13)

Enough room

And that would be a great place to say ‘Amen’. But I have to admit to a couple of problems with all this.

Firstly, we don’t always get on all of the time, do we? We don’t always feel that we’re as well connected as the wood-wide-web! Well maybe a possible solution is not to see the spaces between our opinions as areas of difference. Rather we might think of them like the spaces between young trees in the soil. What may look like distance is actually the gap needed for each independent sapling to have enough room for the light and nutrients that it needs to develop fully. That variety of opinion is needed for us all to thrive.

Secondly, I’m a bit uneasy about the whole analogy – or is it a metaphor or simile – about being rooted. Because, to state the obvious, trees don’t move! They are static; fixed in place. Trees are designed to survive in a particular environment. So, they don’t do well when the qualities of that place change dramatically – water, temperature, length of seasons. Over time they might evolve or adapt but that’s painfully slow. Is that really something that we should aspire to?

Well, perhaps that’s a reminder that it should be Christ that we’re rooted in, not Colossae nor Corinth, not Walmersley nor wherever else you happen to live, as important as those places might be. Our circumstances can change drastically too and heaven knows we can be as slow as trees to evolve and adapt.

No, instead let our lives grow deeply in Christ, rather than in a place or a building. Let our roots intertwine with each other in the body of believers but with space for each to grow. And let prayer be our lifeline and network to the Source of all strength. Amen

‘Prayer and the wood-wide web’ was delivered by Ian Banks at Christ Church Walmersley on Sunday 27th July 2025. It was based on Colossians 2:6-15 and Luke 11:1-13.

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