I am having a quiet morning, studying, reading the Bible and doing some preparation for my Resource teaching tomorrow which will take place at the Custard Factory in Birmingham. Alfred Bird not only invented an egg-free custard powder that gave the building its name, but he also patented baking powder - a dry chemical leavening agent that causes dough to rise. Before baking powder, yeast was the only leavening agent.
Jesus warned his disciples to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees (MT 16) which is hypocrisy - the artificial inflation of self-image that happens with an overdose of knowledge that is not grounded in upright living. Knowledge puffs up (like yeast in dough) but love edifies.
But Jesus also said the Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast that a women took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough. (Mt 13)
In the context of the other kingdom parables (seed and mustard seed), I see the Kingdom as being like yeast because it permeates the entire world, involves small actions, invisible behaviour that is not outwardly impressive, and it does not stop until all areas are saturated.
Carl George once said that the church grows like yeast but not coral. The strategy of coral is addition. Coral grows upwardly with the new cells taking their place at the tip of the stalk. But the bottom of the stalk, where the oldest cells originally gathered, is often dead and powerless, despite controlling the rest of the stalk. The deadness of the base prevents future growth of the coral.
Yeast, on the other hand, grows through division, or "bud emergence".
Bud emergence is a really huge subject and i dont expect to plummet its depths today .. .
"Dont know much about biology . . ."
But I will try to get some basic insights. I found some good movies of bud emergence in 5 different stages that i might use.
Here is some more related stuff on bud emergence that i will come back to later . .
image from "10 Yeast Growth and Cell Cycle"
"Cell cycle transitions are subject to regulation by both external signals and internal checkpoints that monitor satisfactory progression of key cell cycle events. In budding yeast, the morphogenesis checkpoint arrests the cell cycle in response to perturbations that affect the actin cytoskeleton and bud formation." A Monitor for Bud Emergence in the Yeast Morphogenesis Checkpoint
Also, Google showed me that Neil Madgwick (microbiologist) wrote a little article called Slime, Moulds and Yeast on Next Wave.
Anyway, lets grow like yeast and not like coral!
