A New Book by Michael Kulwiec
You don’t grow fruit
by trying harder.
You grow it by staying connected.
One summer, our church met under the grapevine in my backyard. As the grapes ripened over our heads, we learned how the love, joy, and peace we long for grow as we abide in Christ. Pull up a chair.
It was as delightful as it was unexpected.
For five Sundays that summer, our church gathered outside beneath a real grapevine, a living canopy over our heads. An old fountain chuckled nearby. Butterflies visited the milkweed. Grapes hung above us in clusters of jewels.
Of all the places to talk about the fruit of the Spirit, we couldn’t have picked a lovelier one.
Five weeks later, the grapes had grown and matured. So had we.
A Summer Under the Vine grew out of those conversations and the realization at the heart of them. The Christian life is not about producing better fruit through greater effort. It is about staying connected to the One who produces the fruit in us.
Under the Vine
In the Old Testament, sitting under your own vine and fig tree is a picture of shalom, a life marked by peace, wholeness, security, and flourishing. A Summer Under the Vine follows that image into the life of the Spirit, exploring what God grows in us as we learn to abide in Christ.
Through story, Scripture, and ordinary life, the book walks through the fruit of the Spirit and the kind of life that grows when we abide in the vine.
One Fruit. Nine Expressions.
The Life the Spirit Grows.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. (Galatians 5:22-26 ESV)
About the Author
Michael Kulwiec has taught Scripture for more than forty years, in youth rooms, at camps and conferences, and in churches beyond his own, including the one he borrowed for the summer that became this book.
He spent two decades as a youth pastor and has always believed that truth travels farthest when it travels as a story. He is also the author of the middle-grade adventure novel Island of the Angry Smile.
He and his wife, Pam, live in San Diego, California, where neighborhood kids still stop by for a chat and a gummy or two.
