The Cloister, The Harvest, and Where the Laborers Are (Part 3)
In the West, we have an interesting problem. The Church is cloistered. But because of that cloistering we believe no one wants to hear the Gospel. The opposite is true. The harvest is great, but the workers are few. And that sets up an interesting problem.
Jesus’ answer to a great harvest and a shortage of laborers is simple and yet very different than ours. We start Bible colleges, seminaries, training programs and apprenticeships. Jesus starts with the Father.
He said to his disciples, “The harvest is great, but the workers are few. So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send more workers into his fields.
-Matthew 9:37-38
So Jesus’ first response is to pray. We look for strategies, but God is looking for people to pray. The raising up of laborers is a divine act that requires us to go to God in prayer. Have you been doing this? What does your prayer life look like in regards to God raising up laborers? I would suggest this is a good litmus test for how connected you are to God’s heart for the lost.
Now, a lot of people are familiar with this verse and some people actually practice it. This isn’t just Jesus’ being impractical. He expected God to answer and He did. But how?
Jesus called his twelve disciples together and gave to them authority to cast out evil spirits and to heal every kind of disease and illness…Jesus sent out the twelve apostles with these instructions: “Don’t go to the Gentiles or the Samaritans, but only to the people of Israel—God’s lost sheep. Go and announce to them that the Kingdom of Heaven is near. Heal the sick, raise the dead, cure those with leprosy, and cast out demons. Give as freely as you have received!
-Matthew 10:1, 5-8
Did you catch that? God answers the prayers of the disciples by raising up laborers among the very people Jesus told to pray. The people who prayed for laborers became the laborers themselves!
We can’t miss either of these two ideas. For the believer who sees a need for laborers, we need to spend time asking the Father to raise up laborers for the harvest. God is the source of true laborers for the Kingdom and if we ask Him for them in faith, He will give them. But the other idea is equally as important: If we pray for God to raise up laborers for the harvest, we shouldn’t be surprised if we ourselves are some of the very people that God raises up as a laborer.
This idea is crucial. So many people see the need for laborers, see the situation of the harvest, and may even pray. But few are willing to step out and be the very thing that they’ve been asking God for.
But we’re going to need more than just you in the harvest field, we’ll need others as well. God will raise up laborers from the church in much the same way as He did with the disciples. But one of the places we significantly underestimate finding laborers is among the lost.
Why the lost? Well, as we make disciples of lost men and women, we should be teaching them that they have a responsibility to make disciples as well. The teaching and modeling of this responsibility cannot be underestimated. New believers who are amazed about their new relationship with Jesus are often the best at convincing unbelievers that Jesus is real, and often are better at it and more motivated than long term Christians. As a ministry that I know of is fond of saying “The resources for the harvest are found in the harvest.” God has actually stored up laborers for the harvest in the harvest field. We should expect this and teach this as a normal thing, and quickly we will find the number of laborers dramatically increasing.
Friends, the harvest is plentiful and the laborers are few. Have you prayed to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into the harvest field? Are you prepared not just to pray that prayer, but also to be an answer to that prayer?
The Cloister, The Harvest, and Where the Laborers Are (Part 2)
Yesterday I wrote about how the church (predominantly in the West) has been cloistered.
I see this regularly in our attitude toward the unbelieving world. Most of the church believes either consciously or unconsciously that unbelievers don’t want to follow Jesus. Don’t believe me? Ask someone to go share the Gospel with you on the street. The responses will be telling. Our cloistered attitudes tell us the world has no interest in following Jesus.
But this perception of the harvest comes more from our experiences than from Jesus. Jesus told his disciples, “The harvest is great, but the workers are few.“Jesus never seemed to have a hard time finding people so broken they didn’t need healing. Jesus never had a problem finding people who were outcasts that needed love. He never had a hard time finding those marginalized by society and telling them God has a better Kingdom, a better family where they would be welcomed.
In fact, from Jesus’ perspective, the problem wasn’t the harvest. He actually saw so much untapped potential for harvest that he told them the problem wasn’t with the harvest—it was with the laborers! They didn’t have enough laborers to accommodate the harvest that was coming.
This is a massive perspective change for the church today. Rarely do we spend time praying and raising up laborers for the harvest because we don’t really believe the harvest is that great.
Oh if we only had Jesus’ eyes.
Friends there is a sea of humanity, not just across the seas, but across our fences and streets and cities that have no answers. The John 3:16 sign held up at a professional sporting event wasn’t enough to reach them, nor was the chick tract they found in the bathroom at Walmart. But a living, breathing expression of the gospel that has a testimony of transformation is something they’ve never seen. And while I agree with the church that the world at large doesn’t want traditional religion like they’ve seen, they do want the Kingdom of God. They do want Jesus.
And if you begin to touch this realm just a little, you begin to understand how big the harvest is. One year our house church began to serve food at a local park and play sports with the kids in our neighborhood. Word got out and quickly our house church was filled with people from the neighborhood that had barely ever darkened a church. One of the lessons we learned from that season was that there was no shortage of people who had interest in what we were doing.
The problem with that season was we didn’t have enough laborers. The needs they brought to the table were overwhelming. The amount of discipleship each person needed was more than we were used to. We weren’t ready for the harvest that came in. I think most churches are in the same spot.
One of the lessons I took away from that season is it’s not the harvest that’s in short supply. It’s the laborers.
Photo Credit: Wheat Field by Dennis Behm
The Cloister, The Harvest, and Where the Laborers Are (Part I)
A few days back I wrote a post called “Evangelism in an Upside Down Kingdom” that I didn’t really expect people to get or resonate with. However, over on Facebook there was some conversation that was good and I felt like the conversation deserved a follow up post. You can catch the conversation from Facebook below:
First, let’s talk about the situation we find ourselves in. In general, I find that the church in North America still believes they have an answer that the world is looking for. And while I believe that the Gospel is key to transforming every broken heart, I think the church dramatically over-estimates how likely an unbelieving, unrepentant sinner is to walk into a church full of people they don’t know looking for answers they haven’t been able to find.
Frankly, the church in America is cloistered. A cloister is a secluded, religious place*. Whenever we hear someone referred to as cloistered, what we mean is they live in a religious community that has some how cut them off from what the rest of the world thinks. And this is the state that the church finds herself in. The church has become so isolated from the world that we don’t even realize that a large part of our culture doesn’t turn to us for answers any longer, no matter how desperate.
Cloisters (architecturally) were originally designed for monasteries and convents. They were places that monks and nuns could draw away from society and focus on the devout life. And while these were started with good intentions, they did have the affect of taking believers out of the world that they were called to be salt and light in. I believe this has happened with the church as well. We have pulled back from the world in an effort to be pure and not be stained by the world. But the effect has actually taken us out of the world we were designed to make an impact in.
I once heard a fact that I’m now having trouble sourcing, so take what I’m about to say next with a grain of salt. The factoid went like this: In the West, we lead as many unbelievers to Jesus in the first two years of coming to Christ as we will for the rest of our lives after that. Essentially what this stat is saying is that when you become a believer you have about two good years where you live close enough to the world to impact it. Once beyond that, you become drawn into a church community and it becomes hard to get out of it to share the Gospel.
Think about it: When you became a believer, there were so many things to learn. So many classes to attend. You were busy Sunday morning and your unbelieving friends weren’t. You began to grow apart. You married a believing spouse, wanted to raise believing children, etc. etc, and all of these things (as good as they were) pulled you farther and farther away from the world you wanted to impact. It can become hard to move beyond the “Christian bubble.”
My point is this: We have to get over the cloister affect. It’s not okay for the church not to be salt and light in the world. In order to do that, we have to move away from our own tribalism and take the Gospel to people who look like they don’t want it. Jesus had to do the very same thing: Though He lived in Heaven with the Father, to redeem mankind He had to leave the confines of the fellowship with the Father and be willing to preach His Gospel to people who (based on outward appearances) didn’t want it. He overcame the cloister of Heaven and embraced broken humanity, and He calls us to do the same.
Photo Credit: Augsburg interior by barnyz
Cluster Map
Pursuing Glory 