The Lord of the Harvest—Go!

Luke 10:3-7

After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. ^2 He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. ^3 Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. ^4 Do not take a purse or bag or sandals; and do not greet anyone on the road.

^5 “When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ ^6 If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; if not, it will return to you. ^7 Stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house.

^8 “When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is set before you. ^9 Heal the sick who are there and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God is near you.’ ^10 But when you enter a town and are not welcomed, go into its streets and say, ^11 ‘Even the dust of your town that sticks to our feet we wipe off against you. Yet be sure of this: The kingdom of God is near.’ ^12 I tell you, it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for that town.

The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. I don’t have any difficulty believing the second half of Jesus’ statement. The workers are indeed few. However, I do tend to doubt his first statement, that the harvest is plentiful. Most of the world are not Christians, so in that sense the harvest is very plentiful, but Jesus also said the fields of souls are ripe for harvest. I don’t see that. I don’t see lots of conversions taking place. I know it is happening in other parts of the world, but I don’t see it here in Viroqua.

Here is a chart of our worship attendance over the past five years. You can see we hit our peak attendance two years ago and right now we are at the same level we were four years ago. It is safe to assume that no one is asking us to write any books on church growth! But we are not alone. My previous church’s attendance looks like this. If you recall, they have gone through two years of struggles with their senior pastor and now a church split. Subsequently, their attendance is lower than it was eleven years ago.

Our attendance is down, but I am not worried about it. Why? Because I strongly believe our church is cultivating healthy soil for the future. Would you say the church is more of an organism or more of an organization? Both are correct, but the clear emphasis lies with the church as organism. The church is a living, breathing entity with life and growth. It is organized of necessity and design because all living, things have organization. Our bodies are organized into highly complex systems, but no doctor would refer to the human body as an organization—we are living organisms and so is the church.

Think of the universal church, the other churches in Viroqua and our local church as living plants. When Grace got started, I believe we were planted in the rocky soil of this area. Many of you know the spiritual history of Viroqua. It is a rocky soil of church splits, a rocky soil of abusive and weak church leadership and a rocky soil of not caring about the harvest. Someone is building a house down the road from us in the middle of the woods. So far all they have is a pile of logs, a small hole and many enormous rocks almost the size of small cars. All gardening and foundations begin with digging up the rocks and I believe that is what we have been doing for the past five years. My chief desire was to lead this church to become a Biblically healthy church, and for us, that meant digging up rocky soil. We’ll never be perfect. We will always have glaring weaknesses and blind spots, but we are well on our way to becoming a Biblically healthy church. To use our organism analogy, we are cultivating good soil and good seed.

But now we are getting to the part about how the organism should grow. Everyone agrees that a healthy organism will continue to grow. Charles Darwin captured this tortoise on the Galapagos Islands when she was only 4 years old. Like most reptiles, Harriet the giant tortoise has continued to grow and is now 175 years old! Living things which are healthy will grow. Healthy churches should grow. I don’t necessarily mean that we will ever be a large church, but if our attendance record is flat in five years from now, we can conclude that something is not healthy.

So how does a church grow? Last week we determined that it must not be through pyromarketing but through prayer. Because the harvest is plentiful and the workers are few, Jesus said, “Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest.” I challenged you all to routinely pray Luke 10:2 prayers—prayers for more workers—but that is just the beginning of the solution. In the next verse Jesus said, “Go, I am sending you out like lambs among wolves.” Prayer is the foundation, but we still have to go. In other words, we are not just praying for workers—we are workers! Jesus sent out 72 workers, but what if 36 of them said, “Lord, we really don’t think we should go into the harvest because we have started this awesome prayer ministry. All 36 of us are praying for more workers. We have organized ourselves into prayer partners and we are diligently praying. We think the harvest work would interfere with our prayer ministry.” That’s a crazy thought, isn’t it? Jesus commanded all 72 to pray and he sent all 72 into the harvest field. We are to pray for more workers for the harvest while we are working in the harvest. Both are absolutely necessary.

Jesus’ words bring up another deficiency in modern evangelism. Jesus commands us to go to the harvest—we are to go to the unbelieving world—but most outreach involves asking the unbelieving world to come to us. Jesus told the church to go to the world, but we keep asking the world to come to us.

One outreach organization has “The Four Laws of Outreach”. Here are the first two.

Law 1:  Create an Identity for Outreach: Effective outreach begins by establishing an outreach identity at the heart of your church.

Law 2:  Attract visitors by communicating your identity: People are attracted to your church when you communicate your unique identity in a practical and compelling way.

Does this look anything like Luke 10 to you? The harvest is out there, therefore we need to go out there. Asking the harvest to come to us is a little bit like expecting 100 acres of corn to harvest itself. Can you imagine a farmer standing at the bottom of his silo and wondering why it was empty? “Come on corn, harvest yourself! Come on silo, fill up!” Such a scenario is utterly ridiculous, so why do we look at the empty seats in this auditorium and think, “Where are all the visitors? Come on seats, fill up!” By no means am I against inviting people to church. There are legitimate reasons people to enter through our doors, but the people we want to reach are not stumbling through those doors by the hundreds—they are out there. Jesus said pray for more workers and then go out to the harvest.

If you are tracking with me, your next question should be, “but how do we do this?” Does Christ expect that all Christians should be foreign missionaries? Are we supposed to knock on the doors of strangers and blitz them with the gospel message? I believe the answer lies in this chapter. Verse 5, “When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ ^6 If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; if not, it will return to you. ^7 Stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house. Many have used this text to justify a visitation ministry and the random knocking on doors, but this is not what Jesus instructed the 72 to do. They were to go from house to house, but only until they were welcomed. Once they were welcomed, they were to stay there for a while. Jesus specifically said, “do not move around from house to house.”

Let’s key in on the word for house. In the original language the word for house is oikos. When we use the word ‘house’ in English, we almost always mean the physical building where we live. But the word oikos is much more like our word home. An oikos is not the physical structure, but rather the family that lives there. Furthermore, an oikos also included servants and their families. Therefore an oikos often involved multiple families. Jesus wanted his disciples to go to an oikos which welcomed them and stay there for a while—to eat meals with them and to share their lives with them. Don’t give them a quick gospel message and immediately move onto the next oikos, but stay there for a while, develop a relationship with the people and proclaim the message of Christ within the context of that oikos-relationship.

 In one study, over 14,000 lay people have been asked the question: “What or who was responsible for you coming to Christ and your church?” One of eight responses were given, but the key issue is what percentage of people came to Christ and the church through each category listed. Here are the results.

http://www.bible.org/page.asp?page_id=1589  This statistic has proven itself over again and again. The last category of friend and relative is the Biblical idea of oikos. How do you reach people? Within your oikos. Do you know who is in your oikos? How many do you have?

Let me illustrate one example of an oikos. Lorraine Harnwell breeds and shows Sheltie dogs. She has developed a close friendship with four other Sheltie lovers, two of whom are Jehovah Witnesses and two who are Christians. She uses this friendship to pray for, and when possible, speak about the Lord to her JW friends. This is one of Lorraine’s oikoses. I guess you could call it a dog-oikos or in English, a dog-house. Seriously, this is an excellent opportunity. Each of you has multiple oikoses in your life, which we could diagram like this:

Each oikos is a group of friends or family that God has placed you within. These are your personal harvest fields. You don’t need to travel to the other side of the world to reach a harvest field—you have several of them already. You are the worker and they are your harvest. Each oikos has maybe 5-30 people in them and if we isolate only one person in our church, it doesn’t look all that impressive. But if we take ten people from our church we see that the number of oikoses begins to multiply. Many of your oikoses will also overlap one another. Then if we have about 40 people from our church the number of oikoses suddenly becomes quite staggering.

Are you starting to see the harvest now? This is what is often called “oikos evangelism” and it is a go to rather than a come to gospel message. We cannot wait for the harvest to come to us. Turn around and look at the main entrance. What do you see? Do you see the harvest of souls storming into our church? I don’t see them coming in, do you? Now look again. Jesus says that the door is an entrance to your oikos. Go, and pray. Pray and go.

Rich Maurer

October 23, 2005