Pick Up the Sickle

I once asked a wheat farmer friend how he felt when his fields were “white for harvest,” using Jesus’s phrase from John 4:35.

I have to admit, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but always on the lookout for a good sermon illustration, I thought perhaps he would talk about his eager anticipation of the blessings of harvest, or a sense of relief at being at the rewarding end stage of the long farming process.

His answer took me by surprise. “If I look at a field and it is white, I feel a sense of urgency that borders on panic,” he told me.

It turns out that I, not knowing much about the technical aspects of wheat farming, didn’t really understand Jesus’s illustration well, although His hearers in the first century surely would have. One of the biggest challenges in wheat farming is determining the ideal time to harvest. Too early, and the grains are unripe; too late, and the wheat can “shatter” and the individual grains fall to the ground, making harvest impossible.

As wheat approaches full ripeness, the stalks dry out and the grain gets lighter and lighter in color. A field that from a distance looks white means that the wheat is fully ripe and in danger of shattering if any significant wind or rain event occurs.  

A white field means that it is an instant necessity to get as many people into the field as possible to begin harvesting the wheat.

Hence, my friend’s sense of panic and urgency.

Evangelism or Efficiency?

There are essentially two possible responses to Jesus’s challenge to His disciples about the urgency of the task: we can put on a sweatband, pick up a sickle and head into the field to begin harvesting, or we can sit down and begin to engineer a more efficient solution. Given that our society is built around efficiency and scale, it is perhaps no surprise that we naturally tend towards the latter.

I do not think that Jesus intended for that to be an option. The time for designing new tools and systems to improve productivity is in the long winter months, not when the fields are white!

Put simply, there is something about the methods of gospel work that defy novel systematization. Evangelism, discipleship, shepherding––any time we attempt to codify these things and propose a new “system” for accomplishing them, we run into resistance. Exceptions to the rule pile up and soon become more numerous than the rule itself, making a mockery of our own plans and displaying our need to recognize more deeply that it is only His purposes that will stand (Proverbs 19:21).

Patient, Painful Hours

Nowhere is the tension between systematization and dependence on the Holy Spirit more acute than in the missions world, where every few years brings a novel approach to “scaling our efforts” at church planting or reaching the unreached. We look askance at the labor-intensive, sweat-drenched process of swinging a sickle and yearn to find an easier way.

“Surely,” we reason, “our Lord did not intend for us to work this hard!” Authors and missions conference speakers observe “what has worked” in one language group or area and do their best to reverse engineer the process so that we can replicate it elsewhere, as if the Holy Spirit could be marshaled by our own strategic desires rather than seeing Him as a wind that “blows where it wishes” (John 3:8).

Anyone who has been involved in ministry for more than a short while, however, has had the experience of reading or hearing about a new tool for ministry that promises exciting results. How often have we been discouraged when we started trying to implement the tool and realized that it needed adjustment to work in this situation, or had to be adapted to suit this particular relationship, and in the end we see limited benefit?

 Please don’t misunderstand me––there is certainly a time and place for strategic thinking about how to plant churches among unreached language groups! It is not overstepping to say to missionaries in order to proclaim the gospel clearly (Colossians 4:4), you need to learn the language you are speaking well. There is validity in missions organizations studying the language groups in a given area and strategically considering which of them have access to the gospel and which do not.

Rather, where our systematization can be dangerous is in the area of ministry methods. When we argue in a church-planting context that, as David Garrison said, “the right ingredients coupled with the right methods should generate predictable outcomes” we imply that by improving our own strategies and processes, we can speed up the Holy Spirit’s work. Furthermore, we can imply that the ingredients, methods, and outcomes spelled out in scripture are insufficient for the cause.

Too often as I have traveled across the portions of the globe with the least access to the gospel, I see missionaries who invest their time in “methods” rather than simple language study and proclamation of the truth of God’s word. Yes, language study is drudgery––so was first century harvest work! Gospel ministry, whether evangelism, discipleship, equipping, or church planting, requires so many patient, painful hours that it is no surprise that we long for someone to come along with a “do-missions-quick” scheme to free us of them.

Swing the Sickle

And yet the scriptures are clear; gospel work is difficult! James 5 tells us to “be patient” like the farmer waiting for the rains. Galatians 6:9 is even more explicit: “let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.”

I think that anyone seriously engaged with a life of ministry recognizes this. No matter what we hear about some miraculous new “method” of gospel engagement that “never fails to produce results,” our own experience contradicts the whole idea. For most of us, the most fruitful results of our ministry efforts happen only after many hard hours laboring in the fields, often with little sense of whether things were progressing at all.

It is not an accident that the apostle Paul spends so much of his time writing about this very topic. We need to be convinced that our all-glorious Savior is worth all the sweat we are pouring out as we step into the harvest field day after day. We need to fix our eyes on Him as we swing our sickle over and over again.

When we look at the whitening harvest fields and are struck by the urgency of the task, our response should not be to try to engineer a novel solution. Rather, we should “dress ourselves for work, arise, and say to them everything that the Lord commands us” (Jeremiah 1:17). In short, we should proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, or if we are not the ones going ourselves to the unreached, we should pray for the Holy Spirit to work through those who are going and proclaiming.

And then, when we have been “steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord,” we can fully depend on Him to work, “knowing that in the Lord [our] labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58).