The Laborer and the Harvest

Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people. But when He saw the multitudes, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were weary and scattered like sheep having no shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore, pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.

Matthew 9:35-38, NKJV

When discussing the measure of a kingdom, Pastor Calisto explained that the Kingdom of God and God’s influence is not limited to demography or geography. As we see in the Bible, Jesus proclaimed the Good News and healed diseases and infirmity in all the cities, villages and synagogues. His work was not limited to the synagogues. Similarly, as co-laborers with God, we should proclaim the Good News and minister healing not just within church buildings, but in our cities, villages, and workplaces.

A Professional in the Marketplace

Whenever I used to read this verse in Matthew, I dutifully asked God to send laborers. I prayed and gave generously towards ministries that increased the number of believers because in my mind, the solution was in numbers: the church and those in ministry are to lead people to Christ so we can have more people preaching the Good News. As a professional in the marketplace, I – myself, did not actively participate in the harvest. To me, my work was secular and my involvement in the church was spiritual. I worked to make a salary in order to support spiritual work.

Another way to put it is that I had adopted a dualistic view of Christianity; I was a part time Christian practicing my faith on the weekends. However, as ambassadors of Christ, Christians are always on duty. What does this look like? From Matthew 9:35-38, we learn that Jesus was moved with compassion for the throngs of people he met because they were weary, confused, aimless, harassed, distressed, dejected, helpless and scattered abroad like sheep without a shepherd. These adjectives are not limited to the people of Jesus’ day; they also describe the status of people at our workplaces.

Compassion and Action

I cannot help but recount the number of times I turned a blind eye to the plight of my colleagues. My mistake was that I did not see my job as my calling and my workplace as God’s field. This was also evident in my attitude towards my work: One day I was asked to give a five-minute exhortation in church. I remember spending hours praying and studying the Word of God. I prayed that the congregants would be ministered to. However, when it came to my job, I only managed a short one-minute prayer before going to work. I rarely prayed for my colleagues and never asked for a harvest of souls in my workplace. However, I can only imagine the kind of transformation that will occur if I approach work in the same manner as a church speaking engagement.

Convicted by the passage in Matthew 9:35-38, I conducted a heart check, reviewed my priorities, repented for my hardened heart, and prayed for realignment to God’s heart. An effective follower of Christ must be moved with compassion and as such, I prayed that He would give me compassion for my colleagues. This compassion is not just about the heart; it also demands actions. As such, my priority has shifted from working to finance ministries executed by others to me being the one to actively minister to my colleagues, pointing people to Christ.  

Jesus asked his disciples to pray to the Lord of the harvest to send more workers into the field. God has answered this prayer! He has sent you and me into a myriad of sectors: into the fields of economics, education, politics, transportation, hospitality, media, entertainment, the arts, sciences, in the home, into church ministry, and so on... ALL these fields belong to Him! Out of compassion for those in our sphere of influence, He has specifically and intentionally placed you where you are to preach the good news and minister freedom.

So what do we do?

As professionals, we need to realize that we are full time Christians and co-laborers with Christ. – that our work is a calling and our workplace is a field with plentiful harvest. We need to understand that we are part of God’s Kingdom and we must submit to his agenda. When we consider our jobs, it should not only be about earning a good salary to live a comfortable lifestyle. Romans 14:15 states that the Kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit! Wherever we are, people should be set free and walk in right standing with God. However, this can only be made manifest if we change our attitudes towards work by praying and being led by the Holy Spirit. In doing so, we will become effective and fruitful laborers implementing Kingdom agenda.

 Would you take a minute to consider the state of your heart? The harvest is plenty, but the workers are few.

Veronica is part of our first Nairobi Cohort. She works in administration at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). She studied Literature and Linguistics at the University of Nairobi Kikuyu campus and serves at her church in youth ministry, evangelism and discipleship. Veronica promotes marketplace ministries and shares the Gospel, particularly among women and the youth.

The Other Side

By Oscar Muriu

In this blog post I am going to be reflecting on Luke 8:26-39. I recommend reading this passage of scripture so you can better follow along with my message.

A common belief that Christians have, is that miracles are the key to people being saved, but this is not true. Miracles are not the final proof of who Jesus is, but they may point to Him when they are accompanied by Truth. Some believe because of miracles, while others deny and reject because of miracles; miracles can harden the hearts who see them, just as they did to the pharisees. Miracles are not the key to salvation, they can also be found in other religions. So do not follow a miracle alone, because that is insufficient, but it is the truth of scripture that is the proof of God.

In Luke 28-39, Jesus took initiative and went to the other side to heal a man. What does this mean? He crossed cultural barriers, spending time with people that were unlike Him. He went intentionally back and forth between His people and the gentiles. Jesus told His disciples to come, and go with Him to the other side. The other side is somewhere you may not want to go, and interact with people you may not want to be around. It may include not just people of a different culture, but people from a different status. The other side may include orphans, street children, the poor, the rejects, the mentally challenged, the oppressed, etc. It doesn’t matter who they are, Jesus loves them, and went to the cross to die on their behalf too. He calls us to love those He died for. We too must cross cultural and social barriers, and go to the other side.

When crossing barriers and entering a new culture, there is something to be aware of, known as the Cultural Shock Curve. This curve has four phases within it. The first step is when you enter the culture, everything about about it has a wow factor. You love the food, the colors, the buildings, clothes, languages, etc. But after three months, the second part of the curve begins and issues arise. You begin to see problems, inconsistencies, and injustices. Reality checks in and the shine on the culture begins to fade. The third phase is about six months later, and you acquire resentment towards the culture. You don’t like anything; you want to leave and never come back. But you must not leave just yet. You must stay in the culture until you work through the fourth phase, resolution. You realize that the culture has both good and bad things, but so does home, they are just different.

Let’s go my friends, to the other side, and be disciples of Jesus.

Oscar Muriu is the Senior Pastor of Nairobi Chapel in Nairobi, Kenya and a dear friend to Resource Global.

Why God Always Starts Small

WHY GOD ALWAYS STARTS SMALL

Andy Crouch

Maybe Chicago natives get used to it, but I’m always a bit awestruck whenever I’m in Chicago—a city of gloriously monumental scale, set on the edge of a vast lake, its lights stretching out for miles in a grid that reaches almost to the horizon.

Human beings—at least modern, American human beings—like things big. Resource Global’s annual partner meeting in 2015 took place at the impressive U.S. Cellular Field, home of the Chicago White Sox—a ballpark so huge, Cubs fans will be quick to note, it wasn’t even full during that team’s World Series–winning season. There was an undeniable sense of awe as we walked in through the gates and looked up at the towering walls that surround the baseball diamond.

But there’s a funny thing about our human love of big things. God, at least according to the Bible, doesn’t seem to share it. At least not at first.

The story of the Bible begins with two—just two—human beings made in God’s image. When their descendants finally achieve what the business world calls “scale” and seek to build a tower with its top in the heavens—sounds a lot like a skyscraper!—God confounds their speech and scatters them (Gen. 11), and his very next move is to start a worldwide redemptive project with a single couple who are too old for children (Gen. 12).

God promises that couple that their descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky (Gen. 15), but when he leads the people of Israel out of the empire of Egypt, they are a tiny, beleaguered band of ex-slaves whom even God describes as “the smallest of the nations” (Deut. 7). When, after decades of wandering and conflict, they are settled in the Promised Land, they are a speck on the map of the Ancient Near East, subject to predatory empires in every direction—Assyria, Babylon, Greece, and eventually Rome.

And then when God mounts the ultimate rescue operation for his own chosen people and his whole sin-infested cosmos, the Anointed One begins life as a baby and then grows up to wander around by foot with a dozen apostles, plus two sisters and a brother (Mary, Martha, and Lazarus) who seem to be his dearest friends. Even after the astonishing turnaround of his resurrection, ascension, and the gift of his Spirit, with several thousand coming to faith in one day, the church is so marginal that it doesn’t even figure in the reports of Roman bureaucrats until the end of the first century.

God just doesn’t seem to have a problem with starting small.

And the more I’ve thought about this, the more I think that the reason God doesn’t mind starting small is that small is the only way to start—if what you are seeking is truly transformational creativity.

In a world that dreams of making it big, there’s something enduringly important about very small groups of people.

Consider the baseball teams that play at U.S. Cellular Field. At any given time, there are only nine men on the field playing defense, one to four players for the offense (plus two coaches), with another couple dozen in each dugout. There may be 30,000 fans watching the game—but only a handful of people are playing it.

And this is how it must be, with baseball and every other sport. Imagine a 20-person baseball team. It’s just barely possible to conceive (though if outfielders tend to run into one another now, imagine if there were twice as many!). But a 100-person baseball team is inconceivable. A one-thousand-person baseball team? Laughable. The only way to play baseball is with an absolutely smallgroup of people.

Only absolutely small groups can sustain coordinated diverse action—where each individual plays a different part, but the parts combine harmoniously in a single whole. And coordinated diverse action is the most fruitful kind of human action—the kind that commands the most respect and has the deepest power to bring change.

Human beings are in fact astonishingly diverse. From our genetic makeup, to our personal histories, to our cultural heritages, we are inescapably individuals—even identical twins, who share the same exact DNA, express that DNA in subtly or significantly different ways. At the same time, we are made for coordinated action—individuals can accomplish very little on their own. Only absolutely small groups allow both of these qualities to be expressed to their fullest—on the one hand, the flawless coordination of a major league double play, and on the other hand, the unique assignment of roles, from shortstop to right fielder, that perfectly match each individual’s gifts.

Of course, you can coordinate action on a far larger scale than a baseball team. Roughly 156,000 Allied troops landed on the shores on Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944, with millions more supporting them. But such massive coordinated operations inevitably require uniformity from their participants—and, in the case of military operations, literal uniforms. And that uniformity requires, to a greater or lesser extent, ignoring, suppressing, or sacrificing the individual uniqueness of those participants. Men and women in such coordinated uniform action must sacrifice their full identity, and sometimes their lives, to such operations—and their greatest and most distinctive gifts therefore are neglected or underutilized.

Every empire dreams of massive, large-scale, coordinated uniform action. And throughout history various empires have achieved extraordinary scale—not just military empires like Rome, the World War II Axis and Allied powers, and the United States and China today, but also commercial empires like McDonald’s and Walmart. But such action is never, strictly speaking, creative action. To engage in significant creativity requires tapping into the deepest capacities of human beings. Only coordinated diverse action can do that.

You could put it this way: empires dream of social machines, with countless human beings playing rigidly assigned and repetitive parts—but God has a different dream. The divine Trinity, after all, is an absolutely small group in which each person plays a distinct part, none reducible to another; and yet God acts in perfect harmony. God’s dream is not a machine but a family, reflected in the revelation of the Trinity as Father, Son, and Spirit. Somehow families can accomplish things that even armies and corporations cannot.

If you really care about cultural transformation, you’ll start small, with a group of people who can know and trust one another deeply. To be sure, such transformation can’t stay small if it’s going to have wide effects. But at the beginning, when the most extraordinary creative work is done, the number of people in the room is always small so that each one can contribute their absolutely greatest capacities in an environment of maximum trust.

This makes the case, it seems to me, for a particularly risky and particularly fruitful kind of investment, the kind that Resource Global specializes in: coming alongside teams of innovators who are still small enough to be able to be deeply creative, and helping them build the systems, skills, and organizational culture that will allow their vision to grow.

It’s easy to invest in efforts that have already reached a reliable level of scale—but it’s also less rewarding. As exciting as a crowd of 45,000 baseball fans can be, their cultural capacity is oddly limited. About the most complex thing you can get them to do together is “the wave.”

But nine people on a field, on a good night, intensively disciplined, intimately familiar with each other’s every movement and thought, committed to one another and the game? That’s something worth celebrating—and worth investing in. And God’s relentless commitment to the small, local, and family-like, at every turn of redemptive history, suggests that efforts that start small can end up transforming the world.