The positives and negatives(?) of time in the harvest
Most of the trainings I lead involve a key time on the schedule where we get out and engage lost people in spiritual conversations. We call it “harvest time.”
We do this for a couple of reasons:
First, we learn best by doing.
We wouldn’t lead a workshop on prayer and never have our participants pray. We wouldn’t lead a workshop on studying the Bible and never have our participants open the Bible. So why would we lead a workshop on engaging lost people and never go attempt to do it?
Second, we need to practice.
The most effective way to reach people for Christ is not to approach strangers. (More on this below.) Instead, we should seek to reach the people we already have a relationship with… our friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers. But if we don’t regularly practice spiritual conversations, then we will not know what to do when the time comes. Furthermore, we may not even see that the time has come!
To illustrate, imagine a professor of photography doing the following with his class at the start of a semester.
Everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained, would be in the “quanitity” group. They would be graded solely on the amount of work they produced.
Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the “quality” group. They would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but to get an A it had to be a nearly perfect image.
At the end of the term, he was surpised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group.*
The practice of taking lots of photos made the students better photographers than any amount of study or prep for a single photograph could. Likewise, we can’t expect to be good at spiritual conversations if we don’t repeatedly attempt them.
Could there be negatives to times in the harvest? While I don’t think the items below are impossible to overcome, I do think we need to be aware of some potential challenges that can come out of harvest times.
First, time in the harvest can be seen as cold-call evangelism with no further purpose than the time itself.
There is a LONG chart at the end of the book The Kingdom Unleashed which contrasts traditional ministry approaches with multiplicative ministry approaches. This one caught my eye:
Traditional Ministry Paradigm: Random approach to identifying persons interested in the Gospel.
Kingdom Movement Paradigm: The first step in outreach is intense prayer focused on identifying persons of peace God has prepared and the network of lost people they will represent.
If we’re not careful, entry-level trainings and subsequent harvest times could leave people thinking that an effective “evangelism method” is just approaching random people or knocking on random doors and crossing our fingers that someone responds to faith (or even opens the door!).
Instead, this is how we need to think: We are each, individually, uniquely positioned to reach our own circles of influence. At times we need to practice so we can be prepared to engage those circles in an effective way. If we are looking to engage an unreached area or people, we need to have a commitment to prayer and a commitment to that harvest field.
The other side of this, of course, is realizing that we do not have a clue who will be interested in the Gospel. If we don’t go out and meet people and attempt to talk to them about Jesus, we will never know who could be a person of peace… which is why we need to share as widely as possible.
Second, time in the harvest could inadvertently condition us to only share during those scheduled times.
Again, there is a nuance here, but I have been guilty of siloing my ‘ministry work’ into a 40-hour work week. I’ve struggled with it since starting in a full-time ministry after college. But I think the danger is applicable to any believer.
We can have an attitude of “this is when and where I share the gospel” and if we are not careful we might miss (or outright ignore) opportunities God gives us during the course of a regular day. We need to get time in the harvest for the reasons I listed at the start, but if our spiritual conversations are only happening at a designated harvest time, then we’ve missed the point of the harvest times.
New rhythms in our life can help us create new habits, but when it comes to the Gospel, it needs to saturate every area of our life.*
Do you have a story that illustrates a positive or negative from time in the harvest? What have you learned from it?
*Atomic Habits by James Clear stimulated my thinking on these points. The quantity/quality story appears at the beginning of chapter 11, pages 141-142.
