Learning in the Harvest

Saying we want to make disciples who make disciples is easy. In fact, it's easy to "say" anything. But we really want the Lord to show us how to see reproduction and to orient people to the harvest from the beginning. We think that the only way for a Christian to be oriented, after birth, is to follow Christ back into the harvest. Orienting people toward the academic and toward church seems to produce, my observation, Christians who think they have fulfilled their duty if they have gone to church and learned something. Doing the survey, we meet Christians all the time now who don't attend church anymore. It seems that their needs are better met at home. So what does that have to do with discipleship or the assembly of disciples who briefly come out of their fields on Sunday to meet and strengthen and encourage one another to go back into the harvest, to labor for their Lord? Who defined church for "me." Who invented this organization that meets my needs, rather than the one I love that equips Christ's disciples for Christ's mission?

New believers must be oriented to Christ and His mission from the beginning. I think, this has to be in the first talk. You see Jesus send the man who had had the legion back to his family and he influenced the entire region of the Decapolis. The woman at the well influenced her city knowing far less than the average Christian (but Barna says that's changing). Matthew and Zacchaeus had an immediate ministry to their friends and partners. Jesus involved His disciples in ministry knowing less than most of us know.

So I met with Mike last week, who at 70, has prayed to receive Christ. It is easy to say "make disciples who make disciples," but now I'm on. I made up my own lesson, not knowing what lesson 2 would be. Now, in talking with Mike I know what the next lesson will look like, but like the first, it will be directed to being a follower of Christ in Christ's mission, in His harvest.

I'm a seminary grad yet I'm a new learner. I wonder why all of our teaching isn't connected to following Christ in His mission. Could it be that if we persist to teach stuff as detached from following Christ in His mission, that our knowledge only becomes trivial pursuit on a masters or doctoral level. And then in our churches, discipleship becomes the acquiring of knowledge and piety in the comfort of suburbia, rather that following Christ into the harvest. I'm just wondering if we let a person sit removed from the harvest, teaching him stuff that is not intentionally connecting him to and equipping him for the harvest,  and we do this 12 months a year, what good does it do to send him on a missionary trip as a missionary tourist for 2 weeks in the summer?

So I'm meeting with Mike and it's stretching us both. It's not an easy matter to follow Christ into the harvest, making disciples who make disciples. But who would want to do anything else?