The harvest is plentiful!
When Jesus sent out 72 of his followers to proclaim the Kingdom of God in the towns and villages where he was about to go, he commissioned them with the worst motivational speech of all time.
I’m sending you out as lambs among wolves.
You will certainly be rejected.
And you can’t take any of your stuff.
As un-motivating as those promises may have felt, Jesus promised something else as he commissioned his “sent ones” that should fill each of us with hope even 2,000 years later:
The harvest is plentiful!
That is the spiritual reality. The harvest is plentiful.
He may have sent his 72 followers into rejection, complete dependence and suffering, but he also sent them into a plentiful harvest. The fields are ready and an abundant harvest awaits laborers who follow the Lord of the harvest into his harvest fields.
Jesus identifies the one limiting factor to this harvest being reaped: laborers.
Laborers for the harvest
This is the reality that we live in right now. The harvest is happening everywhere we look, and we are constantly confronted with the need for more laborers. For the last year it feels like we can’t even set foot on a new campus without the doors opening wide!
One of our partners spent an hour on a new campus and met multiple student athletes who actually said things like, “we are a spiritually underserved campus”, and “we wish someone would come and invest in us spiritually!” On her next visit, the director of athletics invited her back to share about InterVarsity Christian Fellowship with the entire coaching staff!
Stacy and I set up a table at a community college for a few hours and met 100 students who expressed interest in checking out a Bible study!
The harvest is plentiful on college campuses! We’d love to see missional communities planted on all thirty-five campuses across the state of Nebraska! But what about laborers? Where can we get some more of those?
Here’s one route we could take:
Recruit 35 full-time paid staff to send to the 35 campuses and raise about 1.5 million dollars per year…
And the students and communities who would be impacted by 35 full-time campus missionaries would be well worth 1.5 million dollars per year! But couldn’t there be a more efficient, more reproducible strategy for reaching every campus in our state?
How much does ministry cost in your city? Your ministry? Your church?
What if it worked out like Jesus said it could in Luke 10? What if the laborers for the harvest were found in the harvest?
Laborers for the harvest in the harvest
One place where we’re seeing this is at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. There are 25,000 students at UNL and it is a ripe place for ministry. Typically we wouldn’t even think about starting ministry there if we didn’t have a full-time staff, or better yet, a team of full-time staff to send. But what if the laborers for the harvest are in the harvest?
Here’s what happened:
A few months ago we worked with a church to host a gathering of college students from across our city (and beyond) and cast vision for reaching out to their friends and planting missional communities on their campuses. You can read about it in this previous post.
One of the students we met was a freshman from UNL named Naba, and she got fired up for reaching her friends. I (Eric) took a few of the student planters we’ve been working with at UNO and we drove out to Lincoln to check out the campus with her and to cast vision for planting a community among her group of friends.
As we toured the campus as potential laborers it became really clear that not only was the harvest plentiful, but the best laborer was already in the fields! As a first semester freshman, Naba had already helped a few friends recommit their lives to Jesus. She recognized areas of brokenness and division on campus and had a longing to see the Kingdom of God grow!
As we look back at our experience in Omaha over the last two years we see this same principle at work. Where we’ve harvested we’ve found the laborers who continue the harvest!
The Latino student community at UNO is a great example of this:
During the first week of school I (Stacy) got to know a new student named Rene. Rene was immediately caught by the vision of a multiethnic community bringing the love of God to every corner of the campus. After talking with me for over an hour he turned around and joined the harvest. He went out and set up meetings with his friends Gloria and Yanira. Rene vouched for me, shared his trust and they both jumped on board with the vision right away. Yanira then introduced me to Miguel and Sanjuanita. Miguel invited his friends Daisy and Abraham, and Sanjuanita brought Tina and Keisy along. God led us to one “person of peace” in the Latino student community and that one connection multiplied to relationships with over a dozen Latino students. Five of these students came back to a relationship with God in that first year!
Think about your mission field. Where are you laboring alone? How could you empower more laborers into the harvest?
Is there a place where you think harvest is plentiful but laborers are few? What would it look like to find laborers for that harvest in those harvest fields?
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Finding laborers in the field leads to multiplicative growth. Great insight, Eric and Stacy.
Thanks, Steve! I like the way I heard another leader put it recently: no one is an end-user. The problem is that almost everyone is an end-user unless we plan for multiplication on the front end. We’re praying for laborers for the harvest in South Florida!