‘Jesus’s instruction for us to pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers for the harvest tells us that the need of the day is to get as many young men and women as possible into full-time paid gospel ministry’ reflects a prevailing culture among ‘our kind of evangelicals’.
Our emphasis on getting ‘good people’ into our apprenticeships, ministry training schemes and equivalents, and in turn sending them to theological college and into ‘ministry’, speaks volumes about our priorities — for our churches and for the individuals concerned.
Full-time?
And this drive for ‘full-time’ workers is understandable and, to a point, necessary. The fields are indeed ripe for harvest, and Jesus did instruct us to ask our Father for workers in the field. But to equate workers primarily, or preferably, with those in full-time paid gospel work does not seem to be very thought-through. If the harvest-fields are ripe with the lost, and the work needed is for their salvation, then is it not time we re-assessed our strategies for finding and defining our ‘workers’?
