What Is the "Harvest" for a North American Church? (part 3)

In my previous posts on this subject (click here and here to read), I began to unpack the concept of "harvest" from a church perspective. I'll tie onto the closing comments of my last post.

Picture the following scenario. A person stands up in a crowd and shouts out, "We're expecting a great harvest!" Aside from the possibility that this person might be crazy, what other thoughts might go through your mind? What kind of harvest would you think about?

This is the dilemma I'm talking about in these posts. The Bible talks about a "harvest," but what do we mean when we talk about a harvest? Are we talking about the same thing as the Bible talks about? Do we even know what we mean?

As I said in my last post, the onset of "Constantinian Christianity" created a mindset that the harvest (if there was one) was in faraway, pagan lands. Since everyone in the Western world was theoretically Christian, the only possible harvest had to be understood as foreign missions.

From the vantage point of Western Christians like ourselves, this changed with the start of Protestantism. Christianity was now fractured into different churches with differing structures, practices and beliefs. Harvest could now become the "conversion" of other Christians.

If you fast-forward to the "melting pot" of Christianity in the US, you find a context where churches compete for Christians. Harvest now becomes the "conversion" of people from one set of Christian beliefs to another set of beliefs. Of course there were conversions of people from darkness to light, but much of the North American harvest was in truth a form of sheep-stealing rather than conversion.

In our own Restoration Movement, we learned to effectively steal sheep. We justified it with the belief that we were saving people from false teachings and false practices and converting them to the truth. We rebaptized thousands of people who had been baptized "for the wrong reasons" or "in the wrong church" or "by a false preacher" and on and on it goes. Harvest was less about converting people to Jesus than about convincing people that our specific set of Christian beliefs and practices was the ONLY right set. Added to that, many people still think of harvest as something far away in pagan, 3rd-world countries.

This kind of "conversion" is not always bad. People certainly shift from one set of beliefs to another within their lifetimes. We all grow and mature in our understandings. Sometimes, this causes us to leave one group and migrate elsewhere.

The problem for us is not that people shifted from other churches to ours. The problem is that we confused this with the harvest. For the most part, this was the only kind of harvest we knew. Conversion from absolute paganism was equated with conversion from being a Baptist. We didn't seem to know the difference between harvest growth and transfer growth.

As I will discuss in my next post, the concept of "harvest" has become embarrassing or unclear to many Christians who no longer view our church through sectarian lenses. I think this is part of the reason why our churches no longer grow. I'll ask if we can reclaim a healthy concept of harvest.