More Farmers

Neil Cole astutely observes that when Jesus instructed his disciples to pray for more workers they were the only believers at the time.  The request was not that God would stir the hearts of apathetic church goers but rather that God would capture the hearts and minds of people who were yet to believe the gospel and then send them back into the field.  For a mighty harvest to be gathered we must maintain a view of new converts as new workers.  Indeed, every person who has come to believe in Christ of necessity already knows enough to produce another disciple.  They simply need to be sent back into the field from which they’ve come with the message that saved them.  For this reason the tools within the Life Teams app, Growth Groups and The Three O’s, both set the expectation that every believer ought to seek to share the life of Christ within any given week.  When the responses to these forms reach their inbox, participants are reminded to pray for each other and seek “Blessings from Above” over the field in which each believer is working.  These tools also serve to mobilize current believers by placing weekly tension on them to share their faith.

In addition to the tools, each resource within the app was selected or produced with the view of equipping any believer to share the gospel within their given field.  For instance, the “Messiah Series” is a collection of gospel presentations based on the Old Testament and related to contemporary experience.  Each lesson in the series could be used as a stand-alone presentation of the gospel or the entire series could be led with a group of believers or unbelievers.  A person who came to faith through a Messiah lesson could then simply share that lesson back into the field from which he or she came.  The same is true for the rest of the studies contained within the app.

By building a culture of mission into the Life Teams, the tools and resources pave the way for exponential growth of the kingdom as Jesus predicted in his short parable from Matt. 13:33 –

He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough.”