Harvest Time
After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”
Luke 10:1-2
Greetings from the Anglican Church of Saints Timothy and Titus, more familiarly known as Sts. TnT.
Fr. Russell Martin, in his June newsletter article, delivers an urgent reminder that we live in a time that is ripe for the harvest of the Lord. "There are souls to be won for Christ and His Kingdom.” Fr. Russell underlines three lessons to be learned from Luke’s account of the Lord’s commissioning of these disciples: It is a continuation of Jesus’ own work, the Lord intended this to be communal work, and he sent them because more laborers were needed to enter the harvest plain. For the past year and a half or so, our congregation’s energies have been focused on survival issues, including getting accustomed to doing church-out-of-a-trailer. Now it’s time to be about the task that the Lord has given us to do in growing His body. In other words, it is time to move from survive to thrive. That means, of course, engaging the world and the surrounding culture and talking with others about our faith.
In my reading I recently came across some research done by Lifeway Research in 2007. A survey was conducted with unchurched [did not attend religious service in the preceding six months] folks through two telephone surveys, one of 900 adults ages 18-29 in early 2007 and the other of 502 adults ages 30 and over during the summer of 2007.
Just touching on a few points in the project, 72 percent of the people interviewed said they think the church ‘is full of hypocrites,’ "At the same time, however, 71 percent of the respondents said they believe Jesus ‘makes a positive difference in a person’s life’ and 78 percent said they would ‘be willing to listen’ to someone who wanted to share what they believed about Christianity."
--78 percent of those surveyed said they would be willing to listen to someone who wanted to talk about their Christian beliefs. The number rose to 89 percent among adults 18-29 years of age.
--78 percent of adults 30 years and older said they would enjoy an honest conversation with a friend about religious and spiritual beliefs, even if they disagreed with the friend.
"Even though the unchurched have a negative view of the church, they are overwhelmingly open to someone sharing about their Christian faith," Ed Stetzer, the director of Lifeway, said. "We think religion is a topic that is off-limits in polite conversation, but unchurched people say they would enjoy conversations about spiritual matters." To read more go to www.lifeway.com
Please visit our website at www.st-tnt.org and read the rest of Fr. Russell’s article on Harvest Time as well as the rest of our newsletter, the BLAST [Basic Lowdown at Sts T&T.] Just click on the newsletter link under Latest News. Please note on the website that our meeting place is changing for the summer, beginning on June 15th.
Each month our Acts 1:8 Ministry Team selects a project to support with the change that is collected each Sunday. Our “Change the World” project for June is the Anglican Relief and Development Fund for Myanmar Cyclone victims.
Be sure to check out the Prayer Closet article and the Stephen Ministry piece on communication and listening. There is also the “Acts 1:8 article which contains some musings on Obamania and Oprah.
May the Lord Bless You and Keep You,
Elaine Fox
