Sow more seeds, not pull out weeds
As the Harvest Crusades season approaches, I thought I would share with you an excellent article that John Collins wrote on our policy regarding working with other churches and leaders. John is the director of Harvest Crusades and a pastor on staff at Harvest Christian Fellowship.
The mission of Harvest Ministries is “Knowing God, and making Him known.” In making God known, we seek to bring as many people as possible face-to-face with the gospel and the claims of Christ through community events. In order to accomplish this mission, it requires that we bring together a broad spectrum of churches who commit to working together for the sake of the gospel.
When the Church sets aside minor differences and works together to impact their community with the gospel, the results can be powerful. The very fact that churches are willing to work together is a powerful testimony to people who are not yet believers. For this reason, Harvest Ministries, in the tradition of groundbreaking ministries like the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, chooses to adopt this strategy.
It is because of this willingness to work cooperatively with believers who represent a diverse array of theological views and traditions, that some have chosen to criticize our mission and strategies. It is because of this “guilt by association” that we seek to clarify our position and define the limits of our ministry partnerships.
est Ministries extends a hand to any and all churches that share these basic, orthodox tenets of the Christian faith.
1. We believe that the Bible to be the inspired and only infallible, authoritative Word of God.
2. We believe that there is one God, eternally existent in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
3. We believe in the deity of Christ, in His virgin birth, in His sinless life, in His miracles, in His vicarious and atoning death through His shed blood, in His bodily resurrection, in His ascension to the right hand of the Father, and in His personal return in power and glory.
4. We believe that for the salvation of lost and sinful man, regeneration by the Holy Spirit is essential, and that repentance from sin and belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is the only way to come into a relationship with God.
5. We believe in the present ministry of the Holy Spirit, by whose indwelling the Christian is enabled to live a godly life.
Beyond these bedrock tenets are a myriad of practices and systems that seek to influence believers and promote a variety of expressions to communicate the Christian faith. While it would be easy to allow these ministry “distinctives” and methodologies to separate us, we have chosen to overlook differences in favor of being effective toward the greater work of the gospel. In working community-wide with churches of varying viewpoints, we have chosen to adopt this philosophy: “In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. And in all things, charity.”
Because we have chosen to work across the spectrum of churches, it should not be inferred that we always agree with their respective practices and interpretations of Scripture. Neither do we believe it to be our place in the church as an evangelistic organization to address these varying views. In each and every crusade, our simple focus and intent is to proclaim the gospel in the most clear, biblically accurate, and relevant terms possible.
To those that would say such a position is “compromising” our core beliefs and allowing potential “false” believers to be in our midst, we would respond with what Jesus taught his disciples in the parable of the wheat and tares.
In this story, a farmer plants a crop of wheat, but his enemy comes in the night and plants tares among the wheat. The tare, or “darnel” seed, initially looks just like wheat, but ultimately it can uproot the wheat.
This might suggest that we should examine the Church and ask, “Who are the wheat and who are the tares?” The logical response among believers is to think they will destroy the church. This then leads to making judgments on who is a “true believer” and who isn’t for the sake of protecting the church.
But that was not what Jesus told his disciples to do. When they said to Jesus, “Shall we pull out the weeds?”, (i.e. segregate the true believers from false believers), Jesus replied, “No, you’ll hurt the wheat if you do. Let both grow together until the harvest. Then I will tell the harvesters to sort out the weeds and burn them and to put the wheat in the barn” (Matthew 13:29-30 NLT).
That is the overriding sentiment that guides our mission when we come into a community for a city-wide campaign. We are not there to pull out the weeds, but to sow more seeds! I agree with the statement of Vance Havner who once said, “If we’re too busy using our sickles on one another, we’re going to miss the harvest.”
Finally, we recognize there will always be some in the body of Christ that will hold to rigid, dogmatic positions, and that they will never be satisfied with our strategy. To them we will not “strive about words” (2 Timothy 2:14-16 NKJV), but do our best to “live peaceably with all men” as we move forward with our calling: “Go therefore and nmake disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit . . . ”
