The Harvest is Plentiful...

The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few...

A young man gets up to tell a story about a summer working on the mission field for Dr. Tony Campolo. He says this:

In the springtime we had a speaker come into our school and it was none other than Tony Campolo. He came to tell about the work he does with his church and with his Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education (the EAPE) and so I signed up and showed up for an event the following May.

Dr. Campolo worships at Mount Carmel Baptist Church, an inner-city church in West Philadelphia, and that’s where they met. It was a Saturday morning in the month of May when we gathered at the church with thousands of teenagers when all of a sudden Dr. Campolo walks into the room and cries out:

“Do you want to change the world for Christ?” and the crowd of young people rumbled, “YA!”

“Are you here to serve the Gospel?”

“YA!”

“Do you want to bring Jesus Christ to people who do not know that name?”

“YA!”

“Then get the hell onto that bus!”

Well, we got onto that bus, and the neighbourhood that Campolo’s church was in was pretty scary to us white boys – abandoned and run down buildings, homeless people, nobody there like us at all. Well, if that place was decrepit, then I don’t know what to say about the neighbourhood we ended up in, because it made the place we began look like the Taj Mahal.

I remember that I first went to a run-down apartment building and knocked on the door and an old woman comes to the door. She asks, “What the hell do you want?” So I said, “I’m here to talk to you about Jesus!”

Well, as soon as the words came from my lips the woman began screaming and hollering and I don’t know what came over her, but next thing I knew she was chasing me down 6 flights of stairs and she said to me, “I better never catch you in this place again!”

I thought to myself, “OK – a simple ‘No’ would have done it!”

So I was just standing there out on the street crushed. I had come out here to help save the world for Jesus and was just utterly rejected. It really hurt...I didn’t know what I should do so I just said out loud, “Lord Jesus, I don’t know why you brought me here to this abysmal neighbourhood where I normally wouldn’t be caught dead – but if you can use me, I am here!”

After that prayer I went down to a convenience store, bought a pack of smokes and a pack of diapers and headed back to the projects. I headed up to the 2nd floor and knocked on an apartment door. A voice called from the other side, “Whaddaya want?”

I slipped a pamphlet under the door and waited. A woman opened the door a crack and saw me and said, “Come in!” I handed her the pack of cigarettes and diapers, she offered me a smoke and we lit and I smoked the first cigarette of my life.

She asked me, “What’s all this about? What is a white boy like you doing in a place like this?”

“Well,” I said, “I’m here to talk with you about Jesus.”

“I just don’t understand. Why would Jesus want to knock on my door? What does Jesus know about me?”

“Well, actually,” I replied, “Jesus knows a lot about you – he looks out for people, particularly people like you.”

I spent the rest of my day with that woman in her apartment in the projects and before I left she asked me, “Would you pray for me and my baby? Would you pray to Jesus that we would someday get out of this place?”

So we prayed together and then I left.

We got back on the bus and Dr. Campolo was there. Still on fire, Campolo asked, “Did you bring some people to Jesus today?” and the crowd cheered!

I then approached Dr. Campolo and said, “You know Dr. Campolo, I thought that I was going out to bring people to Jesus, but I found out during my time in that neighbourhood that the person brought to Jesus was me.”

Dear friends,

I just want you to know that the world we live in is a troubled world. There are people living in desperate conditions all across the face of this planet. People are literally starving to death; but sometimes we are inclined to follow Jesus into the despairing neighbourhoods of West Philadelphia, or even Toronto’s Regent Park.

Last year I spent a year doing ministry in Regent Park – one of Canada’s poorest neighbourhoods – and the conditions were awful. We began leading a Wednesday Communion Service in an apartment building in the area and it was always a challenge to want to go there. We started off with 4 or 5 Emmanuel College students doing ministry in the area at the start of September; by the end of September we had less than half that number, because Regent Park is an overwhelming experience. While in Regent Park I saw some pretty atrocious things, but even today the things that jump into my mind when I think about the neighbourhood are the smell of the elevator of that apartment building – it always smelled like feces. I remember the man who poked his head outside for a few moments and ended up being beaten to a pulp – he died two days later in hospital and our community held a memorial service for him. Regent Park is an extreme place the way ancient Israel was extreme. There are people staring death in the face every single day, the same way that an Israel overwhelmed by the Roman government stared into the face of oppression each and every day.

Jesus calls us to be his workers, in places like Regent Park and in West Philadelphia, and let me tell you folks, God is gonna get what he wants, because our God is the Lord of the Harvest.

Our Wednesday Communion allowed the folks of that apartment building to step outside of the circle of death, gang violence, drug trafficking, and young people with guns in Regent Park and into a different story about God. God needs workers, folks, because the time has come for God to fulfill his story in our story.

The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few...Amen.