MMRC: Harvest 2000, Take II

Harvest 2000, Take II
by Justin D. Long

In yesterday's issue of the Monday Morning Reality Check, I took issue with the newest plan announced by the Assemblies of God, entitled "Harvest 2000." That plan called for (1) praying over every person in the United States by name, and (2) presenting the Gospel to every individual in the United States by AD 2000.

I'll admit, my critique was harsh, and perhaps overly so. My wife often tells me I should wait 24 hours before releasing a Reality Check to give myself time to re-think matters, and I think she's right--but I often fail in the face of the temptation to just push the button and send it. Three people wrote in to chastise me for my harshness, while others wrote in to discuss the issue of the plan itself.

Today I've decided to release a "Part 2". This is partly apology for my harshness, and partly reflection. Overnight, I stopped asking questions about Harvest 2000 in particular, and stepped back to look at the bigger picture. I began to ask, "Why we make such plans to begin with?" I have an intellectual understanding of why plans fail--that was fully covered in past Reality Checks--but I do not really understand why we launch them in the first place.

Harvest 2000, for example, was begun despite numerous other plans: Luis Palau has begun crusades to evangelize America; Billy Graham's crusades are well-known and have been nationally televised; the JESUS film has been aired on television and I've heard of a new plan to give a copy of it to every home in America (though I've yet to see any printed material outlining this plan); radio broadcasting is readily available; television programs are in abundance; there is a church every city and virtually every town, often on nearly every street corner; street preachers are in the inner cities; youth camps are held for kids; denominations have home mission boards; new multicultural ministries have been begun; major conferences and rallies are held; and all this along with the massive rallies held by Promise Keepers, March for Jesus, business networks for men and women, and many other similar evangelistic activities.

Is Harvest 2000 motivated by the idea that these other plans are invalid? This thought can be dismissed out of hand. The facts are against it: the A/G cooperates with many of these programs, and "Harvest 2000" calls for cooperation with 170,000 congregations in a combined "Mission America" thrust. So, perhaps the best word is not "despite" numerous other plans but "in partnership with" numerous other plans... except that it's not really in partnership with everything, but just with a few things--a limited network, which is good, except that a new network isn't necessarily an answer to old problems.

Does Harvest 2000 fill a "niche" in evangelism that other plans have somehow missed? This, too, can be dismissed, if simply because of the national nature of the plan -- the idea of presenting the Gospel to EVERY individual in the United States.

Perhaps, then, Harvest 2000 (and Mission America as a whole) is motivated by the idea that existing evangelism isn't "good enough." You have to wonder how good our evangelism is when there are so many structures of sin gripping the USA and the world, and when the church is in decline and people call our nation a "post-Christian society." Another way of saying it is: for whatever reason, existing evangelism efforts have not stemmed the tide of defections from the churches. We need something new to do this. "The country isn't safe... the churches are in decline... We need to get back to where we were."

On this, I'm sure we all agree. The net conversion rate in America for Christianity as a whole (conversions minus defections) is -39,200. (This doesn't take into account demographic growth--the 2.2 million children born into the church each year--because at the moment we're discussing evangelism and the results of evangelism). Protestants lose 189,700 members each year. Catholics and Anglicans, too, are losing hundreds of thousands of members annually. Non-mainline churches -- independent groups like charismatics, African-American churches, and nondenominational churches -- are the only ones showing good growth, adding nearly as many through conversion as they do through demographic birth.

But if existing mass evangelism programs aren't stemming this tide, and haven't for the past few decades, will MORE evangelism of the same kind be the solution? I'm not so sure. This is a problem not of evangelism but church growth and church maintenance, and there's no one-size-fits-all answer. A new church growth study just finished by Christian Schwarz, head of the Institute of Church Development in Germany, is perhaps one of the most comprehensive such studies in history. He surveys over a thousand churches in 32 countries, and summarizes 8 qualities of healthy churches. Although I've seen a summary, I haven't yet seen the full report, so I won't review it until I do. But, the 8 qualities are:

(1) Empowering leadership where leaders assist Christians to gain their spiritual potential.

(2) Gift oriented ministry encouraging Christians to serve in their area of giftedness.

(3) Passionate spirituality, or the walk of faith.

(4) Functional structures, where leadership continues to seek structures which improve the organization of the church.

(5) Inspiring worship where the Holy Spirit is present and felt in the service.

(6) Holistic small groups which move beyond discussing Bible passages to applying the message to daily life.

(7) Need-oriented evangelism which focuses evangelistic efforts on the questions and needs of non-Christians.

(8) Loving relationships which enable people to experience how Christian love really works.

The best response to an unevangelized field is evangelism. But the best response to a saturated, post-Christian, declining-Church society isn't necessarily MORE evangelism--at least, not at first. Evangelism is a waste of time and resources if people come in to the church but don't stay. We need to answer the problem of the decline of the church with solutions that will keep people in the church before we go out to recruit new members.

Take it another way. Coca-Cola has a different strategy for its operations in the United States than it would have when opening a new market in, say, Somalia. Here, it has a core of people who drink Coke regularly, and a core of people who wouldn't touch it for the world--preferring Pepsi--and a core of people who don't drink soft drinks at all, and a core of people who are ambivalent. In Somalia, they may never have heard of Coke. Here, it's a matter of perusading people to drink Coke (and some will never be persuade); in Somalia, it's a matter of offering it for the first time. If Coke were to go around the USA offering its product as if for the first time, we'd all think they were crazy. Yet we often evangelize this way.

Here in America, 85% of the country professes to be Christian and 15% don't. The 15% who don't probably aren't turning away from the Church because they haven't heard the Gospel, but because they don't like the salespeople. Simply presenting them with the Gospel won't necessarily deal with this issue.

Harvest 2000 is not a bad plan. It is, possibly, an unnecessary one: it represents part of an initiative to see the USA evangelized--but the large majority of the USA have been evangelized many times over. (On the other hand, if every denomination abandoned its home missions then pretty soon no one would be evangelizing.) It has holes, but every plan does: it's our responsibility to critique and fix plans. Though locally it is an easy-to-implement plan that promises good rewards, taken as a whole its goals are huge and possibly unrealistic. The goal of praying over every individual in the United States by name within a 3-year time frame will be very challenging, if not completely impossible. Perhaps a more realistic goal would be to have every church member participate in a prayer group which covers their entire neighborhood; and, secondly, to have each church participate in a prayer network which covers all the at-risk groups within their city (e.g. the homeless, the poor, etc). Other saturation evangelism campaigns set goals of planting _X_ churches and seeing _X%_ of the population attending church, rather than _X%_ evangelized.

But is Harvest 2000, and other plans of its kind, the RIGHT kind of plan for the United States? That is a question for which we need to find an answer, before more plans of this sort are launched. Every nation deserves its own national evangelism strategy: one run by indigenous churches and indigenous evangelists, which sees sustained church growth (where people come in and stay in), and which is comprehensive (reaching every person in the country). But our plans must be plans which bring people in AND keep them there. I'm not suggesting we abandon existing plans (like Harvest 2000). But I am suggesting that we take the time to investigate the reasons why people abandon the church, and modify our plans, methods, and presentation accordingly.