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Sow, Grow, and Harvest: How Churches Might be doing the Great Commission wrong (PART 2)

Writer's picture: Kent HollowayKent Holloway

Updated: 3 days ago


Part 2 of 3: Growing


Revivals. They were a big deal when I was growing up in a Southern Baptist church. I could count on one happening at least once per year. If I was lucky, we'd have one 5-day revival in the summer and maybe a shorter two or three day one later in the fall.


The church would hire an evangelist to come and for five nights out of the week, we'd have worship service with some mighty good, fiery preaching. We'd get excited. Many people would meander up to the front of the church near the altar during the invitation. For those who don't know what an "invitation" is, it's just a less fancy, Southern Baptist word for "altar call." It's the time when, if the Holy Spirit has moved you during the worship service, you're supposed to come up and talk to the preacher about it. If you feel like you need to get saved, that's the time to do it. If you want to "rededicate" your life (for Christians who have backslidden), you can do that too. If you just need to pray, you can kneel down at the stage steps and do that.


Revivals were always very emotional times. The preacher's handkerchief would always be soaked from where he'd been dabbing the sweat from his forehead. Faces throughout the congregation would be streaked with tear stains. And everyone would be quietly reflecting on where they stood in relation to Christ.


As a kid, I loved Revivals. They were big deals, and of course, an opportunity to get to spend every evening of a given week with my church friends.


But when I reflect back on these big events, I'm left with a series burning question: Can a church "schedule" a real revival? Was it all just theatrics? Was the Holy Spirit really moving in the place or were emotions so overly charged by the sermon, that people felt compelled to act with or without God's nudging? And if they acted without God's nudging, could their decisions have been authentic?


Truth is, no, a church cannot "schedule" a revival. Revivals are something only God can ordain. But for the purposes of this blog post, that's not the big problem here. The real problem is the nomenclature. The word "Revival" itself. Through most of the twentieth century, the American church (at least, the Southern Baptist denomination anyway) came to think of Revivals as big evangelistic campaigns. As I mentioned in the first part of this blog series, it was "Invite your friends and family to church and let the preacher win their souls" events. But let's think about that for a moment? Let's consider the word itself: Revival.


First of all, I think it's important to know that as much as I researched Scripture, I could find no mention of the word in the Bible (at least within the context of what we're discussing here). Now that doesn't mean "revivals" are unbiblical. After all, the word "rapture" isn't used in the Bible either, and yet it clearly teaches such an event will transpire (although the point in time it will happen is open to interpretation). I suppose one might say that the day of Pentecost, as described in Acts 2:1-4, could be the very first reference to a revival as it has come to be known. I'd argue they'd be wrong about that and here's why...


What does the word "revival" mean, exactly? Well, it means to "revive," right? That implies that something was once alive (animated, awake, active) but somehow now has grown dormant (dead, asleep, vegging), so we've got to wake it up again. I suppose you could technically say that an Unsaved person is spiritually dead and a Revival brings them to Life by being born again, but I don't think that's what the word, in a proper theological context means. Time and again, when we see examples of God-ordained revivals in history, it's always in relation to His Church. To His Bride. Yes, there have been spiritual awakenings historically (I'm thinking Charles Spurgeon and a Great Spiritual Awakening in 19th Century England) where thousands of people have come to know Christ in a miraculous way.


But I've got a theory about Revivals. Just as I said in the previous post that churches are for Believers...for the saved...so too are revivals. Revivals...true revivals...are when a sleepy, almost dead church suddenly and inexplicably explodes with renewed life. It implies that a Christian has grown stale. Lukewarm. Even cold. And God moves in their lives (or in multiple lives within a geographic area) to warm them again. To light a fire under them. To bring their relationship with God even closer than it has been before. I think it's part of the sanctification process (the process in which Christians, over the span of their lives, are gradually being moulded into the image of Christ).


You might be asking yourself, "What does any of this have to do with part two of your 'Sow, Grow, and Harvest' explanation of the mistakes the church is making in regards to the Great Commission?" To that, I say everything. You see, in the last post, I talked about our mandate to sow seeds. I talked about how we're not responsible for whether those seeds find fertile soil or not. That's God's responsibility, not ours. We're just supposed to toss out those seeds as we move along the field. Then, like any good farmer, we wait. We see what blooms. Then, it's our job to help nurture those blooming plants. It's our job to help grow those plants. And that, my friends, is probably the greatest failure of the modern American church today.


We are so focused on "winning souls" (once again, I cringe to even type that phrase)...in having big old publicly visible revivals (Hey! Look what God is doing at our church? He's really moving! People are getting saved left and right!), we forget one crucial thing about the Great Commission. Jesus never said, "As you are going, evangelize and win souls..." No, he said, "As you go, make disciples." That's the goal, friends. Disciples. Not numbers. Not statistics. Not the highest attendance your church has ever seen in its history. We are called to make disciples.


Now making disciples always starts with the same step: sowing. You can't have a disciple of Christ if they're not a believer in Christ. So, yes, evangelism is definitely a huge part of the Great Commission. But in my experience--from what I've seen of so many churches during my life time--once these souls come to know Christ, pastors/preachers/ministers/etc move on to the next big revival event they've got scheduled and the newborn babes in Christ are left out in the cold to fend for themselve and most likely, spiritually starve.


A real world example of this? When I was in seminary, a required course we all had to take was F.A.I.T.H., at the time, the Southern Baptist Convention's premiere evangelistic strategy that was designed so regular folks could easily share the gospel (FYI, as someone specifically called to evangelism, I despised this approach as it sounded so much like a used car salesman pitching a clunker). But whether I liked it or not, I had to take the course. And part of that course was cold knocking on doors to offer the F.A.I.T.H. presentation to whoever would give us the time. One Saturday, my team visited about twenty or twenty-five houses. We presented the gospel to about eleven of these households. Not one of them prayed to receive Christ as their Lord and Savior, which was perfectly fine. We reported back to the seminary about these presentations. And to my knowledge, there was never any follow up with any of these visits by the seminary or any local churches. It was a numbers game. We were planting seeds to as many people as possible within the Wake Forest community and trusting God to take care of the rest.


But this is where the church (not just the Southern Baptist Convention) is failing miserably. You see, the Great Commission has another mandate. Thankfully, Baptists tend not to forget this one, but afterwards...crickets. But the second part of the Great Commission, Jesus tells the Apostles to make disciples of all nations..."baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit." Matthew 28:19 (NASB). Baptism is the first step in making disciples. Billy Graham said that baptism is the "first sermon a Christian ever preaches." It's also a kind of covenant between the new Christian and the local church. A church that baptizes a new believer is saying, "We're committing to take you under our wing and raise you up as a mature believer...a mature disciple." Once again, Billy Graham understood this as well. He said, "I believe in it [believer's baptism] wholeheartedly. In our crusades we don’t baptize because we feel that this should be done by the local pastors—and that if I baptized, some people would say they had been baptized by me, and that would be putting the emphasis on the wrong person. To one who has received Christ, baptism is a necessary and meaningful experience. But, I must say with Paul: ‘Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel’.” Rev. Graham understood that a local pastor should baptize new believers so that they could shepherd and grow them personally.


Within the Southern Baptist denomination, we've got the believer's baptism thing down pat (for the most part). It's everything afterwards I think we drop the ball on. It's the growing and nurturing of these young Christians that we are neglecting. And friends, before you turn to your pastor and blame him for anything, we should look in the mirror at that big plank in our eyes first. Yes, it is the pastor's specific job to disciple his flock. To nurture them. To grow them. To feed them from God's holy word. But just as evangelism is every Christian's mandated responsibility, the Great Commission command of "making disciples" speaks to all of us. Every single beleiver. We're not just supposed to sow those seeds. We're supposed to help grow the plants that take root and begin to blossom. We should take responsibility in these new believers the same way a parent takes care of their own child. We're to feed them. We're to watch over them. Keep them from putting their little hands on a hot stove when the need arises. Teach them to walk, then run. We're to take them and mentor them and help them on their way to having the mind of Christ (Philippians 2:5).


We shouldn't wait for our church to do it. We shouldn't wait for our pastor to do it or ask us to do it. We should look for the need and start discipling. It doesn't matter if you are the one specifically who led that person to Christ (there's no way Billy Graham could have possibly discipled everyone that came to Christ through his messages), find your spiritual orphan and invest in them. Pray for them. Teach them. And guess what! You don't have to do it alone. Get together with a few of your mature Christian friends and team up to disciple these people. The amazing thing is, the more you do this, the more people see you doing this. The more people seeing you doing this, the more people will disciple other new Christians in need. And before you know it, your church might just see a real revival going on like you've never seen before!


Come back soon for Part 3: The Harvest! Oh, this is the most exciting one yet! You won't want to miss it.

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Debbie Buttram
Jan 15
Rated 5 out of 5 stars.

This is so true……God has been speaking to my heart about some of these very things.

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JCJAuthor
Jan 15
Rated 5 out of 5 stars.

This has been a burden for me for a while, but how to implement it is unclear to me at the moment. We ministered in the south for many years, and everyone has prayed a prayer at some point, but few have grown past that, and many more are leaning on a false assurance. The ABC Repeat After Me method of evangelism has done more harm than good.

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Kent Holloway
Jan 15
Replying to

Honestly, I think the solution is that we disciple as individuals. And we disciple our disciples to disciple others. It starts with one person doing what needs to be done. We shouldn’t wait for our organized church to start it. It’s something we do in the course of our daily lives. In other words, “as we are going.”

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