Ripe for a new harvest

For the past few summers our clan has bustled about Ontario’s threshing and steam-era shows and small town festivals making and selling homemade ice cream. It’s the continuation of my late father-in-law’s vision to fatten up the population one creamy spoonful at a time. Our kids very much enjoy Grandpa’s vision and Grandma’s recipe!

To be honest, I’m mostly a fish out of water when it comes to these shows and the 1928 engine I’m somehow supposed to know how to run and occasionally fix. I grew up rural and worked on farms, but there’s a good reason cows kicked me!

Actually, it’s really not so bad. We get copious amounts of family time, meet lots of cool people with interesting stories, and there’s nothing quite like a steam engine whistle at five metres to shake loose the cobwebs that build up from reading too much theology. It’s like a call back to where the writing meets the road.

I’ve actually been learning valuable lessons from these jaunts down memory lane.

That whistle is a shrill reminder of a day we hardly imagine existed. A mere century ago things were very different. Cities now sprawl and the countryside is latticed with pavement and patterned by fields worked by tractors the size of the houses the first settlers raised a dozen kids in. There was a time when people actually cleared bush to survive. There was a time when land was worked for the very first time. Those old tractors with steel-studded wheels were groundbreakers in more ways than one.

For me, the sunny days of dust and constant drone of putt-putts has given new vision to my glazed-over screen-saver eyes. Comfortable in our advancements, affluent to a fault, thoughtless and deconstructionist of our pasts, we need a rekindled pioneering spirit. The spirit that shaped much of what made Canada and the United States unique—and which yet can be seen in the lives of recent immigrants—has cancerously become what historian Jacques Barzun simply calls “decadence.” We’ve settled in, hunkered down, upgraded the implements and lost our drive to find space where no plow blade has turned the ground. If personal cost or discomfort is involved, we’re against it. As much as this is true in many of our lives, it is certainly true for the vast majority of churches.

The Apostle Paul was always looking for a place where the gospel had never been preached, but we act like he pretty much swallowed up all the possible real estate. We have memories of an adventurous, entrepreneurial, missionary past, but now buy the secular line that such zeal is unnecessary, misguided and probably mean-spirited. All this works to close our ears to the commission to go, to be compassionate, and to be Christ-centred and Christ-sent people who pioneer with our Lord in inner cities and vacated hamlets.

Where is there ground yet to be broken for Jesus in your neck of the woods? For all of our new-fangled gadgetry, the land around us is spiritually dry, overgrown and unstewarded. The wildness and weeds are choking out life.

Who are the pioneers willing to take long-term, faith-filled initiative for a new day? Is there any room for this pioneering spirit in our churches?

What might the implements of a new pioneering season of Christian mission look like? Someday they too will look out-dated, but Lord knows we need them now. After all, just look to the fields, they are ripe for harvest.