“Harvest is plentiful, the laborers are few.”
~ Jesus
“The world is going to hell in a hand basket.” I am not sure what a hand basket is or was, but that is what I was often told. The implied meaning of the idiom is that they (the cumulative world) are on a fast track away from the moral center we had lived with. Jesus took a differing perspective. Instead of seeing wasted wheat that was dying, he saw a harvest in need of being picked.
My conflict does not lie in perspective, but lies in the very thing I love and some times loathe, the church. I spend a good portion of my time in and around college students on a Christian college campus. And as the American church, we are in a serious conflict. The world is getting younger, our churches and those leading them are getting older.
Generation Z is expected to be the largest generation in US history. Over taking the Boomers, to which they (Gen Z) will reference as anyone out of high school. As this current generation comes of legal age, the oldest of which is turning 21, according to most who study generations, those leading them in spaces of faith are qualifying for AARP. Below the info graphic from Barna shows the shift and loss of young leaders leading congregations.
I recently asked Larry Osborne, one of the pastors at North Coast Church in Vista, CA how we address this. His answer was simple and complex. “Build the kingdom, not more castles.” So I pushed back with a follow up question, “do we plant more churches?” In his laid back Southern California style, he simply said “why not.”
Larry is a Boomer. Yet, Larry has learned that he had hand the baton to others. He is an unique co-pastorate with a young leader, that he says is less a model for others and just something that was a fit for their church.
I lack the evidence to back up my assessment, so it lies more with personal observation than hard facts. There is a rise in church plants not simply out of a heart for the harvest, but maybe because older leaders are not letting young leaders labor in their fields. Accompanied with youthful energy is new methods of ministry. It is often methodology rather than theology that becomes a dividing line between generations of leadership in the body.
The Millennials generation, which is turning 40 with the turn of the decade, is impatient and will not simply stand by and wait their turn. Due to their persistence, a steady rise of non-profit and social justice organizations have taken flight. While what they do may not look like church, do not get it mistaken, it is tending the fields that are ready to be harvested. It is picking ripe wheat out of sex-trafficking trades, inner-city poverty, and loving wandering refugees who have no home. Life change has happened because young Christ followers did not wait their turn.
Yet, I am old school in this, the local church is still the vehicle given to us to fulfill the Great Commission. Last week I stood awestruck by the site of 65,000 young adults, no older than 25, overcome with worship and praise to God. In moments of such as this, I am certain the Holy Spirit whispers callings into hearts. Callings to preach. Callings to pastor. Callings to lead.
I struggle with the question “where will they find space to lead? From what field can they reap a harvest?”
I acknowledge there is some pieces of the puzzle we are not seeing. Young leaders are getting opportunities. They lead youth groups, kids ministry, small groups. Yet, there is a rising tide of lack of space to be the one who speaks for God to the whole congregation. My information filled brain combines this aging leadership with the gaping hole in the boat we see of those age 18-25 leaving the church. Data still is lacking on whether like their Gen X parents, Gen Z will return to the house of God with kids in tow or if their exodus is for good.
All this pieces together to say what Jesus already said “the harvest in plentiful, the laborers are few.” This seems ever more true. Yet, I push that those who we find willing to labor need space to do so. Not sent to a musty church basement to just teach the kids. No, we need to give them space to lead, to preach, to teach – no matter the age, the gender, the experience, or how skinny their jeans are.
The fields are too ripe to not use them.
