Cultivating or Planting - What Season Is it?

Just like farming, there are two activities for a life of witness: cultivating and planting. If you do the right thing in the wrong season, you get zero results." That somewhat paraphrased statement from Ben Arment in Church in the Making: What Makes or Breaks a New Church Before it Starts has a great deal of wisdom in it. Knowing which season you are in can be used by God to produce a bountiful harvest.

One who is planting a garden (small scale) or a field of grain (large scale) understands that the sequence is important. You turn over the hardened ground before you put the seeds in the soil.

In our life of witness we will meet people whose hearts have been hardened by broken homes, sexual abuse, death, divorce and a myriad of other life circumstances. They are just not prepared to receive the seed of the Gospel. That's the time to cultivate, patiently waiting to plant the seed. Too often we walk away from such people, seeking instead those people whose hearts are already cultivated and ready for the seed. It seems so much easier.

But an eventual harvest requires both activities. Paul understood this. He said of himself in Romans 15:20 "It has always been my ambition to preach the Gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else's foundation." Paul was ready to do the painstaking work of cultivating people's hearts.

5 ways to cultivate people's hearts (with some thoughts from Ben Arment and some from me)

1. Pray like crazy for people you meet who seem to be hard soil. Pray for softening of the hard ground and patience for yourself in seed planting.
2. Purposefully spend time with "hard ground" kind of people, loving on them, spending time with them, being their friend even if they never come to know Jesus. This likely will mean you will have to go to some places and people groups you wouldn't go to if it were just up to your comforts and conveniences.
   
3. Understand that every encounter has the potential for a redemptive relationship of cultivation. Spend tons of time listening to people who are outside the churched world. Listen for their hurts, concerns, fears and challenges. Don't just give them the Gospel in written form - give them yourself.
4. Build strong friendships with high trust. People want to know you're a friend, not a missionary first.
5. Be aware that with many people you will have to restore Christianity's reputation first. The book UnChristian interviewed thousands of people 16 - 35 who find Christians not to be very much like Jesus but instead find them judgmental and cold. Your warmth and love to a those outside the world of the church gives them a glimpse of Jesus.

The privilege of it all is that the potential is there for God using us in overlapping mission activities at once. If we are faithful disciples we will likely always find ourselves cultivating hearts, planting seeds and seeing the joy of the harvest of 10's, 100's and perhaps 1,000's who come to know and love Jesus.