Ask the Lord of the Harvest

I have been to see my good friend Dawnecia (the Rev) who is the leader of Peacemakers Prayer Patrol. (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0KZH/is_4_18/ai_n15378950/ )

Pill Corps is starting out as a Prayer Shield for this great ministry and personally I hope to go out on some more Prayer Patrol's very soon. In the meantime Dawnecia was sharing with me how she is avoiding the Police at the moment, not because she has done anything wrong but because they keep asking her to take Prayer Patrol into more and more areas. However she is stretched to the limit as even some of the existing prayer patrols are struggling to recruit more team members. I felt really saddened that the growing acceptance that prayer makes a difference to communities among secular agencies is not being met by an army of intercessors from the Church. It is almost as if the unchurched believe in prayer more that the Christians.

Now don't get me wrong, I know that many people don't get involved in the particular ministries that I think are priority because they are already heavily involved in the ministry that God has called them into. We are not great advocates of a corps having a huge programme but I understand the heart behind an article William Booth wrote called "buried forces"

He wrote, "Is it any wonder that the interests of the Kingdom of Heaven should make such slow progress, in view of the small amount of energy, time, ability, wealth and other forces expended upon them compared with the enormous attention that is given to earthly enterprises?"

So what should we do? Well we can advertise, we can preach sermons to make people feel guilty enough to help out, we can as William advised, "study how you can roll the old chariot along faster" or we could first take the advice of Jesus. "The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field."

So we're going to take the Lord at his word and we're going to ask him. It sort of dawned on me that God is not going to honour our recruitment drives, our attempts to motivate people to mobilise if we don't first obey his command to ask him for workers.

So we are going to start now individually but will come together with others at the end of November for a intense prayer night

What about you? Will you pray for harvesters where you are? It will be interesting to see who God sends our way.

God bless

Carol