. . . ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest’. Luke 10:2
‘The Lord of the harvest’, ‘his harvest’—how often church leaders forget that the church belongs to him.
A man, now gone to glory told of how he had learned that lesson in the 1940s. He was ordained before World War II and spent his ministry in small country towns. The communities were settled places, one generation after another fulfilling the trades and running the businesses. Being secure made some people relaxed; it made others obdurate. These were not places given to change, what had done for the past would do for the present.
The clergyman had suggested changes in the parish that were not universally well received and a meeting had taken place. Heated words were exchanged and the clergyman, still a young man in those times, feared that he had lost the support of one of the leading members of his church. In a small community, such a division could reverberate for years to come. The row could have provided gossip amongst the whisperers of the town for months ahead.
Sunday morning came and the inexperienced young clergyman, who would grow into the wise old man of his latter years, approached the morning service with a great deal of trepidation, with the sinking feeling in his heart that the tension from the previous week’s meeting would be carried into the church that Sunday morning.
Looking down the church as the worshippers filed in, he caught sight of the man who had been his chief protagonist, sitting in his usual pew. With a great deal of uncertainty, he walked down the nave, in his cassock, and put out his hand to shake hands with his opponent and to wish him “Good morning,” The man smiled at the rector and shook his hand warmly.
“Thank you for coming this morning,” said the clergyman.
The man looked quizzical. “What do you mean, ‘Thank you for coming’? Am I not here every Sunday?”
Wrongfooted, the clergyman searched for words. “Well, yes, what I mean is, ‘thank you for coming this morning after the disagreement last week.'”
The man looked the young clergyman directly in the eye and said, “always remember whose church this is.”
The clergyman told the story after he had retired in the early 1980s, the story came from the late 1940s. He pondered the man’s words again, as he must have done countless times over the intervening years, “Always remember whose church this is.”
“I never forgot those words,” he said, “never forgot them: ‘Always remember whose church this is.'”
That conversation from the 1940s is as meaningful now as it was seventy years ago.
“Ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest.” The church does not belong to anyone; it belongs only to God. No hierarchy, no synod, no diocese, no parish, no cleric, can change that fact. The very word “church,” comes from the New Testament Greek word “kuriakos” meaning “belonging to the Lord.”
Had that one simple fact, easily recognized by an ordinary member of a country parish in the years after the War, been more recognized by the church down through the centuries, perhaps history would have been very different.
“Always remember whose church this is,” said the man. His words help people understand what Jesus is saying as he talks to his friends. “The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest.”
The harvest does not belong to the church, it belongs to the Lord. For any group of people, or any person, to pretend that the church belongs to them is for them to put themselves in the place of God. The church, says Jesus, does not depend on people’s own initiative, the church depends on the Lord sending his labourers into his harvest.
Had this simple verse of Scripture been taken seriously, had people accepted that the church belonged to God and to no-one else, history may have been very different. The sad and violent history of relations between Christians and Muslims would not have progressed as it did down through the centuries. No Christian could ever have contemplated killing someone else in the name of religion if they had realized that it was not their church, and it was not their place to speak or act as if they were the church.
Had people realized that the church was not theirs, but belonged to the Lord, then there would not have had the terrible abuse of children because the church would not have grown to have had the power it exercised and would never have become a place of opportunity for abusers. Corruption and the abuse of power come from people putting themselves in the place of God.
From the international stage, down to the life of the local parish, it is one church, one “kuriakos”, and it does not belong to any person, now matter how fine their robes or grand their title. ‘Always remember whose church this is’, said the man in that country parish more than seventy years ago.
“Ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest.” It was, it is, and it will always be, his harvest; the church is no more than group of labourers. May church members always remember their place and always remember who is the Lord.