#STRask - Shouldn’t We All Be Harvesters?

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Questions about how to handle objections from Christians who think we should all be harvesters and should not focus on gardening, and whether attending a service at a mosque would communicate approval of the religion (similar to attending a same-sex wedding).   How do you handle objections from Christians who think we should all be harvesters and should not focus on gardening? Should Christians attend a service at a mosque in order to reach the nations, or would this communicate approval of the religion (similar to attending a same-sex wedding)?

You're listening to Amy Hall and Greg Kockel on the hashtag SDR Ask podcast from Stand to Reason. Welcome to you. And Greg, we have some kind of tactical questions today. So this first one comes from LSJ. How do you handle objections from other Christians who think we should all be harvesters and question the gardening focus that you talk about?

Well, I think the easiest way to do that is to simply look at the model of Jesus and the disciples in the book of Acts. Because, I mean, the simple fact is there are no altar calls in the book of Acts. Altar calls is like an 18th century phenomena. Before that, they didn't exist. There are no times where people are challenged to receive Christ as Lord and Savior. Now, I have been instructed by a colleague who holds a different view than I do on this, and who's been in play for a long time, actually close to retirement now, but noble individual, but his strong exhortation to me was,

you challenge people to receive Christ every single time you talk to them, because you never know, you just never know. Now, if that's good biblical advice, then why don't we find that in the Bible? We don't find people challenged in that way. And I actually think there's a downside to it because sometimes you can be bruising the fruit. If you're trying to harvest fruit that's not ripe, you can only do damage to it. It's not going to help.

It might make people a little skittish. So there's a downside to that. And I know in circumstances where I've taught this material and I got pushback from somebody in the audience who was obviously a harvest oriented. I later learned from someone else in the audience that he had gone to high school with that gal and it was a smaller high school and they were the only two Christians

and she was over the top aggressive. And that caused a lot of damage and made it harder for him. So this is, I think, what people don't realize. There's a practical element here that's problematic, but the more straightforward approach is to simply point out that this isn't what happened in the Bible. What you have is a communication of the truth under a variety of different circumstances, alright? And the closest, I mean, I'm trying to think what might be close to an altar call.

You have Acts chapter 2, but you have the strong preaching, and then the people say, what must we do? And that's when the appeal is made to believe and receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, etc. But that's in response to the people saying, okay, now what? All right? And my conviction is that when the fruit is ripe, it drops into the basket. You just need to bump it, basically. And communication of the gospel is like that.

Now, if somebody says, I'm ready, just like the people in Acts 2 said, then you can offer them a means or a way to respond, to engage Christ by faith, if they're ready. But it's hard to tell when they're ready. There are different sensibilities about this. I think different personalities. Ray Comfort, who's a friend and a, you know, a colleague, and I really like Ray a lot. He's magnificent at what he does, and he's a harvester. He's always going for the decision. Although I've seen videos of him when he doesn't press

it that far if the circumstances don't seem right. But I think God puts him in circumstances because of his peculiar gifting. He's a street preacher. People may not, some may not be familiar with Ray Comfort's name, but Living Waters is the name of his enterprise. He's written tons and tons of books and a lot of them show up at airports and on these racks you know, in the Walgreens or something like that, these spinning racks, I wish mine would get in those things.

So he's very ubiquitous, his name is round, but he's doing these things on the street. He's very tactically savvy, asking a lot of questions, and he seems to get into a lot of circumstances, and I think the Holy Spirit works this way with him in light of his gifting, where he can bring many people to Christ. And you can watch videos of seeing this happen. It's great. But that's not most people. Ray is unique.

And I don't think that Ray's manner is the characteristic model. I think characteristic, and by the way, people look at what Ray does and thinks that's the way it's got to be done. They're not going to do it. They're going to sit on the bench. And this is why when I teach about gardening, you know, sowing and watering and, you know, I planted a policy watered, but God caused the increase is what Paul says in Corinthians. And so when people are given gardening tools, they were able to make a contribution and

move forward and they get into the field because they realize, hey, I can do this. And I get this all the time from people when I talk about it. Well, I could do this. And the more gardeners, the more harvest. To me, it's pretty straightforward. All right. So the simplest answer to the challenge that we should all be harvesters is that where do you find this emphasis in the scripture? Preach the gospel, but the idea of pressing for a decision is historically new. The second great awakening, you know, in the mid-19th century is when I think all of that became really popular. And it has some liabilities, all right, altar calls and all that kind of thing.

I think part of the problem here, I think we're probably closer together than they actually think. I think we're probably closer together than they actually think because part of the issue with giving the message, they have to understand the message before they can trust in Christ. I mean, that's just the bottom line. If you're just saying words about trying to get them to follow Christ and they don't understand what that means, you haven't actually harvested. Harvesting always requires some sort of gardening. There has to be some sort of communication of the message that comes before.

So you're not saying don't ask for, don't ever ask for a decision, but you're saying let's start by giving the message and here's how we can do that. And you don't have to get all the way to the endpoint. And I think, but there are certainly other things you can do. You can say, you can ask them, what did you think about that? You know, that's a way of getting them to think about the message that you've given them without just saying, do you want to accept Christ?

Or I don't know exactly what their objection is. I don't make such a heart and fast, I have one way I do this, and I don't think you do that either. You figure out how they're responding to you and you take it as far as you can, and then you ask them what they think about it it and that's just how it goes. The other thing is— Can I respond to that? Yeah, sure.

My approach is to garden. I virtually never am aware of circumstance when I'm engaging someone with a Christ where I get the sense that they're ready to go. And when I give the talk about tactics, I mentioned I haven't prayed with anyone to receive Christ in over 30 years, you know, and, but I think I've been more effective for the cause of Christ in the last 30 years than I was before when I was kind of pushing for decisions. In the Jesus movement,

I can think of people that I prayed with to receive Christ. I don't know where most of them are now. Some of them are still in play. But when I take polls of audiences and I ask them how they became Christians, how many are Christians that did not become Christian by going forward on an altar call or praying with someone to receive Christ as Lord and Savior. So those are the kind of standard harvesting motifs. How many are believers who did not become Christians that way? The average for every audience—I've been doing this almost two years now—every time I teach tactics, the average is 70 percent,

did not become Christian in that way. I didn't. My brother didn't harvest me. I harvested myself, you know, and this is the way the rank and file do. And I think, of course, when I say that, we know that the Holy Spirit is the one who's the active agent in the harvesting. I just don't worry about that. And I think that if other people begin worrying about harvesting, that's their responsibility to press to that point. I think that's going to discour ought to always do that, they are advancing a non-biblical directive. Because this isn't the way the disciples or Jesus did it. So, I mean, really, I'm trying to think, well, Jesus says,

Come unto me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest, etc. That didn't seem like an altar call to me. What you see many times in the scripture is Jesus is saying these things, and then the text says, and many believed in him. In other words, their trust and belief in him was a response to the things about him and the nature of the gospel that he was communicating. He didn't have to say, okay, now how many want to believe in me?

You know, nothing like that. That's a new development. So my sense from many, many, many people communicating to me in many, many, many places. My sense is that this has freed them up to be more effective as ambassadors for Christ by not having to worry about that. Now if somebody is right there saying, what do I do? You know, then you could say, you can pray. I remember a young lady said, you know, I've always said that I believed in Jesus, and this is many years ago, I've always said that I believed in Jesus. She was raised Roman Catholic. But I never really said it to Jesus.

And I said, why don't you just tell him right now? And so that was the context in which then she prayed and prayed a beautiful prayer of submission to Christ, and that's when her spiritual life began. So there are occasions for something like that, but it isn't part of the New Testament model. It has been imposed upon us by our Christian culture. I think part of the problem is they're separating what you're doing from giving them the gospel. You are explaining what the message is and you're starting from the beginning.

That's part of giving the gospel. It's not like you're doing something separate and then at the end you give the gospel. That's everything that we're doing, saying that Christianity is true, giving evidence that Jesus died for our sins, explaining why He died for our sins. The rose from the dead. All of these things are part of the gospel, so it's not like we're doing two separate things. And this is why I say it's kind of hard to divide between the two completely.

So I would have to ask whoever has the objections, how are you dividing out what we're talking about here and how do you see what he's doing is different from giving the message? There's something that you and I both talked about because we've both made the same observation in the book of Acts. When the book of Acts is talking about preaching the word, almost universally they are talking about communicating the message of the gospel, the content of the gospel, not quoting Bible verses, okay? And you responded to the word we preached, okay?

We are apostles, we're not going to wait on tables, we are going to devote ourselves to prayer and the preaching of the word. Now, of course, they're not preaching out of the Old Testament. They didn't have a New Testament then. They were not preaching out of the Old Testament, with the exception of when they're talking to Jews. But the point there is, the Word was this robust gospel message about Jesus. And when you see this phrase repeated, people can do their own study, just look it up.

It's so obvious that it's the message of salvation that is being communicated that is the word that is preached to them. That's all gardening. That's all laying the foundation. And then the person responds. Think of even the woman at the well. There's that conversation, right?

And then she said, well, Messiah is gonna show us all these things. And Jesus says, I who speak to you, am he. She asked him a couple more questions, then off she goes. He didn't invite her to believe in him as the savior, but she did. And she brought a whole bunch of other people. They believed because of what she said,

and then because of what Jesus said, as he stayed a few more days with them. It's all in the text. So what I've described here is robust, and as you mentioned, Amy, it's all putting pieces together to help people to understand the larger picture and the Holy Spirit using that in their lives until Eventually they come to a point where they put their faith in Jesus And the last thing I want to say is that we're all Different people with different gifts and different styles and that's okay We don't all have to do this exactly the same way

So maybe if somebody has an objection, maybe somebody's objecting sometimes because they think they don't know the apologetics and they don't want to worry about that and they think that we should just do the simple message. If you can communicate the simple message, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. There's room for everybody and their styles and their approaches. You mentioned Ray Comfort is great at what he does. You do it differently and that's okay. So hopefully people can figure out, look, we're the body of Christ. Not all members of the body have the same function. And that's

the point Paul makes in Romans 12. Not all have the same function. We all have our gifts and we all do different things for God's kingdom and we contribute in our particular way. So there's nothing wrong with that. Okay, next question comes from Adam. Should Christians attend service at a mosque in order to reach the nations? I know Jesus went to the Jewish synagogues, but in our case it feels like we may non-verbally communicate that we approve of the religion, similar to attending a gay wedding. What are your thoughts?

Well, I think it's different from a same-sex wedding because the nature of the wedding is a celebration and the people that go are going for the purpose of celebrating. You don't have tire kickers there, looky-loos, or people that just, hmm, I wonder what this is about, you know, I'm trying to learn a little bit about the gay culture. I mean, that's not what happens at weddings, characteristically. I guess if someone was trying to be a student of the gay culture in some measure, that might be a justification for attending as an observer a same-sex wedding.

So I think, characteristically, it's a different category of going to a mosque. When I think Alan does immersive events with students where he trains them on Islam and then they go to a mosque. I'm not sure if they actually go to a service or not, but I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that. Maybe some people might think, well, these guys are approving of Islam, but I don't think that's necessarily the consequence, like in a same-sex wedding, where the purpose of attending is for the sake of celebrating and approving. And I would suspect that, especially in Islam, because it's a bit of an evangelistic religion

and more and more Americans are taking interest in it, it would not be uncommon for people to be coming who are not adherents of Islam that are checking things out, kicking the tires, so to speak. So I don't see that in the same category. What do you think? I think that's a good distinction. I also think what I would do, because what you don't want to do is participate in the worship service

in some way. So it might be that if you go to the worship service, and I've never been to one at a mosque, that by necessity you'll be in a position where you'll have to take part in some way, and I'm not sure if that's the case. So I think I would just ask the imam there ahead of time and say, I just want to observe. Is that okay with you? Where should I sit? What would you like me to do? I don't really want to participate, but I do want to observe. So because in a church service, that would be fine and nobody would ever know if you were participating or not. But in, I don't know how it works in a service, Islamic service. Right. And that's good to ask that question and find out because I'm thinking of the parallel

with the church service. A person, there are some things when you go into a house of worship that you do out of respect for the people there. So it may be if you go into an Islamic mosque, you have to remove your shoes, for example. I'm not sure. I've not been in one. But well, that's not worship. That's just showing respect for the environment that you're going into and the people's sensitivities.

Same way if you're in a church and people are standing for prayer or standing for worship. Well, you could do that too and participate with the group because that's just a way of being respectful. But that's not the same as saying amen to the prayer, which means you're agreeing with it, or necessarily singing or raising your hands. Everybody else is raising your hands. Well, that's an act of worship. And so, if there were non-believers in the church, I would not expect them to raise their hands because everybody else was doing it. So there's a line there between doing what is appropriate out of respect for the location and the people there and participating in a way that makes you complicit in the worship

itself. And I think that's a problem. So I think, yeah, I think I would talk to someone either who knows more about this, who a Christian who knows, or to the actual Imam at the mosque to find out what's involved and to be clear that you're not there to worship, but you do want to watch and observe. Yeah, there may be kneeling involved and bowing. That's why I would want to watch and observe? Yeah, there may be kneeling involved and bowing. That's why I would want to ask. In a Muslim, and that's where you wouldn't want to do that because that's an act of

obeisance to God on their view, you know, and that's what you don't want to be able to do. But there might be a place where you can sit and observe. Yes. And so that would be a good thing to ask about. Yeah. and observe. And so that would be a good thing to ask about. Because that is a situation where, for example, I've been to Mormon service before and I sit there, I don't sing. But if you're in a mosque and everybody's bowing down, now it becomes more obvious that you're not, you know, you're not taking part. Well, it could be obvious.

Yeah. The problem is, in my view, is not that it's obvious that you're not a Muslim, but it's that you're not participating in a way that they consider appropriate for respect. Yeah. And so that's where you've got to draw the line. And if this is going to offend a bunch of people, then you've got to sit somewhere else or look through the window or not go. If they require some measure of acts of obeisance to be, for you to be present in their service, that's where you've got to draw the line.

And the same thing is true, for example, I've visited a Hare Krishna temple with a Christian group before and they wanted us to repeat this mantra, and we just said, no. But that wasn't part of a service, it was just in there. But I assume if you go there for some reason, that's the kind of thing they would ask you to do that you would not want to do. That's a participation in their religious, like going to a Catholic church and praying a rosary, you know.

Here, pray this rosary. Well, you're participating in a religious function. And same thing with saying the mantra for Hare Christas. know, here, pray this rosary. Well, you're participating in a religious function. And same thing with saying the mantra for Hari Krishnas. So observing is fine, participating is not fine. Participating in a way that is not merely an act of respect that's spiritually neutral, but participate in a way where you are actively involved in some of the religious activity itself. Well, thank you so much, Adam and Alice J. We are thankful for your questions.

If you have a question, just go to X, use the hashtag STRask, or you can go to our website at str.org and look for our hashtag straskpodcast page and you'll find a link there. You can send us your question, just keep it to a couple sentences and we will consider it for the show. We hope to hear from you. Thank you so much for listening.

This is Amy Hall and Greg Kockel for Stand to Reason.