Rev. Don Campbell
THOUGHT FOR TODAY, FEBRUARY 24: MEASURING SUCCESS IN EVANGELISM
“Not everything that can be measured counts, and not everything that counts can be measured” (Albert Einstein).
There are some things we must measure: If a stock is worth the same 10 years after purchase as when bought, it might as well have been in the “sock” market. If year after year a farmer barely made back his seed, he would need to ask some tough questions about the seed, the soil, the suitability of the climate, and maybe his own ability.
When measuring, we must use the right standard of measurement.
If we plant peach trees in April, do we expect peaches in September? If we applied a cost-per-baptism standard to all programs and eliminated those with the poorest yield,, most pulpits would go. However, we must be careful not to use the wrong measure. Conversion and baptism are not necessarily the same thing. I have baptized people I did not convert and converted people I did not baptize. The one is easy to count; the other is not.
Paul said, “What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building” (1 Cor 3:5-9).
Jesus reminded the apostles: “Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor” (John 4:336-38).
Whomever else Jesus may have had he mind, he surely had John the baptizer in mind: “And he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared” (Lk 1:17). “A prepared people” is a field white unto harvest.
