Never before have I experienced so clearly the reality of Jesus’ words in Matthew 9, ‘the harvest is ready’, as I did last week.
I was on a BST mission exposure trip working with Muslim communities in Sydney and had the chance to attend an Arabic church, go to a Muslim eid festival, go prayer-walking and door-knocking, visit a mosque and help at a food bank. Those opportunities really brought home to me both God’s incredible love for the nations and their desperate need to know Him.
I found our visit to the mosque quite disturbing; not from any sense of physical danger, but from seeing how Islam is presented as a religion of peace on a par with Christianity, when so much of what I saw and heard during the week did not line up with that. Yet despite this, my experiences with individual Muslims in Sydney showed more openness to conversations about faith than I might have expected.
I spent some time helping at an outdoor book table, meeting people and giving out free books and copies of the DVDs Jesus and Magdalena, and I had some amazing conversations with local women. The vast array of cultures that merge together in Sydney’s suburbs mean that many of the women have little opportunity to speak English – a young mother from Nepal told me all her friends were Nepalese and because she stays at home with her little boy she had not spoken English outside the home before. She gladly took a copy of the Jesus and Magdalena DVDs.
As I spoke with women from all around the world, I learned so much about the fear and trauma many of them experienced before fleeing their Islamic homelands for the safety of Australia. My heart ached as I listened to their stories, sensing something of the pain they had been through. At an Arabic Baptist Church a lady from Jordan told me of the cruel atrocities occurring right now in Egypt – 40 churches had been torched and the Muslim Brotherhood was executing Christian men. A young Iraqi girl told me she had been injured when her home in Baghdad had been bombed. “When I say, ‘Jesus saved me’”, she said, “I mean it – He saved my life, literally.” She said her Australian friends had no comprehension of what she had been through.
Our team also spent time prayer-walking around the streets of Auburn and Lakemba, suburbs with high Muslim populations, while others doorknocked and just started up friendly conversations about faith with whoever they came across. A number of Christians live in Auburn and Lakemba, all seeking to demonstrate the love of God to those around them through their individual work and style, although it is not easy. But they do it because they are so aware of the truth of this verse: ‘The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.’
Last week I saw so clearly that the harvest really is ready. The question is: are we ready to help bring it in?
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