Year-Round Church Farming

It’s raining today in Moscow, and I really wanted to go for a nice long run. It sort of reminds me of a conversation I had a few years back with some strategy coordinators in Russia about “seasonal” church planting; I even wrote this up as one of my teaching lessons at Bryansk Bible Institute.  Growing up on a farm, I learned early in life that planting is not a year-round activity but farming is. Maybe we should reconsider the name of our present ministry; instead of church-planting, it might be more accurate to call it church-farming.

Indigenous church planters in Bryansk, Russia, often reported that one of the most frustrating things is the frequency of time periods when nothing they did seemed to produce fruit.  It was as if almost every season of the year had its own unique difficulties. During the winter time, people were rarely on the streets; it was so cold that folks did not want to stop long to talk about Christ. The springtime brought some interaction with lots of national holidays, but people were still not going to spend lots of time on cold, wet, and dirty streets as the snow melted off. During the summertime, the exact opposite was true; there was a more relaxed atmosphere on the warmer streets, but few people stayed in the city. In Russia, the summer time is the best time to get out to the dachas (summer houses) where gardens were quickly planted for short crops before the autumn cold settled in. The autumn was the time when people came back to the city to start back to school or work. It was a time of reorganizing life and beginning another year’s journey.  

Back home in Georgia, the humid southern weather allowed us to plant seeds in the late spring. We spent a lot of time, energy, and sometimes money to make sure those seeds received plenty of water. Rural southern boys even made fun of each other if they came to school tired because they had spent the previous evenings “toting irrigation pipes.” ( I guess it’s a Southern rural thing; the humor isn’t necessarily transferable).  But this extra work made for a long summer of watering, spraying for bugs, deweeding, etc., and it finally culminated in a mid-summer to early fall crop of peanuts, corn, peas, watermelon, and squash. Early fall might allow for a crop of wheat or barley, some root plants or pumpkins, but by late fall the planting had long been done in Georgia, and fields were turned into firing ranges for whatever birds were in season and for the wide variety of creative deer stands (sigh… but I am digressing.) As for farming, the fall was a time for storing and selling grains. It was a time for parking the combines and securing the best conditions for the land. The winter was a time for organizing barns and attending farming equipment auctions. For those who adhere to the notion of prescribed burning, it wouldn’t be rare to see their acreage of pine trees on fire in a controlled burn to reduce the insect population. And if we ever saw snow, those days represented a time to burn logs on the fire and sharpen up the equipment for the next planting season. These were the planning days for farming the next crops.

Taking the south Georgia farming schedule as an example, I organized our church planting efforts in Bryansk in a similar fashion. Due to the aforementioned sociological difficulties, our church planting team there decided to map out our missions year accordingly: Plan-Pray-Plant-Pull. During the Winter when few people on the street wanted to interact, we met with any existing groups and bible studies meeting in homes or church buildings and took them through a vision casting period. We asked them to dream big for the next year about what God might want to do through them. These plans were written down and used as a guide for the rest of the year. During the Spring, we taught these groups how to prayerwalk. We prayerwalked those areas where we were asking God for new groups. We set prayer goals for enlisting prayer supporters; we put up a website to communicate prayer needs; we constructed volunteer requests for churches in the US to come help with specific needs and asked them to begin praying about these plans. During the Summer when most folks went outside but few stayed in the city, we began to plant spiritual seeds. We started meeting with city administration and businesses in those geographic areas to enlist their support for our community development plans. As we continued to prayer walk in the areas where we wanted to start a new group, we began going to every home at least a couple of days per week and giving them free bibles, gospel tracts, or invitations to a late summer/early fall concert, Jesus Film showing , a Fall Bible Study, or an outdoor children’s VBS in a neutral location. Some of these contacts produced great connections and some conversions. But Autumn typically brought the harvest as we gathered people. As people came back to the city and back to school, we would advertise free bibles or films and a free bible study with tea and cookies. By the end of the fall, we often had at least a couple of new groups going, and the momentum continued. This would rotate back into a time of planning again as the winter once again rolled around.

I’m not saying that starting new groups cannot or even should not take place year round. In fact, we did have some new groups start in the spring or summer instead of the fall. But I’m just saying that this rotational system helped us to keep our focus, to stay in prayer, to sharpen our tools, and to plant and harvest at natural times. As I close these lines, I am reminded of the fact that we should be ready both in season and out of season. In fact, I just had to get the door for my wife who is going for a run right now in the rain. I said, “But Leslie, it’s raining outside.” And she answered, “Yeah, and I’ve still got to run.” May the Lord make us instant in season and out of season, in springtime or harvest, in sunshine or in the rain.