As I said in my LAST POST, I’ve been absent for a little while, and I’m struggling about what to catch you up on first!
I suppose we’ll start with “Into the Harvest”. We’ll have to head back to October of last year, which, if you’ll remember is the month that my book was released.
I was a HOT MESS of nerves and restless energy. I had felt pretty strongly going into it that, “blog book tours” and book publicity was not really my cup of tea, so other than a few guest blog posts, I did very little to “prepare” for my books release into the world. That said, my mind was going ninety-to-nothing and I had NOTHING to do. And so it was in that frame of mind that our long time friend Andrew called me up and pitched me an idea for a new ministry opportunity where we primarily used social media to encourage the Church ( big C) to step outside the four walls of a building and labor in the “harvest places”- He was like, “There will be these four major areas that we’ll cover: going and loving our neighbors out in the world, sharing our story and God’s story effectively, how to be a disciple of Jesus and also how to help others to be discipled, and then how to gather people together into community…” and as he was talking I was silently repeating the “Four Fields of ministry” that we often use to explain to people what our focuses in ministry are( Go! Gospel, Guide and Gather)! It was exactly the same! He was just using different words.
In fact, it kind of got me MORE excited that Andrew wasn’t using the same language because I had already begun to tire of all the lexicons being thrown around at conferences and in online forums where we primarily went for encouragement. It was like if you didn’t keep up from week to week you could get totally lost with all the new jargon! I wanted something that anyone could pick up! I wanted something that all of us could find tools and encouragement whether we were just starting out or had been Christians for a really long time! I felt totally challenged by Andrew’s idea, and saw a real need that could be met by having a social media presence.
And so Into the Harvest was born! Right now it is Andrew and Lakeith who both live in San Diego and myself-but hopefully as we continue, our team will grow! But for now, our mission is to mobilize the message and mission of Jesus into the everyday places of life. Yup. A bunch of M words. 😉 I just can’t get away from the alliteration! Haha!
Personally, my greatest goal is to not re-invent the wheel but instead help to package the wheel so that EVERYONE gets a piece of the wheel. ( Did I just kill that analogy dead?! Hmmm). And I think we’re pretty willing to cross all denominational and mission-organization lines enable to do that! I primarily find my job is recruiting content ( finding people who are like-minded and good things to share and then giving them a platform to share it) and in content editing our bi-monthly articles. You know what I find I have to edit the most? Christian-y words! We ALL do it, but man, it’s so easy to slip into a certain language sets…but when we do we have NO IDEA how impossible it is for people not in our little bubble to understand us!
Small tangent: Over Easter I was texting with one of my Muslim friends and she asked me why her facebook feed was full of “He is Risen” messages. She was like, “What does that even mean?!” I was truly humbled because honestly, I thought it was obvious. But the bottom line is that it wasn’t. We had a good time that day as I shared the story of Jesus dying on a cross and rising from the dead with both her and her children…but it is moments like that, that make me really excited about learning better ways to share the Good News of Jesus with the world!
Anywho, if you want to follow along you can click on the Into the Harvest logo over on the right hand side of my main page, or click HERE to subscribe to our newsletter. This next month we’ll be starting our podcast, so be sure to stay tuned! Exciting and fun things ahead!