Muddy Sunday: How Jesus is engaging all of us in his movement

By Jarod Osborne

By examining the mission, field, and methods of Jesus, Muddy Sunday activates readers to take practical steps to reach the people around them in their harvest fields. Identify your God-given mission. Connect with the Spirit's power to heal and rescue. Help others find freedom and forgiveness. Unlock the molecular building blocks of movements.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781458311238

Book preview

Introduction

I don’t like reading introductions to books.  It seems to me that if the author wanted to say something important, they could put it in the first chapter. So instead of using this space to introduce the book, I’ll just introduce myself.

My name is Jarod. At the time I’m writing this, I’m forty years old and live in a small city in northern Indiana with my wonderful wife and two amazing kids. Other than Jesus, they are the most important people in my life.

I studied theology and ministry at Indiana Wesleyan University, and Princeton Theological Seminary. Somewhere along the way I spent some time in Africa and Asia, had a faith meltdown, rediscovered the story I believed, and met lots of amazing people who influenced my thinking.

Just so you can get a flavor for my personality, I’m an introvert who loves people (but enjoys being alone in the forest as often as possible). I consider myself a missionary pastor in North America. I enjoy dangerous hobbies like backpacking in wild places where I’m not at the top of the food chain, shooting guns, throwing axes, martial arts, and adventure trips. I can truly say that the last decade of following Jesus, and engaging in his mission, has been the wildest adventure of my life.

Each day I do my best to be fully present in my own life—listening to God, attentive to the person in front of me, unhurried and not infected with the rampant contagion of over-busyness. I enjoy spending time each week with people who are incarcerated, in their cell blocks. And also with heroic souls that are striving to overcome drug addictions and follow Jesus into a new way of living. I have found kindred spirits in the New Thing church planting network. And I serve alongside brothers and sisters in The Wesleyan Church movement.

I’ve practiced what I wrote about, a lot, before I wrote about it. My hope is that this book will inspire others to fulfill the prayer that Jesus asked his first disciples to pray. That more workers will be sent into the harvest fields. Many people are waiting in those fields, in need of hope.

If you want to connect further, you can visit:

jarodosborne.com

1            Harvest

mud on the carpet

I looked forward to our time together. It was my junior year of college, and my faith was falling apart. We met every week in the Christian Ministry building, the place where in the previous semester, I was studying to be a pastor. But then I dropped out. My mentoring times with Coach Drury (as his students called him), helped me find my way forward into my calling.  I sat down in the chair across from his office desk, and we dove into the usual topics. Suddenly, mid-way through the discussion, I happened to look down at the floor. My shoes were caked in mud. It was drying, and crumbling off onto his clean carpet. We’re not talking about a few specks of dust. There were large chunks of mud. No way he wasn’t going notice this after I left. I was so embarrassed, and began to apologize. I stooped down to begin picking up the mess by hand.

I’m sorry Coach. I got mud all over your carpet. I was out hiking in a forest and field this afternoon, and I didn’t realize I had carried all this in.

Oh, he said calmly, then paused. Well that kind of dirt is welcome in this office. I exhaled in relief. This professor was no stodgy academician. He was also a man of the wilderness. He had introduced me to backpacking during my college years. He spent weeks, sometimes months trekking through some of the most beautiful and rugged places in the country. My dirt was not an inconvenience, it was a reminder of what he loved. It was a relic of nature in the confines of the office. I knew that he cherished the forests, the fields, the mountains, and that we held that in common. There was some vague insinuation that he was even proud of me for leaving campus, to go where the trails are blazed not paved.

We have very few examples in Scripture of Jesus asking his disciples to pray for something specific. One of the most memorable is in Matthew 9:37-38. The harvest is great, but the workers are few. So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send more workers into the fields. Immediately after Jesus asked his disciples to pray this prayer, guess what he did. He sent them into the harvest fields. They became part of the answer to their own prayer. Jesus himself was an outdoorsman of sorts. He sometimes preached in synagogues and visited homes, but we often find him outside the walls of the institution and with the people who needed him most. He sat on hillsides and talked to the crowd. He walked on water after a long day of ministry. He got dirt under his fingernails while making a mud pie to cure blindness. He was the doctor that journeyed to his patients rather than waiting for them in his office. Simply put, Jesus was in the harvest field. He wanted his disciples to be in it with him.

Can you imagine walking into your church this Sunday morning, and you discover that Jesus is the guest speaker? What a surprise! The church is buzzing with anticipation. Everyone is leaning forward during his whole message, taking voracious notes, pulling out their devices to record his every word. Then suddenly, the Lord stops mid-sentence and walks into the congregation. He notices a woman sitting in the fifth row, wearing jeans and outdoor shoes that are plastered with dirt. She has unintentionally left a trail of mud-prints from the door to her chair. The crowd goes silent. You’re sure that this woman is about to get rebuked from the Son of God for having so little respect for the house of worship. Instead, Jesus puts his hand on her shoulder and smiles warmly. Thank you for having the courage to step into the fields this week. Let’s pray that next Sunday will be even more muddy than this one!

Before all the custodians and janitors close the book, you do realize that mud is a metaphor for the harvest field, right? God is in charge of the harvest… the people who are stepping out of their old lives into the new life that is found in Jesus Christ. People are ripe and ready to receive God’s grace in every corner of the world. Families, villages, cities, nations are looking for hope in the darkness. Do you believe what Jesus said is still true today? Do you believe that the harvest is still enormous? Do you believe that there are more people waiting to be reached in your city than there are people who are reaching them? If Jesus showed up at your church this weekend, and you got to meet with him afterwards for prayer, would you ask him to pray for your needs, or would you ask how you can pray for what’s important to him? Would he ask you to pray for more workers to be sent into the harvest fields? What if he sent you? Would you go? What in the world does it even mean to be sent into the harvest fields?

theory and practice

People who have found Jesus help other people find him. Christians reach out to people who are still searching for God. Disciples make disciples. This is one of the essential aspects of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Do you remember the speech that Jesus gave to his very first recruits, Peter and Andrew? Come follow me, and I will teach you how to fish for people. (Matthew 4:19) That was the whole speech. It had two parts. Part one: follow me. Part two: I will teach you how to reach others. There’s no ambiguity here. To be a disciple meant helping more people follow Jesus. Somehow over the centuries, this core idea has faded into near extinction in North America. If you told a congregation that every follower of Jesus was responsible for reaching other people, most would agree. But if you looked at their shoes, you’d find them shockingly clean.

Jesus didn’t ask his disciples to pray that they would have a heart for the harvest. He did not ask them to pray that those who are already in the fields would be more effective and efficient. He asked them to pray for more people to be sent in. This is an action-oriented prayer. It was so action oriented that it immediately led to them traveling and sharing the Gospel with lots of strangers. There’s a difference between agreeing with something in theory, and actually putting it into practice. In a high school health class, you learn about how babies are born. For most fourteen year olds, this topic seems situationally irrelevant. They may find it mildly interesting, but far removed. However, if you are eight months pregnant attending a childbirth prep class offered by the hospital, you are likely to be much more engaged. They show a video on breathing techniques, and you’re all ears. You pay attention because you know this is real, and it’s about to get more real when the labor begins. You want to help your newborn come into the world safely because you love them. The day the water breaks, you immediately go from theory to practice. It’s real life, it’s people you care about, and you play a vital role.

According to a Lifeway survey in 2019, over half of churchgoing people pray every week for opportunities to share about Jesus.¹ That’s great! But it’s mostly theory. What about practice? 55% of Protestant churchgoers surveyed shared the Gospel zero times in the last six months. 24% shared one or two times in the last six months. 21% shared the Gospel three or more times in the last six months. Sharing the good news that Jesus paid for our sins and rose again to bring us new life is the mission of the church, but it does not appear to be the priority of churchgoers, said Scott McConnell, Lifeway Research’s Executive Director.

If you were a fisherman by trade, could you imagine only going out onto the lake once or twice a year? If you were a gardener, how much would you harvest if you stepped into your garden and checked for produce once every six months? This research was hitting close to home. I started to ask myself some challenging questions, and answered them with brutal honesty…

Do I believe that Jesus is the Savior of the world?

Do I believe that Jesus wants me to share his good news with others?

In the last six months, how many people have I talked with someone about the salvation Jesus offers?

In the last year, how many people have I led to surrender their lives to Jesus?

Is there any incongruence with what I believe about the Gospel (theory) and how I live (practice)?

dangerous

My guess is, most Christians really do believe in Jesus and his message. Most want to share that with others, and are willing to try, but aren’t sure where to start. Some have even tried numerous times in the past and have become discouraged or disillusioned. If this is you, you’re not alone. In fact, most people in most churches feel the same way you do. Honestly, I bet many pastors and missionaries even feel this way.

I was recently talking with a young adult who had graduated from a Christian college and was about to go live in South America as a missionary. My wife and I had her over for lunch, and she told us of her future plans. But as she described her work, I couldn’t help but ask, Wait, what will you be doing in Brazil again?

She responded, I’m going to be a missionary.

I wasn’t trying to be pernicious, I was just trying to understand. I asked again, Okay. What will you actually do from day to day?

She elaborated that her team will be teaching English, and building relationships and building the Kingdom of God. She had several months before her departure, and she had just moved into the town where I lived, so I said, Hey, that’s great! Would you like to practice reaching people around here before you go? She didn’t seem interested.

It seems strange that we can send people to other countries and pay them to do something that they haven’t learned how to do in their own hometown. This is Following Jesus 101, reaching people and helping them become disciples. But this young missionary is not alone. I have talked with other missionaries and pastors who seem to rarely muddy their shoes in the harvest fields. They’ve lived in countries, in towns, in churches for years and have shared the Gospel very few times with people or have led very few people to surrender their lives to Jesus.

A friend of mine led a church planting movement in the Pacific Northwest where I pastored for a while. I was about to move to another part of the country to be a pastor at a large and well-funded church, and my wife and I had dinner at his house before we left. He was concerned that my upcoming role would dull my call as a North American missionary, and eventually get me out of the harvest field. He said something to me there in his kitchen that I’ll never forget.

Be dangerous for the Kingdom, Jarod.

Yes. That is what I wanted. His words struck a deep cord in my heart. Be dangerous for the Kingdom. I didn’t want to just have a good ministry career. I didn’t want to finish running the bases of my life and slide into home having been a nice Christian who stayed away from bad habits. I wanted to have the fire in my eyes that Jesus had. I wanted my heart to hurt for his lost sheep. I wanted to tread on snakes and see the Gospel advance so powerfully that the gates of hell, trying with all their might, could never stop it. I wanted to see the goodness of God’s life-changing power in my lifetime. I wanted to know that the Spirit in me is greater than the spirit of the one in the world, and that His Spirit is breathing life all over my continent and bringing dry bones back to their feet. I still want these things. I want them for you. I have seen many of them. I believe God has more for us yet.

paralyzing myths

Who neutered our Gospel? How did we get to a place of such spiritual infertility? How did not sharing the Gospel become the norm for most Christians? Again, I’m not pointing the finger to guilt trip you. As you will soon read, this has been a transformational process for me, let’s not judge each other. But can we agree to grow together?

Our Christian sub-cultural narrative has played an important role in how we think about the Gospel and the mission of God. Evangelism, the way Christians share the good news of Jesus, has taken different forms throughout the history of the church. In the book of Acts, we see the apostles and Paul preaching sermons and planting churches. In some eras, the Gospel traveled arm in arm with political and even military expansion. At other times, monasticism was a light that preserved and promulgated the message of Jesus. Then there were the academic institutions of higher theological study, as well as revivals and awakenings. God has used different vehicles to transport his Gospel to his world, but the one consistent factor is that he puts his Spirit and his message in the mouths of his followers. People are always the conduit of the Gospel.

In recent years, friendship evangelism has dominated the Protestant imagination when it comes to methods of sharing Jesus. It offered some very insightful principles to us, such as the importance of having an actual relationship with people instead of cold-calling and Bible thumping your neighbors. One of the elders at my church, Dan, used to go knocking door to door with his pastor, to tell people about Jesus. What he remembers most about these experiences from past decades is that every time he knocked on a door, he was secretly praying that the residents weren’t home! The only person that didn’t want him there more than the unsuspecting resident was Dan himself. Knocking on doors and passing out tracts dissolved a long time ago, and it was replaced by the idea that we can best share the Gospel by developing friendships. Relationships are very important, and being genuine and caring are essential. But friendship evangelism seems to have generated some myths that are so familiar to Christians that they’ve nearly become lethal orthopraxy.

Let’s look at a few of the common paralyzing myths about evangelism:

MYTH 1. You can’t share Jesus with someone until you’ve built trust, and that takes a lot of time.

I’ve heard people talk about reaching out to their neighbors in evangelistic attempts, and it almost seems that they expect to build relationships for three to five years before they would ever bring up the subject of their faith in God. In some circumstances this may be a wise approach, but in many cases it’s an unnecessary delay.

MYTH 2. You have to be a true friend to someone in order to share the Gospel with them so that they don’t feel that you have a hidden agenda.

Each of us has a limited capacity for friendships. We can have a large number of acquaintances, but far less friends. Friendships take time and investments. Friendships require sharing and growing together. If we limit our sphere of people we can reach based on our friendship threshold, we may miss many opportunities to share Jesus with people who are hungry for him, but haven’t made it into our inner relational circle. The same is true for the idea of a hidden agenda in evangelism. I actually find it more disingenuous for a Christian to intentionally build a relationship with a neighbor for five years, eat meals, throw the football in the yard, go for runs together, share tomatoes from their garden, all the while hoping that this relationship will eventually get around to the Gospel and they will become saved. If I discovered that someone had befriended me for years with the sole purpose of evangelism, I would be more likely to feel used than grateful. If you bring Jesus into the conversation early on, others will know that you