Whats Become of the Harvest?

If 1.2 billion people have come to know the Lord in the past fifty years of ministry effort, shouldn’t the world look completely different than it does? 

As a businessman and ministry leader, Arnie Cole had heard the numbers: hundreds of millions of decisions for Christ over the past decades. But something about those numbers didn’t seem to add up—especially compared with other research findings about the steep decline in church attendance and people abandoning their faith.

“We celebrate the numbers,” Cole says. “But nobody is asking the one question that really matters: What actually happens to these people?” 

Public decisions for Christ and digital clicks for salvation are easy to count. The long, messy, and nonlinear road of discipleship is not. What Cole discovered is that people are making decisions for Christ but not becoming committed Jesus followers. The problem may not be how the harvest is counted but how the Christian calling itself is understood.

With a clear assessment of past strategies for church growth and evangelism, and a hopeful outlook for the future, Cole encourages us to find a renewed path to making lifelong disciples. He draws on Jesus’s parables of the prodigal son, the lost coin, and the lost sheep to show that, for lasting spiritual growth, we must return to Jesus’s model of one-on-one discipleship—with ministry organizations offering their energy and knowledge toward supporting that crucial work.

“Asking what becomes of the harvest is elevating the sacred importance of the people evangelism is meant to serve, “ Cole says. “Measuring what Scripture tells us to measure actually matters—an enduring pattern of obedience, formation, and love. This is the fruit that lasts.”