Jewish teachers understood that each of them could handle only so many students, even if the students were still minors (Safrai 1974-1976a:957). The term Jesus uses for workers here recurs in 10:10, indicating that the workers Jesus wished to send forth into the harvest were his own disciples. He trains us in our life with him so we can reach the world for him, making other disciples who in turn can carry on the work (28:19). The urgency of harvest was a potent image that sparked similar analogies among other Jewish teachers (compare m. 'Abot 2:15, probably concerning study and teaching of Torah).

Those of us involved with evangelism in cities have often seen the harvest falling to the ground and rotting for lack of laborers. For instance, on one evening in two hours of street ministry in the Bronx, New York, sixty-three people provided names and addresses for follow-up after praying to accept Christ as Lord and Savior; on other occasions we sometimes saw forty-four or forty-five people make a similar commitment in two hours in Brooklyn. In other parts of the city, where we were breaking new ground among other cultural groups, we might go for weeks without seeing a conversion. We nevertheless witnessed the work of the Spirit prying open the hearts of elderly people who had never before had a conversation with a Christian about the gospel. In the years following such ministry in traditionally closed groups, the gospel has begun to spread significantly as well. Yet even if we led a hundred people to Christ a day, at the end of a year the new Christians would have numbered fewer than forty thousand-not one-half of one percent of the city itself, and only about one-fifth of one percent of the whole metropolitan area.

The only hope for taking Jesus' message to all people is in Christians' multiplying their labors by training disciples to continue and expand the work (see Coleman 1963). If just one of us could win to Christ a few people a year and train them to do the same, all other factors being equal (which they are not), the results of that seed over two or three decades would be billions of people won to Christ. We each have different gifts and callings, but to the extent that we share our Lord's values and commitment to his cause, we will devote our time, energy, wealth and other resources to the task of reaching this world with the message of the kingdom and practical demonstrations of its power.