The church at Corinth had every advantage a church could want. Paul planted it. Apollos, “an eloquent man, and mighty in the scriptures” (Acts 18:24), watered it. Paul could tell them they came “behind in no gift” (1 Corinthians 1:7). If any church in the first century should have been bringing in a harvest, it was Corinth.
Instead, Paul had to tell them he could not feed them anything solid: “I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able” (3:2). They had the best planting and the best watering in the early church, and they were still on the bottle.
Then Paul wrote the sentence every church has to settle: “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase” (3:6).
The increase was not the problem in Corinth. God was giving it. The problem was what happened to it once it landed in the field.
That is still the story in a lot of churches. The seed is good, and God is as willing to save as He was on the Day of Pentecost. Still the field comes up thin, because something in the ground is killing what God sends.
I have watched this up close and from a distance, and one version of it shows up often: a church that preaches and teaches over the heads of its newest believers. There is no ill will in it and no bad intent. It is simply a lack of awareness that a baby needs a bottle, even when the adults are eating steak.
Over time it settles into the culture. The preaching and teaching are always aimed at the most knowledgeable people in the room, and there is no program or vehicle designed to take new believers by the hand and train them toward maturity. Sometimes the pastor is quietly pressured by the long-time congregation to minister exclusively to their “season.” Paul fed Corinth according to what it could bear. A church that only serves steak has forgotten to keep a bottle on hand.
That kind of culture does not drift back on its own. It has to be corrected on purpose, by turning a church from looking within to looking without.
A harvest killer is not the same thing as a small church. Some of the most faithful congregations in the kingdom meet in rooms that would not fill a fellowship hall, and God sees every one of them. “Every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labour” (3:8). Labour, not results. The question is whether anything in your field is killing what God is trying to grow.
Paul’s diagnosis of Corinth falls into three parts, and every harvest killer I have watched at work fits inside one of them.
Here are the ten:
- Spiritual Laziness
- Lack of Prayer
- Lack of Urgency
- Inferiority
- Wanting to Stay Small
- Lousy Fellowship
- Pettiness
- Refusal to Trust Leadership
- Rebellion
- Pride
Babes in Christ: The Killers Inside
“And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ” (3:1). These first four killers live in the private life of the believer, and they do their damage long before anyone else can see it.
Spiritual Laziness
The wise man in Proverbs once stopped at a field “all grown over with thorns,” its stone wall “broken down” (Proverbs 24:31). Nobody had attacked it. The owner just kept choosing “a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep” (24:33), and the thorns did the rest.
Spiritual laziness rarely announces itself. It stays in the pew during the altar call because someone else will pray with the seeker. “The sluggard will not plow by reason of the cold; therefore shall he beg in harvest, and have nothing” (Proverbs 20:4).
Leaders are not immune. A pastor can preach out of last year’s burden for a long season, and the first field to grow thorns is his own.
Lack of Prayer
When Jesus looked at the multitudes and saw a harvest, He did not hand His disciples a strategy. He gave them a prayer request: “Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest” (Matthew 9:38).
The harvest belongs to the Lord of the harvest, and He has chosen to send labourers in answer to prayer. A church can have a beautiful building and a full calendar and still be asking Him for nothing. When the prayer meeting is the smallest service of the week, the field will eventually show it.
Lack of Urgency
Jesus heard His own disciples making the four-month speech: “Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? … Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest” (John 4:35).
Spiritual procrastination always sounds reasonable. I’ll invite my coworker once things settle down. We’ll start the home Bible study after the holidays.
God works in seasons and cycles, and I have often been guilty of trying to gather in planting season and plant in gathering season. Worse still is the long stretch between the two, when the mundane, thankless chores of watering and weeding leave you desperate for any sign of increase.
Watering is real work, and Paul gave Apollos credit for it (3:6). But it is possible to stare at the weeds so long that you forget to look up. That was the disciples’ problem: they were sure it was still the waiting season. A white field does not stay white, and Jeremiah recorded what a field sounds like when it has waited too long: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved” (Jeremiah 8:20).
Inferiority
The spies came back from Canaan carrying a cluster of grapes so large that two men had to bear it on a staff (Numbers 13:23). Ten of them looked at the proof on their own shoulders and said, “We were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight” (13:33).
The grasshopper complex convinces a church that the harvest is meant for somebody else, usually the bigger church across town. It sounds like humility. It is unbelief. Notice the order in that verse: they saw themselves as grasshoppers first, and only then assumed everyone else did too.
The increase never depended on the size of the people carrying it. God gives it, and that should lift the head of every church and every preacher who feels too small to matter.
Envying, Strife, and Divisions: The Killers Between Us
“For whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men?” (3:3). A harvest does not only die in private. It also dies in the fellowship hall, in the parking lot, and in the group text.
Wanting to Stay Small
Some churches stay small for reasons nobody controls. Others stay small because somebody likes it that way. I call the second kind the Three Musketeer mentality: a tight little circle that would rather keep what it has than make room for what God is sending. “Us four and no more.”
It rarely says so out loud. It shows up as a coolness toward visitors and a quiet resentment when new people take “our” pew. If God answered our prayers for harvest this year, would the people He sends feel welcome, or would they feel like intruders?
God’s word to His people runs the other direction: “Enlarge the place of thy tent … spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes” (Isaiah 54:2). A field that refuses new growth is no longer a field. It is a lawn.
Lousy Fellowship
We rightly remember Acts 2 for the upper room and for Peter’s answer in verse 38. Read to the end of the chapter, though. The believers continued “daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house,” eating “with gladness and singleness of heart,” and “the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved” (Acts 2:46–47).
The Lord did the adding, but He added to a church that was glad to be together. New converts are watching. If everyone heads for the parking lot the moment service ends and nobody has been in anyone else’s home in years, a new convert will conclude that what happened at the altar does not hold up in the hallway.
I am an introvert by nature. Small talk does not come naturally to me, and striking up a conversation with someone I do not know comes even less naturally. But I have learned that God can use a willingness to listen, and real interest in someone’s life, just as much as He uses the people who can fill every empty space with words.
I learned this more than twenty years ago, while I was in Bible College and attending a church of several thousand members. Every year that church held a massive fellowship event with food, basketball, and everything else you would expect. I noticed a young couple making their way through the crowd. People smiled, shook their hands, welcomed them, and said all the right things. Everyone was friendly to them. Nobody really talked to them. They ate some nachos, laughed for about twenty minutes at the man in the dunk tank, and then started toward the parking lot.
I felt the Holy Ghost nudge me to leave the comfort of my own circle of friends and go talk to them. So I did. For thirty minutes I listened. Their son had just died of cancer. They were grieving and struggling, and for the first time in their lives they were thinking seriously about Heaven.
That was all. Nothing spectacular, just a conversation. But they were in church the next Sunday. I was able to connect them with some other people in the church who pulled them into a Bible study, and months later they were baptized and filled with the Holy Ghost.
Big fellowship events are good and needed, but for a sizable percentage of people they are so large and so busy that genuine connection does not happen. The noise crowds out the conversation. Over and over, I have watched people connect to a church simply because someone took the time to listen and know them. For me, that means a constant watchfulness, at church or out in my city, for someone I can get to know by doing more listening than talking. Unless that kind of watchfulness is built into the DNA of a church, it will naturally become a happy, tight-knit family that makes newcomers feel like outsiders.
Pettiness
Paul’s word to the Galatians reads like a warning label: “But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another” (Galatians 5:15).
A critical spirit can kill more harvest than open sin, because it hides behind discernment. It keeps a running list of what the song leader did wrong and which family got recognized, and most of it gets said in the car on the way home, with the children listening from the back seat. Then we wonder why our children do not want the church we raised them in.
The critical person is usually right about something, and that is what makes the spirit so dangerous. A correct criticism delivered in a bitter spirit still poisons the ground.
“I Am of Paul”: The Killers at the Root
“For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal?” (3:4). These last three killers concern authority: how we relate to the people God sends us, and finally to God Himself. They work at the root, which makes them the hardest to see.
Refusal to Trust Leadership
Paul’s answer to the factions was not “trust me because I am in charge” but “Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed” (3:5). Leaders are servants.
Servants still have assignments, though. “Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves: for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account” (Hebrews 13:17). A church that will not trust the people God has set over it spends its energy second-guessing direction instead of carrying it out. The field sits unplowed while the committee debates the tractor.
I have spent most of my adult life in the second or third chair. Many times I watched the man in the first chair make a decision I was convinced was the wrong call. Over the years I have come to believe that God shows the first chair things He does not show everyone else in the room. The man who must give account carries a weight the rest of us do not, and God deals with him accordingly.
A pastor also carries privileged knowledge: counseling sessions, family situations, confidences he is bound to keep. That knowledge shapes his decisions in ways he cannot explain, and most of the time he cannot defend himself without betraying someone’s trust. Trusting leadership from the second chair did not require me to agree with every call. It required me to remember that I was not seeing everything he saw.
This one runs both ways, and leaders should feel it first. Trust may be given to an office, but it is sustained by character. A pastor who wants a trusting church has to be honest when it costs him and quick to own his mistakes. Hebrews 13:17 tells the leader he will give account, and that should sober us long before it emboldens us.
Rebellion
Refusal to trust holds back. Rebellion pushes the other way, and in church it almost always comes dressed for worship.
Saul did not refuse to sacrifice. He spared the best of Amalek and then explained that it was for the altar (1 Samuel 15:9, 15). Samuel answered, “Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft” (15:22–23). Saul’s rebellion looked spiritual. It still cost him the kingdom.
Today it builds a private ministry inside the ministry, or works hard at everything except what it was asked to do. The harvest cannot come in while the labourers are pulling against each other in the same field.
Pride
Paul brought his whole argument down to one verse: “So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:7).
Pride is the harvest killer that steals the credit, taking what God gave and putting its own name on it. Paul pressed the point a chapter later: “What hast thou that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?” (4:7).
Pride kills harvest two ways. It makes a church impossible to correct, because a proud church already knows everything. And it invites God’s resistance, because “God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble” (1 Peter 5:5). Pastors are not exempt. Few things dry up a harvest faster than a preacher who needs it to be his.
Labourers Together
Paul does not end the passage with a scolding. He ends it with a partnership: “For we are labourers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building” (3:9).
Husbandry is farming language. The church is God’s field, and He alone gives the increase. Our part is smaller, but it is real, and much of it comes down to not killing what He grows.
None of these ten needs a church split or a moral scandal to do its work. They work quietly, in ordinary people, on ordinary weeks. They come out the same way, one honest conversation with God at a time.
Somewhere this week, God is going to send something into your field. It might be a visitor who almost did not come, or a coworker who finally asks a real question. He has already done the part only He can do. If there is a famine, it is not coming from heaven.
The increase is still His to give. The field is still ours to tend.
