Decided Followers of Jesus

Since moving into a rural pastorate in May 2008 I've been constantly thinking about what it means for farmers to be decided followers of Jesus Christ.

Historically, the southern part of New Zealand has been a very "churched" region. Generations of farming families have formed the backbone of many churches in rural communities. While that continues to be true today, there are also changes afoot as long-establish families alter farming practices and in many cases, move out of the districts they grew up in.

For those who do remain, making a living has become more challenging than ever. It's tempting for Christian farmers to jump onto bandwagons and adopt recommendations without thinking seriously about what Jesus would have them do. One of my desires is to be able to help such farmers (and others too) identify the principles of God's kingdom that should regulate our daily lives, and work out how these apply to the everyday practices of farm life. I've been able to do this to some extent (usually indirectly) in my regular preaching and pastoral ministry in Wyndham, but have a deep hankering to do so more directly and explicitly. Hence the birth of this blog site.

What I plan to do in it is to (a) identify principles for living under God's rule (kingdom principles) from the Bible, and then (b) suggest applications of these for farming practices. I'm more familiar with the first of these - the kingdom principles from the Bible - and will dwell at greater length on these than on their application to farming practice. I hope, however, that identifying and expounding the principles will excite Christian farmers to think seriously about how they can be applied to life. That, I'm sure, is how Jesus wants farmers to live today.

A last word - the prophet Isaiah tells us that God's ways are not our ways, his thoughts not our thoughts (Isaiah 55: 8,9). That being so, we had better brace ourselves for some radical thinking and change. There's a lot more to being a follower of Jesus than having our sins forgiven and going to church. Becoming like him, and living each day as he would if he were us, is going to demand radical and often painful change. But it will please him to see us serious about following him.

Andrew Young