Jonah & his 120,000 Converts

We studied the book of Jonah in our Pastoral Staff meeting today. This just as we have been evaluating the effectiveness of our follow up processes in TFI Gateway Mall Cubao.

If you take a look at it, you will see that after being spit out of the big fish, the man of God finally obeyed and actually went to Nineveh, preached repentance and the entire city including the King repented. Amazing!

I have met people who were able to convert entire villages and even towns, but never a community of 120,000. I once met a man who had 10% of his city of 80,000 attending his Church and that was incredible!

This guy Jonah was handed an opportunity to establish what would have been the largest Church in the World, but he developed an attitude. He wasn’t happy that the evil people of Nineveh had received mercy from God. He was disgusted with God, complained to God and left the city, praying that God would just let him die. This is where the story gets more interesting...

God makes a vine grow over Jonah which provides him with shade to ease his discomfort and this makes him happy. But then God, the same God who sent the nice vine sent a worm which made the vine die, the shade go away and made Jonah to want to die again.

God then tells Jonah that he should have tended the vine and defended it from the worm and makes him understand that it was his job to keep that vine, that blessing alive. Do you know the test that we often use on people, seeing if they are able to care for a plant first before having kids to prove they are ready to be parents? This was like that. God might as well have said, “If you can’t take care of a vine, then how can you take care of a Church?” Then God uses this example to describe how He felt about the new harvest of 120,000 souls in Nineveh which Jonah had basically just abandoned.

God showed Jonah that the new worshippers of God did not know their left from their right and that they would need guidance. They would need mentorship or they would die just like the vine.

Ultimately, we do not know if Jonah responded well to God’s message and returned to the city to tend this new flock. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. I hope he did!

The lesson for us is that follow up, care for those that the Lord gives us in the harvest truly depends on our attitude today just as much as it did Jonah’s attitude in that day. The Lord gave me a prophetic word at another Church in which I was serving and He told me that unless we care for the souls being saved in our Church, that He would stop sending visitors who would turn into converts. I investigated and found out that we in that Church were not effectively following up and those in the ministry which had the charge to do so were even being “selective,” only making those feel welcome who they liked. It was a wake up call for me then and I remember it now.

We at TFI Gateway are doing a good job following up, but we did discover a weakness. We have been relying on the people who bring the visitors to do the major part of the work of following up and it hasn’t been getting done in a timely manner and with lots of gaps. We have decided to step up our efforts and that our team of follow up ministry folks will become much more aggressive in personally following up with each visitor. And if the person who brought them does so as well, double effort is wonderful!

TFI Gateway people who are reading this??? We need your help and we need some new dedicated, responsible and friendly people to join our consolidation team led by Sister Mina. Please contact us?

I wish I could be Jonah right now and preach a message to 120,000 and they would all get saved. But he was raised up with a very specific message for a very specific time. It was something like this: “You are all going to die 40 days from now because of your sin and God’s anger unless you repent.” God has not told me that about Manila in 2009. But I am challenged... our entire staff is challenged to find out what the exact message for November of 2009 is so that we can be as effective as Jonah was in his day. But then we want to go a step further then he did and heed the command of Jesus, not to go make converts, but to make disciples of all nations!