Definition. Sunday service as harvest is the position that the corporate Sunday gathering is the weekly culmination of worship-core lived through the week, not the beginning of worship. The week is the cultivation; Sunday is the offering.
Expanded. Per Cheon Seong Gyeong 29-340 (1970.03.14): “Begin your day at dawn with gratitude… work during the day to become someone God can be with… [in the] evening, harvest your accomplishments and offer them to Heaven.” The cycle is daily (dawn → day → evening), and the week aggregates these daily cycles. Sunday gathers what the week cultivated.
Per CSG 23-063 (1969.05.11): “In the future, the messages during service will be given in the form of reports rather than sermons. Families should report about things of which they are proud.” The implied posture of the gathering is offering and report, not initiation of worship from a cold start.
Implications
- Sunday is not the primary site of worship. worship-core happens M–Sat across all of life (parenting, work, study, tribal-messiah witness). The corporate gathering is one site, the harvest site, not the principal site.
- The corporate harvest has two simultaneous functions: vertical (offering the week’s spiritual fruit to God) and horizontal (members witness one another’s victories, draw fire and inspiration from each other). Both functions assume the week’s cultivation has already happened.
- Visitors arriving at the harvest see what is being offered. Whether that offering is credible — whether the testimonies are real, the family is warm, the worship-form is alive — determines whether the visitor wants what they’re seeing.
Tension with “Sunday service primary purpose = evangelism”
A strong reading of harvest implies Sunday is internally oriented (members offering, members reporting). A strong reading of Sunday-primary-purpose-evangelism implies it is externally oriented (designed for visitor conversion). These are in tension. The MFC working resolution: Sunday is harvest, and the harvest is witnessable — visitors are welcomed to see what is being offered, but the gathering is not redesigned around their conversion. Conversion work is upstream, in tribal-messiah relationships M–Sat. See which-visitor-profile-is-mfc-sunday-service-designed-for.
Referenced by
- does-mfc-sunday-service-design-presuppose-pastor-alignment-not-yet-explicit (question)
- worship-core (glossary)
- worship-form (glossary)
- home-church (glossary)
- populist-church (glossary)