What's Become of the Harvest? (Reframing How We Share the Gospel and Grow Disciples)

Help Solve the Greatest Mystery in Modern Christianity

Is Christianity in America experiencing genuine revival - or is it in serious decline? If the world is hearing about Jesus like never before, why isn't it making a bigger difference? 

If 1.2 billion people have come to know the Lord in the past fifty years of ministry, shouldn't the world look different? “We celebrate the numbers,” Cole says. “But nobody is asking the one question that really matters: What actually happens to these people?” 

As a businessman and ministry leader, Arnie Cole had heard the numbers: hundreds of millions of decisions for Christ over the past decades. But something about those numbers didn’t seem to add up—especially compared with other research findings about the steep decline in church attendance and people abandoning their faith.

Public decisions for Christ and digital clicks for salvation are easy to count. The long, messy, and nonlinear road of discipleship is not. What Cole discovered is that people are making decisions for Christ but not becoming committed Jesus followers. The problem may not be how the harvest is counted but how the Christian calling itself is understood.

In What's Become of the Harvest?: Reframing How We Share the Gospel and Grow Disciples Arnie Cole exposes how spiritual-decline predictions from past bestselling publications have come true and how his research framework - the SALT Index (Scripture Absorption and Life Transformation) - has been designed to address and heal that decline. 

With a clear assessment of past strategies for church growth and evangelism, and a hopeful outlook for the future, Cole encourages us to find a renewed path to making lifelong disciples. He draws on Jesus’s parables of the prodigal son, the lost coin, and the lost sheep to show that, for lasting spiritual growth, we must return to Jesus’s model of one-on-one discipleship—with ministry organizations offering their energy and knowledge toward supporting that crucial work.

“Asking what becomes of the harvest is elevating the sacred importance of the people evangelism is meant to serve," Cole says. “Measuring what Scripture tells us to measure actually matters—an enduring pattern of obedience, formation, and love. This is the fruit that lasts.”