The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. (Luke :2)
When Jesus uttered these oft-quoted words, he was in the midst of sending out seventy disciples to “every town and place where he himself intended to go.” In other words, these were “front men,” people hired to attract the crowds to the public teaching of Jesus. I think of these people today as those called to service careers, where their primary mission is to touch those who have primary needs of safety, education and health.
In education the enrollments in teacher preparation programs across the nation are 33% down. This suggests an impending shortage greater than the current one in which
the researchers estimate that there are more than 36,500 teacher vacancies in the nation. They also estimate that there are more than 163,500 positions filled by teachers who aren’t fully certified or are not certified in the subject area they’re teaching. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/how-bad-is-the-teacher-shortage-what-two-new-studies-say/2022/09
The pandemic has been blamed for a teaching exodus, but the truth is that teaching just doesn’t attract young people as it once did, due to lack of adequate salary and benefits, as well as public attacks on local schools. I could see this decline even in 2017, when I retired from teacher education. The kind of teaching skills required today include technology for Zoom interactions, special education for students entering the mainstream, and cross-curriculum familiarity to integrate the humanities, a sophistication that a primitive teacher preparation program, such as “Teach for America,” cannot provide, and entry-level salaries cannot fairly compensate. Teachers cannot afford to take the necessary 160+ additional credit hours needed for such preparation, for which the national average entry level salary is around $40,000/ year.
Healthcare has also faced a major exodus at a time when the demand for healthcare workers is skyrocketing. The healthcare sector faces a labor shortage, with most workers being overworked due to the pandemic. The Department of Commerce projects a severe lack of physicians, nurses, and health workers. The stress of the pandemic has driven hospital workers out of the profession, but the demand for these professions continues to be exacerbated by a rising aging population in the United States, initiated by the Baby-boomers, but perpetuated by the increasing lifespan of Americans.
Public safety does not appear among the lists of job shortages, but it is worth noting that the St. Louis police force is down 250 officers at a time when increased lack of presence of patrol-men/ -women on the street is considered a public danger. The entry-level pay for the St. Louis police force is $50,615.
Most urban police forces lack adequate staffing of professionally trained officers. The mere presence of patrol-people on the street is considered a crime deterrent in a time where urban crime is a major election issue. So the need is critical and the supply is diminished. Teaching, healing and public safety are the work of laborers of the harvest, in Jesus’ terms. You cannot work in these professions without a sense of calling, because the salaries cannot compensate for the daily challenges you face. You discover the soft underbelly of human suffering and the hard edges of addiction which demand discipline, patience and kindness, traits that sometimes come from training, but more often come from dealing with the hostility and the suffering that you “can’t pay me enough to do.”
Since these professions are always underpaid, the workers need to be called and committed to a life of service. You can argue that all professions require “service” of some kind, but not all professions are so underpaid for such extended hours and stress. Possibly the leisure and hospitality professions also provide a woefully underpaid service, and they also are losing employment at two times the national average.
What all these understaffed professions require is the call to be “laborers in the harvest.” The labor is underpaid and the workers under-appreciated. Check any day’s headlines and see if one of these professions is not under attack, because those who expect to be served are not feeling adequately served. So there are weak incentives to enter the work unless as a “higher calling.”
I pray that the Lord of the Harvest will send these laborers. Unless the next generation of qualified workers hears the calling, we are facing a painful decline in our care industries and a coarsening of our lives. These jobs are not for the faint of heart or the materialistic . They are for those who still believe you can be called to a career and who are ready to accept they can’t be financially rewarded enough for their life’s work.