Labouring for a Lifetime
posted by Navigators on November 13th, 2025 in Discipleship | Evangelism | Generations | Gospel | Missions
By Grant Dibden
I’ve been to several funerals lately. All were sad. Some were vacuous. Others were great tributes to the Lord. But one really stood out to me. It was Dave Crowe’s. I’d met Dave when I was a young man and Dave was on Navigators staff, and then heard about him and his ministry for many years until his fairly recent death. At Dave’s funeral the minister spoke very highly of Dave, as did his family. The minister shared how Dave’s Navigator influence had made Dave who he was, and asked how many people had been influenced by Dave. I think there were about 40 there who stood up because they had been helped individually by Dave. Men he discipled. Men who are sharing about Jesus and making disciples today. What a wonderful legacy!
Funerals help you see what is important in life, as do major changes in one’s life. As I step down from the National Director’s role, I am taking stock about what is important in life and wanted to share some thoughts.
The Navigators calling is: To advance the gospel of Jesus and His kingdom into the nations through spiritual generations of labourers living and discipling among the lost.
We refer to it as “the calling” because we know that God has given us this work to do. It is why the Navigators exist, and He put you in contact with us somehow, not by accident but by divine purpose (Eph 1:11). Do you believe that?
And this work is focused on labourers, not leaders. Sure, we need leaders, but they are not the key element of who we are and what we do. Labourers are!
The Scriptures are clear that everyone should be labouring1 (Matt 28:19.20 and 2 Tim 2:2). Labourers pray for people, they live a godly life, they are compassionate and walk alongside people in the messiness of life. They get their hands dirty in the work of ministry. As good and necessary as those things are, one more key thing is needed. The term labourer is only used 15 times in the New Testament, and 11 relate to harvesting, so being in the harvest is fundamental to labouring. To be a labourer we must also verbalise what God has done for us in a winsome and respectful way (1 Pet 3:15,16). Like picking zucchinis or oranges which I did as a kid, labouring does not take a lot of training to be able to do it. Indeed, labourers are ordinary people who are growing in their intimacy with Jesus and who work together in the harvest (living and discipling among the lost) with a generational mindset.
Making and sustaining generational labourers is our central ministry focus. It’s the most important thing we do to fulfil our calling and it’s the one thing that everyone in the organisation must be committed to doing all the time! It’s the single measure by which we should decide what we are doing and judge how we are going: “Is this contributing to making and sustaining generational labourers?”
If we lose this, we lose the spirit and purpose of why God called the Navigators into existence.
These are the five key enablers to making and sustaining generational labourers for a lifetime:
1. Convictions. Convictions are beliefs that hold you rather than beliefs that you hold. Lifetime labouring is sustained by convictions. People need to develop deep convictions about:
a. God. He is a trinitarian God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. All three are God, yet there is one God. He is the creator, redeemer, immortal, sovereign Lord who loves us.
b. The Bible. It is God’s perfect word.
c. The Gospel. Our need for salvation and Jesus’ death in our place, his bodily resurrection and our need to accept Jesus as our Lord and Saviour.
d. Labouring. God calls every one of us to be labourers, to make disciples.
2. Depend on the Holy Spirit. We do not labour in our own strength. The Holy Spirit does the heavy lifting. He changes hearts, He convicts of sin and He is with us always.
3. Prayer. God convicts people and brings them to faith so we need to pray and pray and pray.
4. Together. We also recognise that very few individuals can labour alone. Most need a small group of labourers to labour together.
5. Community. We need to belong to a community, like the Navigator community, that encourages us, prays for us and our work, and believes in us and what we are doing.
50 billion years from now, it will not matter if you were a doctor, a mechanic, a great sportsperson, a garbage collector or the Prime Minister. But it will matter if you made and sustained generational labourers because God will have been honoured and people saved. Labouring is worth giving your life for. It’s worth being your passion.
1 The term ‘labourer’ and the term ‘disciple’ are different ways of saying the same thing in the NT. In the Navigators, we use labourer because it has helpful connotations – ordinary, everyday, hard-working, gritty, being in the harvest field.