Weaving the nets

Although it is not, strictly, exegesis, Frost and Hirsch in 'The Shape of Things to Come' provide an interesting slant on Matthew 4.19 and pars - 'I will make you fishers of men'. They ask what proportion of a fisherman's time would have been spent actually fishing and what proportion repairing the nets? Surprisingly, rather a lot on the latter, the illustrative point being how much time we Christians spend building genuine relationships with those who are not believers? The answer, when it comes to clergy and church leaders in particular, is often shockingly little. These authors also remind us that fishing was a collaborative activity and not an individualistic one, though that is not the way that we have typically been conditioned to think about evangelism.