Becoming a commercial fisherman (part two)

Continuing the topic of church planting:

I immediately went through the Gospels looking at every reference to fishing. There were several. Even though in Mongolia, I did not have a concordance, it became apparent that several different methods of fishing were described. Sometimes the disciples threw or cast their nets into the water (e.g. Matthew 4:18), at other times they let down the nets from the boat (Mark 5:4). Sometimes they fished from the shore; at other times they were in deeper water.

Soon after this, we went to India. There we met with a friend of ours, a church planter who works with fishing communities along the coast of rural Andhra Pradesh. So we asked him about the fishing practices in these primitive villages. He immediately told us about different fishing techniques that these people use. He described a net that looks like a butterfly net that they use to catch fish along the shore. He described a long dragnet, or seine, a net several hundred yards long that two boats would let down in a circle. This net would catch large numbers of fish at a time.

When I returned home and could access the Internet again, I looked up fishing nets in a concordance. To my surprise, I found that different words in the Greek were translated as "fishing net" in English. There was a word that implied a net like a purse. Usually a generic word for fishing net was used.

But perhaps the most interesting scripture occurs in Matthew 13:47-48 where it says, "Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a fishing net that was thrown into the water and caught fish of every kind. When the net was full, they dragged it up onto the shore, sat down, and sorted the good fish into crates, but threw the bad ones away.” The word used for fishing net here, is dragnet or seine.