AdAgrA 2020: A Living Parable

Plenary

Gabriel McClover

Vonnella McClover

AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

“Unity” in Living Parables

The title of our talk this morning is Unity and Living Parables.

I'm going to test it and see if it works.

So we are, we have from Somerville, Georgia, where we own and operate the Vineyard Vegetarian Cafe and Juice bar.

We were here about 3 years ago when Brother Deisinger did a sermon and the sermon was entitled I Have a Dream.

And 1 of the things he said in his sermon that resonated with me, he says I have a dream 1 day that there will be an Adventist owned restaurant being supplied by an Adventist grower.

And when I heard that, I said, we're kind of doing that on a very small scale.

So I remember I went and told John, I said, I'm going to give you a proof of concept.

I'm going to see how it can be practically done.

And that was my motivating force, because I know that the secret of the health message lies in the people in this room, growing this healthy, organically grown food.

Most restaurants now, they give some type of fake meat and they throw some barbecue sauce on it and they try to charge you $12 or $15 for it.

And that stuff is not gonna reverse any disease.

We started 4 years ago and by God's grace we've been still been open.

Several trials and tribulations, but we've been doing some work.

So, Lauren has opened doors for us to do ministry in a lot of different avenues.

This is us in a public school in our town.

We do something at our restaurant called the 10 Day Health Challenge.

So we put people on a plant-based diet for 10 days.

We work with over 500 people over the last 3 years.

And what we do, and we're gonna show a little bit as we go along.

We literally put them on a plant-based diet.

And then, by doing that, the people that we've worked with has allowed us to say, you know what?

These are good Christian folks, or just good people, and their business is trying to help the community.

So this is all a second grade at this particular school that we went to.

And As you can see over here, I don't know if anybody ever dealt with anybody teach cyber school and trying to keep some 5 year olds or 7 year olds entertained for an hour.

Here we are, we're trying to, I don't know if you can see, We had the guess what's in the box.

And then we'd put a teddy bear in there and say, you know, we just had a great time.

We also did, so we brought all the 8 laws of health into this program.

1 of the things we did was trust, trust in the divine power, right?

So we were thinking and we were brainstorming.

So what we did is we had some volunteers.

We said anybody from our church want to volunteer?

He just never knows you're gonna volunteer for it, right?

So they came and I had 1 of the, they had, so we blindfolded our volunteers, right?

And they had to go through an obstacle course.

I said, kids, so we had 1 volunteer on that end of the gym, and then we had the volunteer blindfolded, and he had to kind of go through an obstacle course.

So he had to focus on the voice of the other volunteer and say to go through the obstacle course.

I said, give me 4 kids and just surround him and tell him to go the other way, the other way, the other way.

And so they're walking and going through the thing.

But the point of it was trust and authority.

So we need trust in our teachers and our principals.

And we're going to have a lot of noise around us that's gonna tell us to do the wrong thing.

So that's what we did, and we had a great time doing that.

And we also, and the funny thing about this, so they didn't, we were showing them how to eat healthy.

And so we had the smoothie, and we said, we're gonna do smoothies.

So we're gonna say, anybody like mangoes?

They're like, no, no, you're gonna mess it up.

And we put the spinach in there and then we blended it up and then we brought it around.

And you should have seen the kids, they were smelling it.

And you'd be surprised how many people came to the restaurant just because we went there.

There's something in marketing called the nag effect.

So That's why you never see a toy commercial when you're watching like Jeopardy or a news.

So what the kids do, mommy, I want this, mommy, I want this toy, mommy, I want this toy.

And they go to Walmart and guess what the company does?

They put it right at the end cap of the aisle.

So they see it and they, mommy, I want, mommy, I want.

So we can use it in God's way right so we use a nag effect and they nag nag nag their parents to bring them to the restaurant to get a smoothie so this is a way that we've been doing We also do in-home cooking classes with our 10-day health challenge.

We go in people's home and teach them how to cook.

So literally what we do, we try to take every excuse away of being healthy.

So this is, and we've done so many cooking classes over the last, I mean over, I don't know, 100, 150.

I mean, I don't know how many cooking classes we've done.

We did it, so we had a church contact that said, hey, Could you guys do a kids cooking school?

Market Farmers

God’s Plan in Marketing

Father in heaven, we thank you so much for this opportunity to come together to learn about marketing, but not just marketing in a worldly perspective, but in a biblical perspective.

So we pray that your Holy Spirit be with us.

Open our eyes that we may learn something new.

So a little bit of back, for guys that didn't read our bio, my name is Gabriel McClover, my wife Vonnell, and I, we own and operate a restaurant in Somerville, Georgia, called the Vineyard Vegetarian Cafe and Juice Bar.

But prior to that, I spent almost 10 years in the corporate world.

I was in various sales and marketing positions.

I worked for 3 Fortune 500 companies, doing various sales in a lot of different positions, marketing, different with CRM packaging, which is customer relationship management.

So I got a good experience on working territories, developing marketing strategies and how to penetrate.

So, and I think what makes me to qualify me to teach a class like this is the 4 years that I've, were running the restaurant, because I was able to take principles from corporate America and then mingle them and mix them with doing medical missionary work and doing God's work.

So I want to share these things for you as we go along.

I like telling stories, so you're going to hear a lot of testimonies of what we do in the restaurant.

But I know most of the people who come, they want to, if you're a market gardener or you're somebody who's interested, an entrepreneur interested in marketing their business, these are some of the goals that I would think.

You know, grow my business, gain more customers, expand new markets, add new product offering.

Is that, you think that, is that pretty consistent with everybody in here?

So, when I think of marketing and marketing my business, these are the first things that came to my mind when I opened the restaurant, right?

So all these questions started coming in my mind and the Lord reminded me of a text and we all know that text.

It's found in Matthew chapter 19, 28 verse 19 and 20.

Go ye therefore and teach all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the name of the Son and the name of the Holy Spirit teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I've commanded you and lo I am with you always even until the end of the world so this is known as the Great Commission so we said I think a lot of people said this class marketing class I want to grow my business the main thing that popped in our mind was what grow my business gain more customers spend new markets add new product offering but nobody said anything about the Great Commission so the question is and you know how the devil likes that we like to like to rationalize things you know well you know maybe this is only for ministers or disciple you know ministers you know and and Bible workers and and those type of people those type of people does the work I need to run my business business is business and it's separate right I thought the same thing And so are we to separate business and ministry?

Yeah, because the title of the class is God's plan in marketing, so obviously there is some co-mingling that's going to be taking place.

But when we think about marketing, we think about marketing business these things don't the goal of the soul never comes up we think about growing our business how do I get more get more customers how do I gain how do I gain how do I gain so here's a here's a quote so it should be a business and ministry be separated I'd like to give some backup this is from review and herald february 21st 1893 paragraph 5 God has given to every man a work to do in connection with his kingdom.

Each 1 professing the name of Christ is to be an interested worker, ready to defend the principles of righteousness the work of the gospel is not to depend solely upon the ministers every soul should take an active part in advancing the cause of God just talked about that but instead of this how many in our large churches and small churches come and go like a door upon its hinges feeling no responsibility for the progress of the work no interest in the salvation of soon souls for whom Christ died they do not dream of weaving their religion into their business They say religion is religion and business is business.

They believe each has a proper sphere but let them be separated.

But in whatever calling the Christian is found, he has his work to do for the Lord and representing Christ to the world.

So as we're in this class we may have a business, we may look into open a business, but we need to make sure that we are incorporating what the Lord has told us to do in our Great Commission.

So this is going to be kind of thing in the class I wish I had a dry erase board because this is going to be that what I got highlighted this is what we're going to be I'm going to be highlighting this throughout the lecture.

So but whatever calling the Christian is found he has work to do in the Lord, representing Christ to the world.

Whatever may be your occupation, we are to be missionaries, having our chief aim the winning of souls to Christ.

So when you think of chief aim, is that number 1, number 2, number 3?

So as I'm figuring out ways to grow my business, Am I figuring out ways, ideas, maybe to start a business?

My chief goal is for the salvation of souls.

So if this is not our interest, what do we do?

We rob God of influence, of time, of money, and effort.

And with holding our heart service from the Lord, we fail to benefit our fellow man, and thus rob God of the glory that will flow to him through the conversion of others this is from Review and Herald February 21st 1893 paragraph 5 so we robbing God so God has given you hey you know this is even folks in the corporate world even for me and when I was in a corporate world God didn't place me there and give me that job, open so many doors for me to sit at a corporate table, go to a luncheon, just sit there and just eat all the food that they eat and do what they do.

No, God has placed you there to be a light unto the world.

So our businesses, our market gardeners, or whatever we may do, it needs to have our chief aim is for the salvation of souls.

And obviously we got to be very practical with this, right?

You're not going to go there and start passing out Ministry of Healings every time somebody comes to the restaurant.

You know, it was funny because we started off and we were so gung-ho.

You know, we're like, yeah, everybody come in here, they get in the ministry of healing.

And what we found that people, people probably didn't just wanted a sandwich, they didn't want, they didn't want, they don't want religion right now, just want a sandwich, you know.

So we had to scale back and I had to, and I said, you Lord, you know, what am I doing wrong?

Christ's method alone will give true success and reason to people.

The Savior mingled with men as 1 who desired the good.

He showed his sympathy for them, ministered to their needs, won their confidence, then he bade them follow me.

So I said, okay, Lord, how can I mingle with somebody if I'm throwing a book at their face and telling them to read it and it just wasn't the right time I'm going straight I'm skipping all these steps and say, hey man, you need to follow Christ?

I remember my pastor, he was preaching a sermon, he used this quote, and he says there's a difference between true success and perceived success.

So we may look at it and say, wow, look how many people have been baptized, wow, look at that, and it looks on the outside as perceived success, but is it really true success?

Because when they come next year, most all those people got baptized are not even in a church so is it really true success so the Savior mingled with men as 1 desire to good and we're going to talk about that as we go along because this is how I were able to market our business in our community.

Now I said sympathy, what does that mean?

Because a lot of times we kind of skip over this.

You hear the sermon, they say we ministered to their needs, we showed his sympathy, and then we bid them to follow me, won their confidence, and we move on." I'm like, what does sympathy mean?

So I started doing some research, and this is what I found.

If we love Jesus, we shall love to live for him, to present our thanks offerings to him, to labor for him, the very labor will be light.

For his sake we shall covet what what we don't Christians that we don't want pain 7 that we don't want no pain covet you know what covet means covet pain and toil and sacrifice Most folks don't want to sacrifice nothing.

I'll be talking about that tomorrow, tomorrow morning about hard work and overwork.

We shall sympathize with his longing for the salvation of men.

We shall feel the same tender craving for souls that he has felt.

So as we go to Christ's method alone and we see, okay, we're mingling with 1 who's desired a good, that sympathy is as I'm talking to them, as I'm mingling, it's saying, how can I connect this soul to Christ?

Is there something that I can do for this soul to be in the kingdom?

So with that in mind, that in line, as we're moving along in this discussion and as we're thinking about growing our business, as we're thinking about doing market gardening, all these different things, If we don't have this, we need to ask the Lord for this every single day.

Right, 1 of my prayers, I said, Lord, you know, when I'm talking to somebody, because 1 thing we do at our restaurant, and we go a little bit, we do what we call a 10-day health challenge.

We call it Let the Healing Begin 10-day health challenge.

And we work with about 500 something people, just me and my wife and 1 employee.

I probably did 500, 600 health consultations.

And as I sit now with somebody, and I'm saying, how do I connect them to Christ?

Intensive: Bridging the Gap

Bridging the Gap Part 1

Father in heaven, we thank you so much for this opportunity to come together to learn about this restaurant work and What you've called us to do in this last days.

We pray that your Holy Spirit be with us help us Lord to focus our minds and Understand the importance of this health message.

My wife Vonnell should be in here shortly.

We have 5 kids we run we have a I wouldn't call it a farm, but we have a nice size garden.

And then we also have a restaurant that we run and we also homeschool.

So I'm just going to tell you where we're at, and then we're going to go backwards, and I'm going to give you our testimony of how we got to this place.

So this is us at a public school, a public school.

And we were teaching the whole second grade, it was a couple hundred students in there about eating healthy.

So we went in there and you see, I'm like, so they came to me and say, well, because we'll talk about, we do something in our restaurant also called a 10-day health challenge, called Let the Healer Begin 10-day health challenge, which you guys are going to get some meat to it on that third hour, which is, this is revolutionary, and I'm so excited to share this part of it.

But through that, through that ministry that we did, it opened up a door for us to actually get into a public school system.

So we went in there and they said, could you come and teach about, you guys are so big about health and you do so much in the community, could you come and share with our second graders?

So we came into the school, I was like, so can you do it?

I was like, no problem, you know, of course.

So like, okay, how are we gonna keep a bunch of second graders focused for an hour?

So you see we've I had I had so many different misdirections going on.

We have 4 different boxes so we guess what's in the box, we gave different clues, we're like, okay, you know, it's red, and you know, we just kind of went, people's like, Coca-Cola, I was like, yes, and then what we did, what we illustrated to them, the importance of staying away from sugary beverages.

We talked about the army in our body, which is the white blood cells.

And if we do eat a lot of sugar, it suppresses our immune system for 4 hours.

I said, so we went, I said, anybody serve, anybody parents serve in the military?

And I said, what is it what is the purpose of an army?

Everybody's like, to protect us, to fight, da da da da da.

I said, what happens if the army goes to sleep?

I said, do you know there's an army in our body.

And we started going through the caffeinated beverages.

And we says, based off of your age, this is how much sugar you should eat.

This caffeinated beverage is like 6 times the amount of sugar that you eat.

And amazingly, we had made smoothies for them, right?

And the smoothies were, you know, we put in like, here go some mangoes.

Everybody's like, here go some mangoes, yeah.

And then we made the smoothies and we passed it around and they're smelling it and they're like, and they started tasting it and all the kids enjoyed it.

And another school invited us to do the same program.

So we see just just by doing things that the Lord has called us to do, they start to open us up.

So this is part of our 10-day health challenge that we're going to talk about, where we get people who are interested in making transitions in their health that we literally go into their homes, teach them how to cook.

If people say, how do you do it, we have a balance.

She makes things taste good, and she serves it to the people.

I'm the talker, I'm the salesperson, I'm the getting to doors, but this is where my wife shines.

I don't know if you can really see it because it's kind of dark on the thing, but maybe we could turn that last light off where we can see a little bit better.

I guess we can see that a little bit better.

So people say, have you ever done a kids cooking school before?

I said if they can walk, bring them in here.

So we had kids from, this is my daughter, but we had kids from 3 years old all the way up to teenagers, 18.

So Everything that we do, we try to make it evangelistic in nature, right?

We actually did this with the Cartersville Seventh-day Adventist Church.

We went in there, and we say, you know what?

It's not just going to be a one-day cooking school.

We're going to do a three-day cooking school.

And then the third night, we're gonna make a banquet.

And I want each person to go invite their family members to come out and see what they created.

And you'd be surprised how many people came to, I said, hey, what brings you here?

Not Christian, not church at all, but if granddaughter says, come see what I made, guess what?

And he was like, and they came and we had a wonderful Wonderful wonderful wonderful time and they just enjoyed itself and it was amazing.

We you would think In all the age groups, so we had, what was the age groups, from 3 to 5?

3 to 5, 6 to 8, 9 to 11, and no, 9 to 12, and then 13 for all the teenagers up.

So who do you think was the most neediest age group the most neediest the least amount of mess yes you know we had extra, we brought wipes, we were ready and then you see I can't see their table, Actually, these are the guys right here.

They were cutting their bananas because we did like a banana split so we cut the bananas and we put almond butter on there we put chia seeds and different fruits on there and they made it and It was not a bit of mess, but that next class that next group I was like wearing they are wearing almond butter.

It was just amazing But we this is this is this is what we love to do.

Back to Menu

Presenter

Gabriel McClover

3 Teachings

AdAgrA 2020: A Living Parable

“Unity” in Living Parables

42m

God’s Plan in Marketing

54m

Bridging the Gap Part 1

58m

Sound Doctrine