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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Nelson Ernst

Tips For Reaching Jehovah’s Witnesses

As was mentioned earlier, my name is Nelson and just happy to be down here.

Short drive, good friends, good to see young people.

You know, I have to admit there's something about coming and preaching at Advent Hope which just makes me nervous.

So you have to pardon my my quivering voice a little bit.

I'll get warmed up to the idea after a couple seconds here.

I've spoken in front of the general conference.

I've taken the entire executive committee for the GC on outreach.

But I've even played the piano in front of those guys.

But something about speaking to you people makes me nervous.

Maybe it's because you're all really high above me or looking down on me, I'm not sure.

But nonetheless, we'll pray and God will bless.

Just before we have a word of prayer and then get into our message, I wanted to share a few things about what's going on with GLOW.

A lot of people, as was mentioned earlier, I think know me as the GLOW guy.

I'm the guy who makes those little Bible pamphlets and I talk about them.

In fact, last time I was here, I think about 2 years ago, I was giving a presentation to you all about how to, creative ideas for how to distribute the literature.

Have any of you passed out GLOW tracts since I gave that presentation?

I hope that that was an encouragement to you and I hope you had some good testimonies from and divine appointments out of that.

God is blessing with this with the the ministry of glow.

You know we started off in 2007 in a renovated garage that I was living in at the time and the idea was birthed from there.

And today we've printed 73 million tracks and most of those are just in the North American division and Western Europe.

Different divisions are now beginning to start this program and they're just going to take this to entirely new levels.

In Western society it's a little bit intimidating sometimes to pass out tracts but when you go down to South and Inter-American division in Africa, they're going to pass them out in large amounts.

In fact, the South American Division Publishing Director, based there in Brazil, told me, Tursio, he said, when we start this program, we're estimating that we'll pass out 100 million of these tracts every year.

And it took us since 2007 to just do 73 million here in America.

This is going to be something which is hopefully going to have a large impact in the world.

We have some new tracts that we're coming out with.

I hope that some of you are keeping up with the new titles that are available to spread and witness with.

We just developed a new tract on how the Dead Sea Scrolls in archaeology substantiate the book of Daniel and by extension the Bible.

Hosel from Southern Adventist University.

We have a new children's tract, our first ever.

It's a tract written for little kids to read on the topic of the state of the dead.

Grandpa died and the kid asked his dad, what's wrong with grandpa?

And so when they started lowering grandpa into the grave, the little kid said, but grandpa, he's gonna get dirty.

You know, and So, you know, then you proceed into the topic of the state of the dead and for kids.

John Bradshaw's wife wrote that 1 for us.

And we have a third new 1 out written by Mark Finley.

And this one's called Certainty in an Uncertain World.

And this tract is written with a broad audience in mind.

It's generic enough so that you can use it in many different cultures across the globe.

And the reason why he wrote that for us is because the General Conference Publishing, Personal Ministries, and ministerial department are combining with Glow to do an initiative in 2017 to encourage the world church to pass out 1000000000 Glow tracks.

And so what that comes down to is we're, in a practical way, we're encouraging all of you guys to pass out at least 1 track a day.

Just stick the tracts in your pocket like I have in mine and then pass out 1 a day.

If you have some Buddhist friends, those ones will be available soon.

And we're working with the General Conference, specifically Homer Chakartin, to develop literature tracks for every major world religion.

So when you are traveling and you meet Hindus, you meet Jews, you meet Muslims, you meet Buddhists.

We will hopefully, before the spring meetings at the GC, have some literature available for you to give to them so that we can try and reach these folks.

We also voted to develop a new tract on the rapture, entire tract on that, a new tract on media, and then 1 on diabetes.

And lastly, I'd like to mention that we have an exciting new 1 out.

Anybody know what's happening this October?

It's the 500 year anniversary of Martin Luther posting the 95 Theses, right, in Wittenberg.

There's going to be a lot of celebration.

There's going to be a lot of talk about that.

Pope Francis is going to be heavily involved with it, I'm sure.

And so we've developed a new tract on the Reformation, which we can pass out, and hopefully we'll have that 1 out in the next month or 2.

I'm excited to pass that 1 out in particular.

Martin Luther, in fact, if I have a baby boy, I'm going to name, I've really considered naming him Luther.

1 tip for those of you who are going to have kids, never tell the name in advance because you'll always get naysayers and then it kind of discourages you.

We have a Romania mission trip coming up February 1 through 10.

We're gonna go pass out a million pieces of literature and they're all gonna be advertising to draw people to 2, 000 simultaneous evangelistic meetings that are happening in Romania.

So If you're interested in coming to Romania with me, February 1 to 10, you can talk to me afterwards and I can give you the details on that.

We also have a mission trip coming up for Salt Lake City.

We're going to pass out a million tracks there immediately before the LDS General Conference.

We're going to go pass out a million tracks on another mission trip in Christmas in Japan, if you're interested in that.

I want to share a quick story with you, just to illustrate how things are happening.

I was in Florida recently at the Inter-American Division meetings talking to their personal ministries directors about how to get GLO going.

And after I was done with the presentation, I got a call on my cell phone and I don't answer phone calls if I don't recognize who it is, if it's just a number.

But for some reason, my finger gravitated over to the answer button and I pressed it and I found the phone up to my ear And I said, why did I do that?

Anyway, I stepped out of the meeting room and I was pacing around in the hall, because I like to pace when I talk on the phone.

And this guy begins to talk to me and he says, yes, hello.

I just the other day received my Amazon purchase, the Amazon shipment came, I ordered a garage door opener, and as I opened up my box I found 3 of these little pamphlets of yours, And all of a sudden it dawned on me, there's something wrong here.

The routing system on the back of the tracks when somebody calls in to request Bible studies, it does not route to my cell phone.

It routes to the appropriate secretary throughout the North American division.

But there was some fluke and this person is calling me.

This is somebody who just received our tracks and I was thinking, oh man, this guy's going to be angry.

He told me the 3 titles that he got, Promise of Peace, and I can't remember the other 2, and we proceeded to have a discussion.

And I kind of laughed and I told him, you know, this isn't even supposed to be calling me.

And come to find out this man was a chaplain of, you know, non-Adventist ministry, and he, thanks Arden, and he was overseeing a bunch of men with Bible studies and by the time we were done with our conversation the man had signed up for I think it was 12 or 13 Bible studies that he wanted mailed to him so that he could begin giving those to all the people that he was working with, all the men he was studying with.

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Tips For Reaching Jehovah’s Witnesses

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