ASI 2009: By Knowing Him

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ASI 2009 Seminar: Understanding Evangelism

Lisa Quade

Leading Little Ones to Christ

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much for your blessings.

Thank you for the special commission that you've given to us to feed your lambs.

So please come, send your Holy Spirit to be our teacher here this morning, for we want to be your helping hands to feed your lambs in Jesus name, amen.

Well, we're here as part of the evangelism track to find out where we can find evangelism's greatest returns.

And so I'm happy you're here because you're in the right place if you want to make your efforts, your time, your resources, your finances go the farthest distance in bringing the most people to Christ for his kingdom.

I wanted to share with you just a little lesson from a shepherdess.

You see, I was raised on a farm with sheep and I had the opportunity to feed many little lambs, to raise them by bottle, and what a joy.

You probably heard last night how I shared that when I feed a little lamb that warm milk, that they love to follow me.

And 1 little lamb I wanted to tell you about this morning.

Violet loved to follow me, but she was a frail, tiny little lamb.

Of course, this little lamb need to be fed every 4 hours.

So often, it was my job to remember, go out to the barn and feed your little lamb.

And there's my little lamb, feeding my little lamb and holding them close.

I was supposed to go out and feed my little lamb, but first I had to get my chores done in the house.

But somehow it crossed my will that morning.

I grumbled and complained, stomped and pouted.

And I was so absorbed in my own way that time passed.

Mother sent me to my room to pray, spend time with God so He could change my heart.

I stomped off to my room, flopped on the bed and pouted for a long time.

Finally, I let Jesus get a hold of my heart.

I claimed a promise from His Word that I could do all things through Christ who strengthened me and went to do my chores.

Hours had passed while I'd been choosing my own selfish way.

I was supposed to have fed her hours ago, right after my chores.

I'd been so absorbed in my own way, I'd forgotten.

I warmed a bottle of milk, put on my boots and hurried to the barn.

I looked over the feeder on the other side where I knew Violet would be eagerly waiting for her bottle of milk wagging her tail.

I walked over, knelt down, placed my hand upon my little lamb, just in time to feel her take her last breath.

And my little lamb died because of my selfishness, because of my neglect, because of being so absorbed in my own pursuits.

My little lamb had died, and You can only imagine the tears that welled up in my eyes, the sorrow that gripped my heart for days over my selfishness.

And I said, Lord, help me never to do this to your real lambs.

Of course, I learned a very good lesson about choosing my own way with my sheep out in my pasture.

You can hardly see her, but she is right down here in the corner, curled up.

Have I in any way left his real lambs, his children to perish?

Less work, you know, simpler, you don't have crafts, you don't have these busy energetic children?

Or perhaps I've just looked for the quickest, easiest way to pull off a program to teach the children.

How is it that perhaps I've chosen my own way instead of letting God empower me to give His warm, living milk of His Word to the children.

And I want you to know that God has power for each 1 of us, whatever our situation, how we find ourselves, whatever has been the past, that He has power to give us to feed His lambs and to be faithful under shepherds, for Jesus our shepherd of the real little lambs.

And so today we want to look into how he can impart to us this power in raising children.

My husband is here, my husband John, and this is our little boy, Micaiah.

He is a year and a half now, and they're standing there and back.

And we work together night and day, it seems, in feeding his lambs' ministries.

And my parents also, we couldn't do it without their help.

They're standing back here and back, mom and dad.

And they've been a great support since the Lord placed this vision on my heart when I was about 12 years old.

And the Lord has blessed me and given me a husband who has even a stronger passion than I do for feeding his lambs.

And I also have a friend visiting, and she's over here in the front in the purple.

And she has taken hold of the work of feeding His lambs, so you can ask her about her experiences.

We want to seek God's plan for how we can do this work.

We might think it's the adult evangelistic meetings, and those are very important.

But Jesus said, suffer the little children to come unto me.

In fact, a noted Hindu said, as long as the missionaries concern themselves mainly with work for the adults, we did not worry.

We knew that only a few could be changed, but when the missionary started to work for the children, then we were definitely concerned.

The noted Francis Javier, the Jesuit said, give me the children until they are 7.

Benny Moore

The Five Ws of Public Evangelism

Father in heaven, we thank you for the opportunity to spend time talking about the work that you've given us to do as your people.

And I just pray that your spirit will be with us and guide in this presentation this afternoon, that it will be beneficial to those who have come.

This is our prayer, We ask it in Jesus' name and for his sake.

I'm 1 of the managers for the Share Him program.

Work with Elder Falkenberg and have for the last almost 6 years.

Before that, I had the opportunity to work in public evangelism with Elder Kenneth Cox for about 9 years, and that was my beginning in ministry, actually.

Since that time, I've been a conference administrator for many years and now have the opportunity to focus all of my time and attention on evangelism and making evangelism work both internationally and here at home.

So this afternoon we want to talk about 1 of the greatest problems that we have found as we brought people back home from an international thrilling experience and sometimes they had hundreds, sometimes they had thousands of people in attendance at their audience and they come back home and they want to preach and they're ready to preach.

The only problem is they don't have a place to preach because we have found that empty pews don't respond too well to the gospel.

We were able to find people who were willing to be speakers.

We were able to get those people to come to a weekend boot camp and we were able to train them in how to speak, but they went back home and there was no place to speak or there was nobody to speak to if they had a place to speak.

We've suggested meetings in all type of places, different rooms in the church, in addition to of course the sanctuaries a possibility, but also we can go to public places, like I know 1 person did meetings in Denny's restaurant.

You know, there are rooms in hotels, sometimes there's a storefront.

There's different kinds of recreation halls, mobile home parks, there's all kinds of different places, you know, even in a tent, but not in Phoenix in August.

But we can do all types of things, but we still have to have people when we get there if we're going to have results.

So in our several years of attempting to find the answer to how to effectively do evangelism in North America, we have just learned more what not to do than we have what to do.

And we've just kept backing up and trying other approaches.

And we learned that our biggest challenge is that our members largely in North America do not have meaningful relationships with people who are not members.

And they have not been developing relationships so that they have people who are ready to come when they're ready to preach.

So again, we didn't have any problem finding the speakers.

We have already taken somewhere over 7, 000 speakers to preach internationally.

And those people are willing and anxious to preach again.

The problem is, is having the audience to listen.

And we thought 1 of the things that we learned as we've studied about this, we found that God will never ask us to do something without providing what is necessary to make that something successful.

Sister White tells us that God puts us in difficult places so that we can learn to trust him and not ourselves.

So even when we face difficulties, then we need to realize that there's something for us to learn in there and that God is ultimately going to bring success.

Sister White says over and over again, if when I did a study on angels and I found over and over again it says the angels are waiting, the angels are waiting, the angels are waiting.

Are they waiting for things to get bad down here?

Are they waiting for the economy to turn sour?

Because their work, they have been assigned the responsibility of assisting us in soul winning.

If we don't do a soul winning, then they're just sitting there waiting and waiting and waiting.

So we're not alone in this work when we go out to do it.

So how can we begin to develop meaningful relationships with non-members?

Several things that I've run across fairly recently, and it's become our focus of attention with ShareHim as we are training evangelism teams in churches and as we're preparing right now tools to help our pastors be able to train their teams.

We're finding that there are some things that are maybe rather unique, some are rather simple.

They're so simple that you wonder, well, why in the world didn't we think about that sooner?

I want to skip that 1 and go to the Smith Mountain Lake, Virginia, because Jeremiah is not here, but let's go to Kuna, Idaho.

And there we're going to talk about, we're going to talk about teleconference and newspaper advertising and how someone pulled that together to make it work.

This is a video clip from the North Pacific Union.

It's 1 of their spotlight on mission programs.

And when I saw it, I was thrilled because I said, why didn't we think of this sooner?

We're not going to finish the work inside the 4 walls of our church.

Imagine yourself trying to find the truth and you're going from church to church.

You try church A, you try church B, you're going up the steps to church C.

You don't know what they teach, what they believe.

You have no relationship built up with anyone there.

You don't know how you're going to be received.

Did you bring the right version of the Bible?

All of these things are barriers to people coming into our building.

Welcome to Dakuna, Idaho, Seventh-day Adventist Church.

I'm Allene Andres-Sox, and I've been a member here for 20 years.

1 of the things that we have found the most difficult to do in our community is to get people in our door and we wanted to do this in a unique way.

Somehow we've got to get the good news, the message that we have out to the people.

So we've got to figure out ways how to break through that barrier and connect with people and dialogue with them outside the the walls of our church.

It's not easy because some of we live so far scattered in the valley.

My pastor came up with the idea to advertise a telephone number for a teleconference on a topic that would be of immediate interest to many people.

You just take a simple little ad in the paper every month.

We did it every fourth Tuesday of the month.

And you advertise the time, the phone number to call, the access code, and your topic.

We entertain questions and have a discussion.

It is a great way to connect outside the walls of your church and allow people to get to know you, but from the safety of their own homes.

They don't have to overcome that huge psychological barrier.

I grew up in a non-denominational church and I stopped going probably when I was, I'd say 19 years old.

I stopped going for a number of reasons, but I just felt really judged in the church and didn't really want to really have anything to do with it.

And I had always been a Christian, you know, on my own, but I just figured who needs church, you know?

It's, you know, full of people that are hypocrites and I just didn't want anything to do with it.

And, but then my son was invited by 1 of his good friend's dad to come to his new church and play electric guitar for their band.

And so my son jumped all over that and started going and every Sunday we'd drop him off and we would go back home.

I'm like, this is just, you know, yeah, I may have been burned by church before but you know my son is showing interest in God and I need to support that.

And she started calling in on the conferences.

I could just you know mute it or put it on speakerphone and not have to worry about my children coming up to me saying, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, I need this, or crying or whining, and you have them tell them, knock it off.

It was never naive enough to say that there was never a God, right?

And saw him out and had lots of excuses why not to.

We had just started going to a new non-denominational church because my son was involved in that with music.

I would just eavesdrop on the speakerphone.

Series

ASI 2009 Seminar: Understanding Evangelism

The Five Ws of Public Evangelism

Transcript

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