We read “In God We Trust” on our money, but do you sometimes feel that you love God but actually trust money more? How can we both love and trust God in our materialistic, money-centric world? This seminar could be the most challenging and inspiring presentation you’ve ever heard on the Bible’s advice for managing money..

ASI 2017: Called. Chosen. Committed.

<p>We read “In God We Trust” on our money, but do you sometimes feel that you love God but actually trust money more? How can we both love and trust God in our materialistic, money-centric world? This seminar could be the most challenging and inspiring presentation you’ve ever heard on the Bible’s advice for managing money..</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

4-Living the Faith

Danny Houghton

Jared Thurmon

Top Tips for Entrepreneurial Success- Panel Discussion

So, a good entrepreneurial tip is start on time.

So, before we begin, I'm going to ask Danny, and then we'll present ourselves and start, but I'm going to ask Danny to have a word of prayer.

Father in heaven, we thank you for the opportunity to be here at this National ASI Convention here in Houston.

Lord, we thank you for the chance to stop and think about some successful tips and ways to be more effective and better in our business as entrepreneurs.

And Lord, we know that all of this wisdom comes from you, so we thank you for it and ask that you would be here to impress our minds, to speak through us, and just to be in this place.

We thank you for hearing and answering this prayer in your name, amen.

Well, first of all, thank you very much for choosing our seminar and for your interest in this topic.

There's 3 of us here and all of us are going to present, hopefully, in a balanced way, so no special time for anybody, and everybody's going to share their thoughts.

We prepared this together and we're going to present ourselves a little bit, our background, why we're here, and why we believe this topic is so important.

Okay, a couple of suggestions about the flow of this presentation.

We're going to do it in a very informal way and especially we're going to share some more personal experiences.

So you're welcome to interject and ask questions at any point.

Well I hope I'm not, I hope I don't repent from that because sometimes it really breaks the flow, but if that happens, we also won't be shy and tell you that we have to move, okay?

And at the end, we also have some a little longer Q&A session, but again, each topic you will see that's probably a good opportunity to have some feedback from the others.

So, I want to hear your feedback at every moment.

If you're sleepy, we're gonna wake you up, Okay?

So, to start with, my name is Ruben Dias.

I live in Canada, and I've been living in Canada with my family for the last almost 5 years.

I started my first company when I was 21.

I don't look like 47, But I started when I was 21.

I did it in Europe and I thought that I was never going to work for anybody.

And besides planting pines in Alabama when my parents studied at Enger University, I planted like a hundred thousand pines in Alabama and washing dishes and painting houses.

Those really good jobs that gives you good work ethics.

Actually, I was an entrepreneur since I was 21.

I started more than 10 companies and I sold successfully 4 of those.

And lately, the last 2 or 3 years, I've been running a venture capital firm and we invest in early-stage tech firms.

So, that's basically it in a nutshell where I'm coming from.

I was ASI vice president in Europe when I lived in Europe and now I live in North America.

I've been attending ASI US for about 12 years.

So this is really our DNA as a family to be always part of ASI.

We have excellent friends at ASI, all of you.

Some of them we know for many, many years.

Actually, Michael, we went to school almost together.

You were in others' academy in 87, right?

So some of us know each other for a long time.

They're gonna present themselves as well.

But they will let you know a little bit about background.

And this is actually my 34th ASI convention in a row.

I started coming when I was 7 years old and I absolutely love ASI.

So, you know, my background a little bit, I've kind of grown up in a supporting ministry, working with my dad at Heart Research Center, and some of the various ministries that were subcomponents of that.

Have spent some time in the IT world, helping build a global platform for websites called NetAdvinist, that has been deployed in many different divisions around the world.

But most recently, I was a co-founder of a company called 1 Degree Organic Foods.

And currently serve as the vice president of sales for Vibrant Health Products, which is a family of brands that mostly make gluten-free and sprouted whole grain breads.

And so my background kind of encompasses some of those various elements.

I'm still working and building those businesses today.

And I hail from Linden, Washington, where my wife and I live.

I'm an international commuter, so I cross the Canadian border every day to go to work.

And the really thing that I've been excited about lately is I've had my first son.

His first flight on a plane was coming to an ASI convention.

I have had the privilege of growing up in a Seventh-day Adventist home, homeschooled and then on to 1 of our academies and then on to Southern.

My parents were high school graduates who just learned to hustle.

And so I grew up in a home where it was always hard work and then serving the church in a variety of capacities.

I graduated school and got into assisted living community development and got out of that and have been in a number of ventures since, creating anything from soil to a juice company to some other things with health and wellness.

I currently have the joy of serving with the Adventist Review team in the area of innovation, and there are some very cool things that your church is up to that you're gonna see in the coming months.

So I'd love to talk to you more about that, but I'm excited to be here.

My favorite quote in the whole world is from the book Christ's Object Lessons, page 349.

Religion and business are not 2 separate things, they are 1.

Excellent, now that we are presented, we just go for it, right?

Also, I'm gonna give you the background of what type of presentation we're going to share with you and what was our inspiration.

So we were asked to share with you the top tips for entrepreneur success.

Jamie Schneider

The Social Media Mission Field

For the first time in human history, every single 1 of us has the potential to witness to the world via the power of social media.

And personally, I believe as disciples, we have an obligation to be social media ambassadors for Christ within our sphere of influence.

If we work together, we can easily, you know, we can easily reach the ends of the earth in a very short amount of time.

Our department serves to provide those resources and tools so that we can accomplish this together.

Social media presents a bold new frontier for mission.

If Facebook alone were a country, it would be the largest country in the world with 1.9 billion monthly users.

We need to be intentional about reaching souls for the kingdom on these platforms that are already designed for engagement and relationship building.

In other words, we need to reach people where they are, not where we want them to be.

And this isn't part of the presentation, but when I was on the plane coming over here, I was reading Ellen White's counsels to writers and editors.

And anybody, if you are a communicator in any capacity, if you are on social media, I highly encourage you to read this book.

And she says, the warning message for this time is not being given earnestly in the great business world.

Now, I know she's not talking about the internet, but she's talking about the great business world at her time.

But our time, the great business center, is online.

Cyber Monday is the biggest sales day of the entire year.

And she goes on to say, day after day, the centers of commerce and trade are thronged with men and women who need the truth for this time, but who gain no saving knowledge of its precious principles because earnest, persevering efforts are not put forth to reach the class of people where they are.

And to drive this point home, by 2018, 33% of the world's population will be on social media.

This is an incredible opportunity for both business and ministry.

Young people, on average, spend 7 to 12 hours a day behind a screen.

At least 5 hours of that is on social media.

And in North America, we are very concerned about young people and reaching them.

We need to take the message to them, where they spend their time.

At the turn of the 19th century, these words were written, which was, let Every worker in the master's vineyard study, plan, devise methods to reach the people where they are.

We must do something out of the common course of things.

Social media must become part of our outreach strategy because we are trying to reach souls in a digitally focused environment.

Can you imagine if our founders would have had this technology?

We have all the right gadgets and time-saving devices to witness to the ends of the world, and yet we're distracted or hesitant.

So my challenge to you and the community is this, is why are we not spending time and effort sending missionaries to the digital countries?

After all, the conversation is happening whether or not we decide to join it.

Social media enables ministries and individuals to contribute to and influence the narrative.

It gives a voice and a platform for anyone willing to engage.

Social media has changed the barrier to entry to tell stories and get your message out at scale.

It used to be that if you wanted to tell your story or get your message to a broad audience, you had to buy your way in through costly traditional media.

Now, social media makes it easier and cheaper to tell your story and for people to share it.

You can have hundreds, thousands, even millions of people see your story at little to no cost.

This has a broad impact and comes with little risk.

In today's technology, you know, With today's technology, if it doesn't resonate with people, you can recut it or try something new.

It used to be if you published something and you sent it out, it would be months before you knew how it performed.

Now we can get instant results and we can adapt instantly.

The church knows from experience that evangelism works best when there's a foundation built on relationships.

And social media just represents a digital reflection of what humans do, and that is connect and share.

Storytelling connects people and gets people engaged and interested.

The reason why people love going to movies and reading books is because they love to be engaged by stories.

Social media is simply people connecting with people to create a collective human story.

It is our job to frame that story within the context of our faith and our present truth.

But social media is only meaningful if it results in something tangible.

With each opportunity, we are planting seeds.

Our goals must serve to direct people from the digital conversation to a real world tangible experience, in-person experience.

Reaching souls means cutting through the noise.

We are being bombarded daily with news, social issues, product ads, mixed messages, and so much more from countless sources.

It is estimated that the average adult now experiences 3, 000 marketing messages a day.

Can you imagine what we're going through?

Therefore, it's important to develop a digital strategy that enables your church, your ministry, your organization to navigate a dynamic and complex digital environment, allowing your messages to reach people and stand out as relevant, because there's a lot of competition.

You know, If you don't believe me, I recently read a stat that said 82% of people would attend church at Christmas or Easter if they were just simply invited.

We can use social media to share the gospel, inform the community of events, get our members involved and build relationships.

47% of Americans learn about a nonprofit or cause from the internet, specifically social media, and this is only going to increase.

59% of people donate after becoming a follower of a nonprofit social network.

56% of people donated to an organization because they read a story via social media.

At this time, digital communications is a way of magnifying the impact of traditional means, not replacing it.

We still need all our different channels.

But what we have are more resources than ever before to reach audiences how and where they want to be reached.

Social media is a powerful tool for feeding and reaching the multitudes, where they are and in a way that is relevant.

My goal is to empower, equip, and inspire you to think differently about how you use social media.

So to get you excited about the possibilities, let me share with you a few case studies from my first year at the North American Division.

These principles can be applied to both businesses and ministries, large and small.

If you want to know the how-to's, the foundations of strategy, you can visit my website at sdadata.org.

And there's also other presentations that go through this.

But I have found that people get more excited when you show them the results first, and then they start to get interested.

Okay, so for our first case study is the Faith, Reason, and Earth History text.

Because of technology, I'm gonna hold questions to the end.

Because of technology, the Seventh-day Adventist Church now has the tools necessary to exponentially increase the speed and efficiency of our efforts in fulfilling Christ's great commission.

Name the issue, the topic, the belief that needs to be shared with the world, and digital technology can help spread the message anywhere and anytime.

1 of the most important questions facing our world today is the age of the earth.

So to butcher a scientific support for the young earth model of creationism, the Faith and Science Council provided funding to write and distribute a free digital version of this text, which provides research perspective for contemplating earth origins in the terms of scripture and science.

But as exciting as that is to make the text free, Simply making a resource free for evangelism and truth is only part of the church's responsibility.

Having a powerful resource without a marketing strategy means the resource could potentially sit on the proverbial shelf gathering dust with only a few people appreciating it.

So what the Adventist learning community did is they made use of key partnerships to develop a digital marketing campaign for sharing the text with the world.

Active social media partnerships are a key to expanding your reach and branding.

Social media is designed for community building.

Find the organizations to build partnerships with either by location or topic.

The strategy they came up with was actually fairly simple.

It included a predetermined distribution platforms, e-book formats, a 60-second promotional trailer, and promotions packets, which is basically a Word doc that includes pre-made Facebook posts, tweets, you know, emails, etc.

And paid ads targeted to Adventists and Christians on Facebook.

But the biggest thing I want you to take home from this example is that they chose to do something different than the usual model.

The promotions package was shared with social media directors around the church.

These digital gatekeepers then became the social media ambassadors for the advertising campaign.

Within a matter of days, the book was being marketed on Facebook, Twitter, and internet search engines.

Julian Archer

The Christian Atheist- Believing in God but Trusting in Money

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this opportunity that you've given us to come here today to learn more from your Word, to hear from your Holy Spirit who gave your Word to your people so many years ago as a blessing to all who live on this earth.

And Lord, I just pray that as we dig further into your word looking at faith and finances this morning that your same Holy Spirit will be here with us to interpret your word to touch our hearts to convict us and convert us is my prayer in Jesus name amen okay well the seminar session I don't know whether these lights are able to be turned off independently, but if the front lights can go off, that would be great, but we'll see what happens.

It's a question which when I ask of myself, I have to regularly realign, recalibrate and say, hey Julian, what are you really trusting in?

You know, on your dollar bills that you have here, it says, in God we trust.

And I think it's 1 of those ironic things that we write in God we trust on the item that we trust more than God many times.

And so, We have to ask ourselves, what are we really trusting in, God or money?

And it's a question that only you can answer.

You can't look at somebody else's life and say, hey, that guy's too involved with money.

You can discern and think, well, maybe he is, maybe he isn't, maybe she is, maybe she isn't, but ultimately it's in your heart where that is revealed.

If you want to see more pictures like this, it's a little bit hard to see under these bright lights, but go to journeyswiththemessiah.org.

This is A photo of the rich young ruler, of course, and if you want to know where the rich young ruler story is found in scripture, it's found in a couple of places, but 1 of the places is on the number plate, Matthew 19, 16 to 22.

The photographer is very, he's a New York fashion photographer who decided to use those talents that God had given him for sharing the gospel, and he takes photos of the life of Christ in different parts of the world.

If you jump on faithvsfinance.org, I'll just very quickly run through some of the resources there.

The book is available to buy through Amazon or whatever from there.

There's an e-book on there, it's a free download, if you want to just download it and read it on your iPad or whatever, just download it for free.

There's an audio book that you can download for free if you want to listen to it, if you don't mind the Australian accent all the way through.

There's video clips, 10 short video clips, so if you're studying faith and finance in a small group at church or you're doing a lesson on it or something, you can download these little video clips on there.

There's small group discussion guides, a lot of resources.

Of course, there's the Bruised Camel that I don't put every issue up on there, but you can subscribe from that website to the Bruised Camel.

And then, yeah, there's talks and I run seminars around the place.

So, what we're looking at now is, just to give you an overview of the seminar.

We're going to look at a lot of little, let's call them packages of, 1 might be a quote that I'm going to expand on, 1 might be a Bible verse, 1 might be something that's happening in the world.

This first 1 that we're going to look at is the distribution of household wealth.

Now we've been around long enough to know that if you own a refrigerator and a car and you've got a bank account, you're quite well off.

We've heard those things coming through from many charities and different places.

But I'm a member of what's called the 1% Club, which means I'm a member of the richest 1% of adults on the planet.

And people look at that, and I've had people come up to me just a couple of weeks ago in Canada when I was doing some talks, somebody came up and said, Julian, you're a member of the 1% Club, do they sort of like communicate with each other and do you talk and do you have like secret phone calls and this sort of thing?

Can you give me any inside information on this 1% Club?

I said, yeah, we talk to each other all the time.

I mean, we guide what goes on in the world.

And I said, yeah, yeah, come to my next session and I'll explain about the 1% club.

If you have your net worth, so that's the value of all your assets minus the value of your liabilities, if your net worth is $3, 000 or more, then you are richer than 50% of the world's adults.

If your net worth, assets minus liabilities, is $90, 000 US, then you are richer than 90% of adults on the earth, which puts you in the 10% club.

So congratulations, welcome to the 10% club.

What do you think it would have to be to be a member of that 1% club?

You know that crazy group of super elites who you read about in the New York Times and they talk about them on CNN and they hammer them and say, to hell with this mob because there's a great divide between the rich and the poor.

How many millions would you have to have?

Well, the answer is very clear, $750, 000 US dollars, welcome to the club, if that's you.

$750, 000 worth of net worth and you are in the 1% club.

When I realized that and I read my Bible and I read all these texts about the rich, I couldn't ignore the fact that they were talking directly to me and I want to tell you that when Jesus and the rich came together it usually wasn't pretty it wasn't pretty even when they were church leaders usually wasn't pretty so 1% Club yeah we do talk to each other every day.

I've talked to members of the 1% club this morning.

I don't even have to ask sometimes, I'm just guessing that many people are.

But we're not right up where you might think you need to be, to be in the 1% club.

Series

4-Living the Faith

The Christian Atheist- Believing in God but Trusting in Money

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Balanced Living Bootcamp

Balanced Living Bootcamp- Part 5

1h 11m

Gem Castor Weekend

Tis So Sweet

55m

Sons of Heaven, Sons of Hell, Meeting on the Sabbath Day

48m

ASI 2012 Seminar: Business / Nonprofit

Growing a Sustainable Ministry

1h 14m

Breakout Session C

Reflecting Christ to Your Community as a Healthcare Provider

1h 7m

Breakouts

God’s Call to the Jungle

1h 2m

Faith and Healing

59m

Young Professionals

Unlocking Your True Potential

1h 10m

Morning Devotional: It's War Time

It’s Wartime - Part 8: Marching Orders

53m

Divine Assurance

The Man in the Shadows

1h 43m

Breakout Session C

Being Willing to Fully Invest in All of Our Patients

57m

Revelation Made Simple

18. Revelations Spiritual Revolution for a New Millennium

57m

Sound Doctrine