Michigan Camp Meeting 2016: The Harvest is Great

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Elders Advanced Training

Royce Snyman

Elders Advanced Training- Part 1

Elders Advanced Training- Part 2

Elders Advanced Training- Part 3

Father in Heaven, thank you for a new day, for life, health, strength, the blessings of a place like Camp Meeting, where we can come together and convene and fellowship and learn together, be blessed by biblical preaching, and also have opportunities to emphasize the work that you've given us to do and learn how to do it better.

We pray that your spirit will be here as we talk about the work of an elder And may these individuals be strengthened in their work to go back to their local churches to rightly represent you.

Thank you for hearing our prayer in Jesus' name.

Today we want to continue into our second phase of our advanced training.

I want to be able to share some things with you in a very more specific way.

I also hope that we have enough time for you to dialogue as you have questions.

How many of you have been elders for 10 years or more?

The rest of you, I'm assuming, have either been not elders or you've been elders for less than 10 years.

So, there's a lot of experience in here, in terms of being an elder.

I've never been a lay elder, such as yourself, with a job besides ministry.

But I have been an elder in a church when I wasn't the pastor, and it's a lot closer to being an elder in a church when you are a layperson doing it, because I had my day job, so to speak, as well as being an elder, and it was a good lesson for me.

I found what it's like to be having another job besides being the pastor of the church and having to carry the burden of being an elder and working in that church.

And as I, this is while I, when I came to the conference office and came to the Lansing Church back in 1993.

I'm barely that old, you know, so I'm probably about 22 by now.

At any rate, during that time, I got involved in the Lansing Church, and I was the personal ministries leader and the Sabbath School director for the Michigan Conference disaster response coordinator and those things were keeping me busy.

But when you get into a position like that, you're not as busy.

And So they asked me to be an elder and I said sure, and I spent several years as an elder in the Lansing Church.

A time came when my job started to change and it also started to expand.

And as that began to happen, I had to make a decision and sometimes you have to make the same kind of decision.

I know your churches need you as elders and I'm not telling you now this is kind of counterproductive to my class, but there does come a time when you say, look I honestly can't do the job of an elder because my life just does not allow it right now.

And it's better for you to step out and let someone else step in who has the time to be able to do that job, or at least more than you are able to do that job.

For example, if you're traveling 6 days out of 7, And the only time you're home is on Friday night through Saturday night, and then on Sunday you're gone again.

And that's your work, and that's your life, and that's your job.

You can't do the work of an elder, folks.

You can't do the work of an elder if you're not there during that time.

I already said earlier in the job description time that an elder's time commitment should be at least 4 hours a week.

If you're going to visit people in their home, you have to be present to visit them in their home.

Well, maybe you could Skype with them, I suppose, but not really the ideal way to be able to do it.

So what I'm saying is, I've learned from experience what it is to carry that kind of a load, and recognize the challenges that are there, at least more so than when I was a pastor.

And as we're working through this, I value your experience.

Those of you who have been doing this for 10 years or more, you've had experience in doing this.

At some point when I recognize, when we are doing interaction, that I've got to share some material with you, and I may say, I'm going to just have to keep launching ahead and not take your questions or your comments.

That's I still have to accomplish some level of content delivery.

Okay, But I do want, especially today and tomorrow, to have some time for you to ask questions or to share appropriate experiences of things that have worked for you or the like.

So if we come up to that, I would like to encourage you to do that.

I have 20 slides today, and this is the second 1.

So I've got 19 slides, which means I don't have that much as I have had sometimes.

And so I'm hoping to be able to get through that, and then we can have some dialogue.

If we wind up with a little extra time, I'm happy to take some situations that you may be dealing with, that you'd like some advice with, or things that you know you've had in the past that are long since past, but you say, you know, did we do that the best way we could have?

And use it not so much to fix the past, which you can't do, but to use it as a teaching moment for the present, and a learning moment so that not only that you might learn for how to handle things in the future but also how the class might learn how to handle things to the future.

All right, did I make a lot of sense in that or any sense at all?

At least 1 person thinks I've made some sense I might have to go over it again all right just a lead-in not the best word but I'd like to just remind you that you are leaders okay?

Now everybody follows somebody and we all follow Jesus, all right?

But you are in your church, you're viewed as being a leader.

You were elected because you have been recognized as a leader in your congregation.

You have been elected because You have shown leadership potential or leadership skills, and the church needs that leadership.

You've been elected for some of the other qualifications, your spiritual qualifications, your spiritual mentorship of others, and even though you might not have been an elder, but they've recognized that and now they want to make you officially a leader.

When you are a leader, there are some things I want you to think about, and they're what are on the screen right now.

Leaders first of all must love people and the challenge of course is that not everybody's lovely and just about every church that I've been to has somebody who's less lovely than others And you can think of who some of those people might be, because your mind right now is playing back in your mind some of those people, or at least 1 of those persons in your church that's harder for you to love than others.

The challenge of course is sometimes we have to love them with tough love.

And we can't allow unlovely people to dominate the church.

Now there's an individual in the Michigan, that is in Michigan, and I'm actually going to tell you this man's name.

And the reason I'm going to tell you is because he could visit your church.

I have gone in the lower part of Michigan, I've gone a number of different places, and I'll go there and bump into him.

He doesn't particularly care for me, But 1 of the reasons is because he's a challenge.

Well, I'm not going to tell you his name because I don't want to put him on recording.

But maybe at the end, if you will remind me, I'll turn the recorders off and I'll tell you this individual's name.

But the problem is that he borders on the level of being a predator.

And you cannot allow people like that to continue to dominate your church and to control what goes on in your church.

And people like this can often target new members or vulnerable members, And if you simply allow it to go on, you're not loving the rest of the church, and caring for the rest of the church.

And you're ultimately not loving that person either, because that person is being destructive, and they need to have their lives changed and fully surrender to Jesus.

So love comes in many different forms, that's my point.

Part of your work is to maintain church unity.

The devil wants to divide your church because He understands the principle of divide and conquer.

He's the author of divide and conquer, and he's been doing it for a long time.

And if your church becomes divided, he knows that you will be ineffective in the community.

A united, loving, caring, Christian church community is a powerful force in the community that you dwell in.

But a divided church is unable to be effective in doing anything in that local church.

So, your work is to maintain unity and to keep unity.

When you start to see something happening that's bringing disunity into your church and division.

Your work is to number 1 pray about it and ask God for solutions and number 2 to begin to get involved in that process.

But you can't just step back and say, pastor it's your job to solve this problem.

Series

Elders Advanced Training

Elders Advanced Training- Part 2

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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