Michigan Camp Meeting 2016: The Harvest is Great

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Deacons & Deaconesses Basic Training

Royce Snyman

Deacons & Deaconesses Basic Training- Part 1

Deacons & Deaconesses Basic Training- Part 2

Father in heaven, thank you for this afternoon and for all that we've been able to benefit from here and camp meeting so far this year.

You've already blessed us abundantly, and even if we even went home right now with that experience that we've had up to this point, we would be blessed.

But Lord, there's some things we still need to learn that you want us to learn.

We want to be the best that we can and we have be in our leadership roles and here we have deacons and deaconesses that have come to learn as well.

Pray that your Holy Spirit will be here and that you will guide our conversation, our learning, and the words that I speak in our ears that hear.

The key book that we're going to be using in our seminar today is this 1, entitled, The 21st Century Deacon and Deaconess, written by Vincent E.

I'll tell you a little bit more about that in just a moment.

A couple of other books that you have also been given is the companion to this book, and I'm not holding it up at the moment, but I should do that, and I'm doing mainly for the video, but this companion book will help you.

You and I are not going to be able to go in depth through this book.

In other words, I can't cover everything that's in this book in the short amount of time we have.

We have all of 6 hours and a half to be able to do this, actually not quite a half.

And that's not enough time to be able to actually go through this, but you can go home and say, all right, he's whetted my appetite, I've got an idea where I'm going now, but I want to look at this more in depth, and I also want to, I want to share this with others, and so you'll have that book to go along with it.

This companion book is a workbook that goes along with the chapters and just gives you a study tool.

I'm not going to try to go through this chapter by chapter today.

You'll find that basically what he does when you take and use this tool and review your material, you'll find that what he does is he starts at the beginning of the chapter and then he goes from paragraph to paragraph and not always every paragraph and then makes his way through.

That's in the first chapter so you can start at the beginning and kind of work your way through.

You get to the second chapter and then you say, wait a minute, I'm lost now and that's because he starts jumping.

And he instead of the first paragraph and the first question paralleling the first paragraph in the book, he might go somewhere else first and then work his way back.

So just a little clue if you're going through this.

It is in there and you will be able to find it.

I'm giving it to you to work with right now and I just want that to be beneficial to you.

This red book that I've given to you is entitled Seventh-day Adventist Deacons and Deaconesses Handbook.

Previous classes I've taught did not have this handbook because it didn't exist.

It has recently just come out, produced by the General Conference, and it's something that you definitely want to have produced by the Ministerial Association of the General Conference and I've given it to you.

You don't even have to go buy it and it's free to you but it's going to cost you a lot of time and a lot of work and God will use you because of it.

It's a good tool and some of the things we'll be talking about are reflected in here and we will look at some special parts of this, but this is a reference tool for you.

If you're as a deacon or deaconess, you're trying to understand how you should do something or what you should do in particular, if you open the handbook you'll see some of the chapters that are listed there and you'll recognize a little bit of where this is going and what it might be able to be, how it might be of value to you.

Look at chapter 9, for example, talks about the baptismal service.

If you're a new deacon or a new deaconess and you've never done it before and your pastor isn't going to be able to help you for some reason, which pastor should be able to help you some way, but you want to understand the baptismal service and some of the details of your role in the baptismal service, That's outlined here.

And how many of you are none of the above?

We don't mind people who are looking, you know.

So we are providing you with this tool so that you can use it as a point of reference.

It's also a good book for you to read and recognize some of the issues of responsibility, your job description, and so on.

These 2 books really are companion books.

This individual does it from the perspective of a pastor and also a teacher and he recognized the need for this kind of leadership training and he started doing it as a pastor in his church and over a period of time He developed it more into a very, an ongoing seminar, and he was, and probably still is, giving that seminar in a lot of different places and teaching, and because of that, he began to realize that there was a need for him to put it in printed form so that it could go to places he couldn't.

And it made its way to my desk, and I took a look at it, and I said, that's a tool I need, and gave me a foundation to be able to teach this class a couple of years ago, and I've done it for a couple of camp meetings now.

It's all right for you to come back again, but if you're all back again, there's 1 of 2 things.

I didn't teach it very well the first time, or the second time you didn't learn it very well, no, I'm kidding.

All right, so here's the material that I'm giving to you.

A couple other things that would be very beneficial to you to have that are supporting materials.

It wouldn't hurt for you to have the Elder's Handbook, so you have a little bit of idea what your companion leaders in your church, their responsibilities are, and so that you know who to go to and what expectations that the church has of them, the Elder's Handbook would just be a good learning tool for you, a very important tool for everyone and we kind of addressed it in our elders meeting this morning, but I'm going to talk a little bit more about it there later.

Here, and that is the discipleship handbook.

How many of you have seen the discipleship handbook?

I love it when I see that many hands go up.

I hope you the same percentages apply to the rest of the camp meeting attendees because if we've done that, that's a wonderful thing.

You've been through the course and that's great.

If you haven't gotten this, make sure you get a copy of it.

I'll try to have some copies here in the next couple of days if I can remember to do that with all the other duties that I'm doing.

And last but not least, the Church Manual.

You should have a copy of the Church Manual.

You are leaders of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Therefore, you need to know what the Church Manual outlines for you, not only in terms of your responsibilities, but also how this church operates and how it manages things, how it deals with issues like discipline, which we'll talk about a little later in the week, how you handle challenges that come to your church and conflicts within your church, and how the church functions in its departments and how they interact to each other and how you can be supportive of that role, those kinds of things.

The church manual is a very important tool.

I would say of all the tools that I've given you beside the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy.

If you have to say, I've got to make a choice, and the next so long, and I want to know which of the priorities, these are the 2 that I would have you read.

Now the only problem with this 1 is this is the old version of the church manual.

And there is now a new version, and I hope they have them upstairs.

We warned them about the kinds of things that they needed to have, and I hope that the church manual is on that list.

It's been out for all of about 2 or 3 or 4 weeks, at least in terms of I've seen it.

It's going to eventually be available online.

The last time they did this, by the way if you're not aware of this, they do it every 5 years.

They revise the church manual every 5 years, coincides with the General Conference session, which makes sense because that's where the decisions are made and policy issues are addressed, And then they have to have time to get it printed and get it out into the field.

And General Conference was a year ago and we're just getting the new church manual now.

You gotta be able to speed that up a little bit.

Don't read the, if you never read the church manual, don't read the old 1 now.

You want to get the new 1, unless you want to have to read them both and figure that out.

So start with a new 1, then work back if you've got time and you can see where the changes were and all that.

All right, let's dig into our materials here a little bit now.

Take out your book and we're going to start with the first chapter and lay the foundation for what we do.

Now I've taught 3 classes today so my mind is just kind of flowing together here.

Series

Deacons & Deaconesses Basic Training

Deacons & Deaconesses Basic Training- Part 1

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Deacons & Deaconesses Basic Training

Deacons & Deaconesses Basic Training- Part 2

1h 9m

Elder, Deacon, Deaconess Basic Training

Deacons and Deaconesses Basic Training- Part 1

1h 8m

Deacon & Deaconess Basic Training

Deacon & Deaconess Basic Training- Part 2

1h 18m

Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training

Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training- Part 2

1h 11m

Deacon & Deaconess Basic Training

Deacon & Deaconess Basic Training- Part 1

1h 12m

Sabbath School and Personal Ministries: Getting the Most Out of BSO

02 The Power of Personal Ministry

58m

Spark Training: Public Evangelism

Spark Training: Public Evangelism- Part 1

57m

Elder's Basic Training and Deacon & Deaconess Basic Training

Deacon & Deaconess Basic Training - Part 1

1h 6m

Elders Basic Training

Elders Basic Training - Part 1

58m

Preach the Word

05 Delivering the Message

59m

Elders Basic Training

Elders Basic Training - Part 2

1h 9m

Elder's Basic Training and Deacon & Deaconess Basic Training

Elder’s Basic Training - Part 1

1h 7m

Sound Doctrine