Michigan Camp Meeting 2016: The Harvest is Great

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training

Royce Snyman

Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training- Part 1

Father in heaven, as we begin our study and our lesson time today, we pray that your Holy Spirit will once again be here.

We want to learn how to do our work in the best possible way for you.

We want to serve you faithfully and represent Jesus aright.

And Lord, you've called deacons and deaconesses to carry a certain responsibility in the local church.

May that become clearer today and how to accomplish that we pray in Jesus' name.

I should probably really save this for the time when we talk about conflict, which is not today, but anyway, here's a little bit of a conflict situation.

It's in a chapter entitled, Is This Really Worth Fighting Over?

If you're coming into this class for the first time because it's the advanced course, we still will be using as a foundational set, 3 books that you see up here.

So make sure you grab those and take advantage of that.

Alright, this is the illustration that he gives you.

The principle of relinquishing rights to advance God's kingdom was illustrated in 1 of my first conciliation cases.

Now, 1 of the points that he brings out, and I get into this too deep, and then we're gonna get off of what we were gonna talk about today, but, in talking about relinquishing your rights, Do we have certain rights?

And in our church, we have certain rights.

You know, for example, if somebody accuses you of something, you have certain rights to be able to say, wait a minute, you've got the wrong idea, you've got the wrong information, you've got whatever, you just don't have everything quite right.

And you have a right to defend yourself, you have a right to be able to share your story in front of the church, rights, whatever.

But sometimes those rights get in the way of what God's trying to really do for us, and that's where our conflicts really start to become a problem.

You might want to let me move, go ahead and move it back if you don't mind.

Yeah, no that's okay, just make sure that I stay in it.

That's really good, so thank you for doing that.

So here he's talking about relinquishing your rights And he said, Ted worked for a government agency.

As a new believer, he was excited about his salvation and wanted to have a positive witness for Christ among his co-workers.

Ted and his supervisor, Joan, had never gotten along well, partly because Ted continually tried to tell her how to run her department.

His enthusiasm for Christ provoked her further.

As her frustration toward Ted increased, Joan gave him particularly difficult work assignments, even though she knew he had a back problem.

Eventually, he injured his back and had to leave work for several months.

Although he received some disability benefits, Ted lost several thousand dollars due to missed wages and additional medical expenses.

As a result, he filed a lawsuit against Joan and the agency.

By the time Ted came to see me, this is a lawyer now, but he works by applying Christian principle and here he's working with Ted, a Christian, right?

So he says, By the time Ted came to see me, this is a lawyer now, but he works by applying Christian principle and here he's working with Ted, a Christian, right?

So he says, by the time Ted came to see me, he'd returned to work and the lawsuit was moving slowly through the court system.

During our first conversation, Ted and I identified several ways he had contributed to the conflict with Joan.

He's helping him to understand that he's contributed to the problem.

And so he says, then seeing his own fault more clearly, Ted began to consider settling the lawsuit by accepting the $5, 000 the agency had offered him a few days earlier.

Although his damages exceeded that amount, his attorney advised him to accept the settlement.

On the other hand, several of Ted's friends were encouraging him to demand more money or continue the litigation.

A few days later, Ted surprised me by saying that he was going to drop his lawsuit without accepting the settlement offer.

The more he had reflected on his own fault in the matter, the less comfortable he felt about accepting money from the agency.

At the same time, he concluded that laying down his right to restitution would be an effective way to demonstrate the mercy and forgiveness that he himself had received from God." Wow.

Make sure you bring your book back, Kathy.

When we come to it, I'll share with you the rest of the story.

Are you going to publish my books right away?

If that's what you're asking, the answer is yes.

Okay, we want to talk today a little bit about the kinds of things that we can do about caring for other people and ministering to people's needs.

We've talked a little bit about it but I want to go a little farther in it and I encourage you that as we're doing this today that you begin to think back to your local church, whatever your context is, whether it's Pioneer Memorial or it's Houghton Hancock, whatever your church context is, think about how would you do what we're talking about doing here as a deacon or a deaconess.

All right, we're glad to have you all here.

And we want to, I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that can be done in relationship to the work of being a deacon or a deaconess.

Again, this is our textbook that we're using.

Those of you that are new today and coming in just for the advanced portion of this class, were you also in my basic class that I've taught in the past?

Anybody that's from a basic class in the past?

Well, I'm not going to try to set the stage for what we've done here before.

So if you come in today in the advanced cattle course and you haven't done this, go back and read some of the materials that are here and you'll get a little bit of the foundation that we've settled for all of this.

But mainly what I'm going to be doing is going into part 4 in your book and talking about the work of the deacon and the deaconess and the kinds of things that are here for us to be involved with.

I'm not going to be talking, I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about the communion service and baptism and so on because that I consider to be basic and just about every deacon and deaconess has been schooled in that in their local church, unless you're new at it and that's something that you've not gotten.

But that's in the handbook and there's details in there and so on and so forth.

And he's got ideas in here and he's even got quite a bit of area here in dealing with all of that.

But what I want to spend a little bit more time on is in chapter 19.

Chapter 19, which is beginning on page 143.

I want to talk a little bit about visitation.

And we're doing this, Some of you are overlapping between the elders and the deacons, and if you're in both classes you're going to get some overlap, although I don't use this book in the elders class.

But nonetheless, we're going to talk a little bit about some of these things.

The ministry of visitation is a most neglected, I didn't say the most, I said a most neglected ministry of deacons and deaconesses in our local churches.

A lot of deacons and deaconesses have not recognized that this is part of what God wants us to do and be involved with and the elders are in the same boat.

I want you to know that because there's been a lot of talk about that.

Some pastors have even been effective in orchestrating that type of work in their local church, that ministry in their local church, all of which is good.

But most churches, most Adventist churches, their elders, their deacons and their deaconesses do not have an active visitation ministry.

If there is any visitation ministry, it's more of a hit and miss or an emergency basis visit, maybe when the pastor's gone, going to the hospital because the pastor's not there, or the pastor, you know, they're in between pastors and so the elders are covering some of that and just trying to keep that part of it going so the church doesn't fall apart, rather than a carefully orchestrated ministry.

And 1 of the things that I want us to be able to see here and think of is thinking outside of the box, and that box is the church.

Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training- Part 2

Again, Father, we are grateful to be servants of yours.

As we've studied in this class, Jesus was first servant, and he illustrated for us how to be servants as well.

We pray that you will help us as we talk about servant ministry today, as we talk about serving you as faithful disciples, that your Holy Spirit will be in this class, that you will speak through me, it's not my words but yours, that will help us to serve you better in Jesus name, Amen.

If anybody happens to notice that thing stop running, be sure to tell me.

There are some numbers that move there and that red record at the top would stop.

All right, take your books here and I'd like to...

First time in the class, this is quite common.

Make sure you sign your name, because that way I just...

I want to make sure you get all the materials that we give, and it's nice for me to know who's gone through the training, and so on, so I can send you a lot of spam emails, and that kind of thing.

All right, today here's what we want to talk about.

Again this is the advanced course of Deacons and Deaconesses.

Some of you participated in our basic course and we just hit the highlights, skimmed the top, identified job description, and a few other key elements and ingredients.

The purpose of the advanced class is for us to 0 in on some more important areas and get down into the depths of them and how they apply to you and how they work in ministry.

If you go to chapter 8, which we've talked about before, but I want to go back to it again for a moment, it's talking about deacons and deaconesses as teachers of God's Word.

And for those of you who are new, I've given out 3 books here, actually 4 to be exact.

I don't have the fourth book right now, I'm hoping to get some more and we're gonna see if that all works out.

At any rate, the 3 books are this textbook, which is our main source of direction for our class, a workbook that goes with it, which is a workbook size.

We're not looking at the workbook, that's for you to go back and as you study this on your own more in detail, it'll help to guide you through.

And then I've also given you a copy of the handbook, the Deacon and Deaconess' Handbook, produced by the Ministerial Department of the General Conference.

And this Deacon and Deaconess' Handbook was not available last camp meeting.

And so I'm providing it to you and there's resources.

It's my way of doing 2 things, saying thank you for attending the class and God bless you with all the work you got in front of you and you're gonna need the book to know what you're going to be doing, right?

And I want you to be able to have that and to be a benefit to you.

There are a lot of good little pointers in there, direction as you're thinking about this ministry and it expands the ministry.

These books and that book are very closely connected with each other in terms of content.

This particular author comes from his background and his perspective, and I will mention that the culture that he comes from tends to be much more formal in a church service environment, and typically the deacons and deaconesses in the church that he grew up in and that he was pastoring, You'll see them dressed in white shirts and black skirts and black pants and white gloves.

Not everybody feels great about it, but I love it.

I think it's great because I think it's a great way to identify who the deacons and deaconesses are, who the leaders in the church are, and on Sabbath morning they're there to serve, and they've got their name tags on and all that.

I think the rest of us would do a good job to do that as well.

At any rate, my point is that we all have some differences in relationship to that, but the bottom line is there's some basic principles we all work off of and all deal with.

All right, I want to talk to you today about deacons and deaconesses as teachers of God's Word.

I know that you may have thought that being a deacon or a deaconess excluded you from having to be a teacher of the Bible, from giving Bible studies, from being involved in soul learning.

That you've heard me say this so many times, but I have to say it, you know, for those that are new so that they get a sense of the feel here.

So those of you who've heard me say it 4 times already, you'll forgive me and you'll recognize they're new people here today.

Besides, repetition is a good teacher, right?

Deacons and deaconesses are not appointed just to take up the offering, to get people to their seats, to manage the people when they're getting baptized and helping them get in and out, making sure the baptistry is filled, caring for the plumbing and all that kind of thing.

That's not just what deacons are all about.

And 1 of the things we've learned in our study, both from the Word of God and from this book that's helping to focus that, is that the deacons were first appointed not to fix the plumbing.

Deacons were first appointed to care for the needs of people, the physical needs of people, but also the spiritual needs of people.

But what we have said up to this point is the reason some of the other things weren't pointed out in the job description of an elder or a deacon is because the other things that we don't do as deacons and deaconesses today were assumed to be done by the people because they were Christians.

God transported him to the, led him to the Ethiopian unit and then physically transported him back to where he wanted him to be, but he'd send him there to preach the gospel message.

It wasn't Paul, it wasn't Peter, it wasn't James, it wasn't any of those people, It was Philip the deacon.

Who was the first martyr for preaching the Word of God to the Sanhedrin?

Because these people were first Christians.

They were first committed Christians given their lives to Jesus Christ and because of what Jesus Christ had done in their lives, they had accepted the call to be disciples and they taught the message any way God gave them opportunity to do it and that included with the Mount.

So you and I are first deacons and deaconesses, we are first disciples and then deacons and deaconesses, right?

And so that's the platform I'm building on.

I'll come back to that here in just a moment.

But the author here does talk a little bit about this work and gives a little bit of the history of how people were involved in this process.

Go to page 51 And I want to point out something here just to reconnect us to the book and where we're going today.

Actually go to page 50 at the bottom of the page.

And it says, he says there, Rosalind Brown, although an Anglican, writes from a wider Christian tradition.

She states that proclaiming the gospel is 1 of 3 strands that makes up the diaconal ministry.

Okay, the work of deacons and deaconesses.

Even though preaching during the main worship service is not necessarily the role of deacons, Brown says that it is appropriate that they be trained to preach.

This training prepares them to present God's Word within the varying context of their ministry.

Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training- Part 3

Father, the last Friday of camp meeting, hard to believe.

We're always blessed to be able to be in your presence and to be led by you.

You've given us your word as a teacher, and we're so thankful for it, because it helps us who are leaders to have direction so we know where to go and what to do.

We pray for your wisdom to be here with us through the presence of your Holy Spirit, As once again you teach us how to be leaders for you, deacons and deaconesses, leading your churches forward into the kingdom of heaven.

The truth is, Lord, in this earth we have troubles, no question about it.

And even in the church there are challenges that we face.

As we focus today on how to handle some of those challenges, we pray that your Holy Spirit will be here and I thank you in Jesus' name, Amen.

As I was looking at what to present for the seminars a month and a half, 2 ago, or whenever we did it, when I got down to this particular point, I realized that 1 of the challenges that elders face is the same challenges that deacons and deaconesses face because they are leaders in the church, and it's 1 of the areas that we really do need help with, and that is handling 2 basic challenges in the church.

1 is conflict and the other is, there's my book, I'll see it, and the other is discipline.

And as we, as I wrestled with that I realized that there is a close connection, and there should be anyway, between elders, deacons, and deaconesses when it comes to dealing with these problems.

Now we've spoken a little bit about conflict in the basic section because in that we talked about the role of deacons and deaconesses and the fact that the work of deacons and deaconesses came out of conflict in the church.

And that tells us that that's the responsibility then for us as deacons and deaconesses to learn how to manage that and help the church to be able to sort through those things and work through them without them becoming bogging down experiences that bring the church to a halt and take it away from its mission and its purpose.

You and I are given that work that we talked about yesterday and that's the work that God wants us to do and we must do it.

The challenge that we have today is that the and I've always had in the church but especially today in these last days just before Jesus comes, is the devil is bringing everything to bear now that he can.

Anything and everything that you've heard of and things that you haven't, the devil is now bringing to bear because he is trying to push in against us to try to destroy God's church before Jesus returns.

That means that his leaders are going to have to be even better equipped, better prepared, and more dependent on Jesus than they've ever been.

If you read the news today, I mean, I'm reading things I never ever, ever, ever even imagined.

When we're dealing with the LGBT agenda, you know I can almost, for the recording and for everybody else, please raise your right hand what you're about to say.

You recognize what I'm saying is not saying what somebody might take and say in this recording, so it's right here.

If I need you to defend me because somebody gets it and puts it there, whatever.

Now let me explain what I mean spiritually speaking.

I'm not talking about the people, I'm talking about the theology, I'm talking about the doctrine.

But when you begin to see where the agenda is really going, and what I've been reading recently in the news has just absolutely floored me, the agenda of the devil is abundantly clear.

He is actually trying to destroy the whole idea of gender.

This isn't just about homosexuality anymore.

You can now tell exactly what Satan is trying to do.

He's trying to take away, obliterate the image of God entirely.

God says in Genesis chapter 1 and 2 that He made man and woman in His image.

And what Satan is trying to do now is destroy that there ever was a man and there ever was a woman.

Because if he can do that, he can destroy the image of God.

You and I are, I mean, I didn't see that coming.

I don't know, anybody here see that coming?

I couldn't believe it when I read it, when I started to see what people's agenda was.

And that agenda is actually out there, that's where they're going.

I shouldn't have been surprised and you know almost nothing surprises me anymore.

This is a deacon and deaconess's class and we've got some challenges that we face, but the subject that I just spoke to is not the only challenge you're going to face in your churches.

You're going to face that and you're going to face things you've never heard of and I haven't heard of yet and we're going to have to be prepared to work together to solve those problems and to keep God's church together as we wrestle through with them.

And so both the elders and deacons and deaconesses are going to have to struggle with the issues of discipline and dealing with conflict in the church.

So I want to take some time to talk to you about discipline and about conflict and give you some ideas and tools to work with.

I'm not going to solve the problem for you.

I'm going to give you ideas and introduce you to potential tools and solutions.

But this is going to be an ongoing struggle in your church.

But you will go away with 2 things today.

1 will be overwhelming, and that is I'm placing again on your shoulders the responsibility for leading your church when it comes to dealing with these issues.

Not to walk away from them, not to ignore them.

After the elders class I had some people talking to me about the conflicts and the challenges that they're experiencing, the difficulties that they're having to handle and they want to know how to manage that.

God's going to help you how to deal with it.

And I'm willing to come to you or talk to you on the phone, talk to your churches, talk to your leaders, and talk to your districts, whatever, to help you begin to work toward managing this.

But the bottom line is please don't ignore the challenges your churches are facing.

Don't run from them, don't be scared of them, because Jesus is bigger than those things.

Most of the people ran, turned tail and ran and spent 40 sure hours in the wilderness.

But we're back at the promised land again and they came back to the promised land and Caleb proved it was true.

He went right back into the place that God had given him.

The Anakim were still there and he took them out.

Caleb said, piece of cake here, I don't even need this sword.

And you know you don't really see much of that fight going on because God just took it over.

All right, I feel a sermon coming on, so.

I want to talk to you a little bit about church standards and move us along here in relationship to this.

Because God is holy and righteousness, his church has set high standards of moral and social behavior that reflect the character of God.

Is God seeking to bring us back into His image?

He's got work to do and that will finally be finished when we get to heaven, but He's teaching us to be dependent upon Him.

He wants to cause us to think that we're being kind and generous and caring about people by lowering the standards of God's church.

At a time when God says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

We're just on the borders of the kingdom here, we're at Kadesh Barnea, we're almost in the promised land, don't lower the standard now, keep it up there, I'm strong enough to help you with that.

These standards are based upon biblical principles which are eternal and unchanging.

Every person baptized into the church promises to follow these standards.

How many of you have been baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist Church?

Good, because if you're a deacon or a deaconess in the church, I sure hope so.

I'm not going to tell you I've never seen that happen, but it does happen.

You didn't just make promises, but they were promises.

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Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training

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Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training- Part 1

1h 11m

Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training- Part 2

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Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training- Part 3

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