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

Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training- Part 2

Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training- Part 3

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.

Series

Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training

Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training- Part 1

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

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