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Muskegon SDA Church

Jason Sliger

The Master Plan

Father in heaven, we're thankful for this community of faith and for what you have done in and through us and what you are about to do in us.

And Father, we thank you that we can worship you.

We thank you for the blessings of this past year and for another year of life that is just before us.

And Father as we plan for being about our Father's business, we ask Lord that you would give us wisdom, that you would guide us, that you would give us excitement as we look forward to service for you in this upcoming year.

So bless us now, Lord, we ask in Jesus' name, Amen.

How many of you thought you were gonna live to 2019?

It's mostly the young people that raised their hands on that 1.

You know, I've been told that the older you get the faster it goes by.

It kind of hit warp speed once we had kids and things just, I mean I can't believe I have a 7 year old now.

I mean, just I remember bringing her home from the hospital and thinking, how in the world do they let people out of the hospital with these little infants?

You know, as new parents, like what in the world are we gonna do?

But here we are, we're on the cusp of a new year, we've got a blank slate in front of us.

And I think Paul has some really good words of advice and you've read it in our scripture reading, but if you'd like to turn there again in the book of Philippians, some good words of advice as we begin this new year together.

Philippians chapter 3, verse 13 and 14, Paul says this, he says, "'Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended "'or to have achieved the goal, "'but this 1 thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

In those 2 verses, Paul touches on the past, the present, and the future.

But what you find as you look at the passage closely, that the weight is placed on the future.

Paul touches very briefly and he says, listen, I haven't quite gotten to where I need to be.

And then he says, but this 1 thing I do, this is the present, I forget the things that have happened in the past, and I'm pressing toward that mark that is in the future.

And I think this is good advice for us as we begin a new year together.

Sometimes the temptation is to get caught up in the achievements of the past, whether it's as a community of faith or as individuals, the temptation can be to get caught up in what we have achieved and to kind of bask in that achievement feeling good.

But Paul says that it's good for us to put those things behind us to, what he says is to forget them.

Now this is a guy who's done quite a bit.

I mean, if you look at Paul's resume, he has done a lot in his life at this point, but he says, I'm not quite there yet.

And in fact, he says, I'm forgetting that stuff, and there's a goal that's in front of me and I'm pressing toward that.

Now Paul is using here in the passage, he's using the imagery of a runner and he oftentimes uses this in his writing, talking about athletic competitors and making analogies back to the spiritual journey.

And he's using that analogy here, pressing toward that mark.

As a runner is running in a race, he is pressing toward that mark.

He has that goal in mind of crossing the finish line.

And a good runner allows the distractions around him to fall to the side as he presses toward the mark that is set before him, forgetting his past achievements in an effort to achieve another goal of finishing the race.

Now, as we have looked back on 2019, or 2018 rather, the Lord has blessed us tremendously.

And I think it's good for us to just briefly think about what the Lord has done for us.

It's good to reflect and see how the Lord has blessed.

We need to thank the Lord for those blessings of the past.

We need to thank the Lord for the growth that he has brought in our lives, but we need to say, Lord, those chapters have now been closed, whether it's good or bad, it's been closed, and now I'm pressing toward the mark of the kingdom of heaven and taking as many people there as possible with me.

And so this morning we wanna discuss a little bit about some of these plans as we're pressing toward the mark.

We have this goal in 2019 of various things that we would like to achieve.

And so I'm gonna go ahead and ask Dan to come on up at this time and we're gonna just discuss this plan that we have for the upcoming year.

And I'm hoping that as you listen, that maybe you might catch a vision on a particular project and say, you know what, I wanna put my time and energy behind that.

I wanna maybe donate some means or give some time to that project to make it go forward because the reality of it is Dan and I can't do this on our own, the board can't do this on their own.

We need to move together as a community of faith to achieve the goal that God has for us.

So Dan, it's good to have you up here this morning.

This is gonna be kind of interesting having 2 preachers up here, isn't it?

I see that you gave us chairs so we don't run into each other.

Yeah, Midori said, you know, you guys are gonna sit down, and Dan's like, yeah, because if we're both standing up here together, we'll be crashing into each other.

So Dan, why don't you tell us a little bit about something here.

As a board, every year we come up with this document that the conference encourages us to write and to put together.

Why don't you just kind of tell us a little bit about that document this morning.

So how many of you have heard of the term master plan of evangelism?

If you're on the board, all the board members should raise their hand.

So the conference expects us to create a master plan of evangelism.

And as Pastor mentioned in his word from Paul, it's a look forward.

What are we planning to do in the next 3 years?

And in fact, since I took over personal ministries, I've kind of stretched that to 3 to 5 years to try to create a strategic plan to go along with the Master Plan of Evangelism.

And we take the previous couple of years' performance, like the number of baptisms, the literature we give out, the public evangelism efforts we do, and we reflect on how successful they were, where we learned, what we did, and then we shape the next 3 years.

So the Master Plan of Evangelism is a living, breathing, strategic document, and it lays out all the things that we think we're going to do or want to do in the prior year.

Now understand, it changes, it's a living document.

So there's things that weren't on our 2018 Master Plan Evangelism that the Lord brought to us and we just took on, And there's other things that we originally thought we were gonna do, they kind of slipped off or we pushed them out because the Lord pressed us to do something more important.

So we're always, but it's kind of a guiding document for the board to say, this is what our plan's going to be next year and the next 3 years.

So today as you leave, we're actually gonna give you the master plan of evangelism for 2019.

So you can take it home, you can pray through it.

We've divided it up into 3 sections of different areas of ministry that we wanna focus on in 2019.

And we want you to have that in your hand so it's not just a board thing that we're coming up with, but it's a church movement.

This is something that we wanna do together as a church family.

So on our master plan of evangelism, Dan, there are things that kind of just get carried over from year to year.

What are some of those things that get carried over from year to year.

And they're things that you've heard about that we've done for years and years and years, long before I've come to the church.

We've had an active prison ministry mission in this church for many, many, many years.

We see a lot of fruit from that, so we'll continue to do that.

Obviously, everybody knows we're down to 2 prisons instead of 3, so we're shaping that ministry around the changes in the prison system.

But many of those people are now going out into the community and they're contacting us and they're going to Adventist churches and they're actually working in their communities and they're sharing what we've taught them in the prison.

Door-to-door outreach, you hear me talk about that during personal ministry time quite often.

That's our door-to-door handing out literature, asking for Bible studies, doing our community surveys, and obviously we'll continue to do that.

We need to do better at that, and that's 1 of my goals from personal ministries this year to try to get us back to where we used to be with our door-to-door outreach.

We need to do better face-to-face at people's doors.

Discover Bible School is a correspondence-type Bible study.

People will mail in and request those and the ladies that run that will continue to answer those and send those Bible studies out.

The quilt ministry, we've done a quilt ministry for many, many, many, many years and that will continue.

In fact, we're going to talk about something later that we think we're going to actually possibly grow Quilt Ministry or leverage Quilt Ministry with another idea that we have that I'll talk about later.

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The Master Plan

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