Michigan Camp Meeting 2019: As a Witness, Matthew 24:14

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Emmanuel Institute - Ignite Your Church

Mark Howard

Ignite Your Church -  Part 1: Evangelism 101

Father in heaven, we are thankful for the privilege of being here.

Lord, we can't overestimate the privilege of the freedom to come together, to believe according to our conscience and to practice those beliefs, to study them together.

Lord, we know that these freedoms would not always be held by us.

And we just thank you that we have them now.

We ask that you would help us to take the most advantage of them while we do.

We pray for the blessing of your Holy Spirit upon what we're going to do now in this classroom and Lord, across this campground with all of the different seminars going on, we just pray for the outpouring of your spirit and we ask and pray it in Jesus' name, amen.

Okay, personal ministries is the department in the local church whose goal, according to the Seventh-day Adventist Church manual is to get every single member involved in outreach missionary service in the church.

Not, oh I'm involved in the church I do greeting, oh I'm involved in the church I help with fellowship meal.

According to our denominational beliefs, according to what we believe scripture says, I'm going to share that this morning, according to our church manual every member should be involved in sharing their faith.

And so that's the job of the Personal Ministries Department is to help provide that training on a conference level and help equip the Personal Ministries leaders in the local church on that level.

And so 1 of the reasons the conference office had invited me to do this is because I've been the director of the Emanuel Institute since 2009, which basically does training, evangelism training, and they wanted to bring that into a more prominent place in the conference office so that we could make that training more accessible to the field.

So Pastor Cameron and I go out on a regular basis and do training in churches.

And if you are interested in training in your churches, if you are in Michigan, if you're outside of Michigan, you can request.

And, you know, but yeah, the brethren just usually focus on, you know, there's cost involved and all that.

But for Michigan Church, if you go to our website, which is the michigansspm.org website, you want to write that down.

I'm going to reference it further this week.

I don't think it's case sensitive, but I'd go lowercase.

Michigan SSPM, Sabbath School Personal Ministries.

We're gonna have a lot of resources there for you, a lot of the things we cover here and that kind of thing, but there's also a speaker request form, if you are training request form, if you want some training to come to your local church, and that form gets the ball rolling with us getting it on the schedule and that kind of thing, just so you're aware of that.

Now, Pastor Cameron, why don't you just introduce yourself?

Yes, my name is Cameron DeVasher and I'm the director of the Sabbath School of Personal Ministries Department and Elder Howard, of course, is the associate director, but he is the director of the Emanuel Institute.

That might seem a little bit, how does that work?

The issue is that the Sabbath School of Personal Ministries Department has...

It's on, but I'm going to give you a little more to think about.

I'll just take the Personal Ministries Department.

That same church manual that outlines how the local church, the personal ministries leader, is responsible to recruit, to train, and deploy every member of the church, young and old, in some form of soul-winning missionary outreach activity.

That same thinking was brought into the conference office and saying, you know, if this is supposed to be happening in every local church, maybe the conference should have that same thing.

We have a ministerial department who works with all the ministers, right?

And usually that's how information and training and resources gets conveyed to the people in the church is through their ministerial representative, OK?

We, of course, still have a ministerial department.

And they work with, like, for instance, Ordination Service the other day, that they train and equip and move around and recruit and all the different things that had to do with the minister side.

But we have noticed, and I don't want to get off on this soapbox too much, but there is a bit of, some of you may have heard my diatribe about pastor dependency.

In the Seventh-day Adventist Church, a lot of our church members are becoming very, very dependent on the pastor for everything.

They want the pastor to do all the administration, all the preaching, all the leading out of meetings.

They want him to do all the soul winning and Bible studies and public evangelism and raise the funds and keep the tithe dollars coming in and help us with, and if members see their role more and more decline into a position of, my job is to pray for and financially support the work that the paid ministers are doing.

When the reality is, the purpose of the pastor is to train and equip a member so that every 1 of us is doing work for the cause of God.

And so with that mindset, the Michigan Conference Brethren said, you know what, we need to make that more clear in our responsibilities in the conference office.

So instead of, it's not like removing Mark and I from the pastoral field, now we're just up in some conference office somewhere.

They said, no, your purpose is to get out there and actually make happen the things that we know are supposed to happen according to the Bible, the Spirit of Prophecy, and our voted documents, and the Church Manual and whatnot.

So, the Sabbath School and Personal Ministry Department, I'm very, very happy to be part of because we have an exclusive focus on, or at least primary focus, on the training and equipping of the lay people in the Michigan Conference to partner with their ministerial brothers, right, so that all of us can be doing effective soul winning work for God.

So there are 26, 000 members in the Michigan Conference, plus over 26, 000, and there's about 180 or so churches and companies in the Michigan Conference, about 120 or so pastors.

So there's a whole team here that we're trying to get to.

And so the conference brought, especially Mark in with the Emanuel Institute and that kind of thing, so that it couldn't, it's not just a occasional one-off thing you might hear about it in Emmanuel, so you can go to it.

We're trying to make this a more central focus of the entire conference work is the training and equipping and sending out of lay people for their work and cooperating with the ministers for the work of the gospel by God's grace to finish the work.

If y'all come to our church, is there a cost?

No, no, we've talked about it because in all seriousness, there's only so many, like, say, weekends in a year or so many weeks we can devote to that, and we don't want to come to a place if 1 person from the church says, oh, we'd love to have that, and you're just speaking for yourself, and then all of a sudden, we all go there, and all of a sudden, 4 people...

We want to make sure that if we come to a place, it's going to be a blessing for everybody.

We want to make sure that if we come to a place, it's gonna be a blessing for everybody.

We want to make sure that the church shows up.

I'd love to see the church board say, yeah, we want this.

We're gonna make sure all our members are there.

We're gonna talk about a prayer meeting in Sabbath school we're gonna make it a thing right because we don't we don't all right I'll take a little more time on this I'm done yeah you got your time you'll have your time okay I'll stop but anyway that was an introduction to you not your sermon I said introduction I just had tell them who you are they don't care about me by the way I grew up in Tennessee blah blah nobody cares What they care about is the thing they came for.

Actually, there's some pretty exciting stories about that growing up in Tennessee, but he can share those with you.

If you have time to get into, praise the Lord.

Now I'm gonna tell you though, that Pastor Cameron will be teaching in here along with myself, my brother Jim.

I apologize, but no, I love my brother Jim.

But my brother Jim works for the General Conference.

He'll be here this week, so he's gonna share a little bit.

He works, and ironically, he's in the same position for the General Conference that I am for the Michigan Conference.

So Cameron's the director of our department.

I'm the associate of the Sabbath School and Personal Ministries Department.

My brother Jim is the associate of the Sabbath School Personal Ministries Department of the General Conference.

Wes Peppers is going to help us out this week as well.

Cameron is going to be heading up some other seminars that start tomorrow.

If you want your Sabbath school to be alive, you've got to come to the Sabbath School Live Seminar and that does not compete with the manual institute.

I'm not gonna plug the other person ministry stuff even though some really good stuff there too, but no manual, but in the mornings go to the Sabbath School Live Seminar and that's it.

Yeah, we have a lot of different, so he'll pop out sometimes for seminars and then me popping in and we'll do, anyway.

So I wanna now turn your attention to our schedule and now there's a little, Does that sound okay?

I think it's bouncing off of this is what's happening.

I just wanna make sure the sound is okay.

Kameron DeVasher

Ignite Your Church - Part 2: GROW-The Soul-Winning Road

Now when we talk about this grow cycle, now I know it's pretty catchy that, you know, no he doesn't.

Does it sound okay or does it need to go up a little bit?

Because it always sounds different up here than it does, but Like I can hear everything and maybe in the back, you know, like that.

So, how many of you have heard the term Grow Michigan?

How many of you have seen the logo, the little icons?

How many of you could just explain it and say what each 1 means?

Okay, this is where, so at least everybody's heard of it, most people have seen it, and a good number could probably explain it, and that's when it starts to get a little fuzzy.

Let me tell you something, the GROW initiative, the GROW Michigan program, is not just a thought-up, catchy thing that like, oh I get it, agriculture kind of grows, we want our churches to grow, let's come up with some icons that enforce it into that motif.

This is actually a biblical concept and I want to give you just a couple of passages about this so you can have in your mind that what we're trying to present here is not just some like program somebody thought up in a conference office this actually comes from the Word of God itself.

1 of the passages I like to go to it's not actually in here but it still works it's not in your notes but it's Isaiah chapter 61.

This is the chapter that Jesus read when he went to his home church of Nazareth that day.

By the way, the Bible is very clear about why he went to church that day.

It wasn't because the church was so warm and loving and hospitable.

It was because that's what his custom was, how he'd been brought up.

And how did the church receive him that day?

I've seen some pretty awful churches but never once has anyone actually tried to, you know, kill me.

It's coming, I'm sure, but Jesus, but you know where he was the next Sabbath?

Because it's your custom, that's what you do.

So anyway, but when he stood up in church that day, and you can find that story in Luke chapter 4, he quoted from the prophet Isaiah, right?

And he basically said, this is my mission statement.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, right?

And he said all the things he was gonna do, and then he sat down and he said, today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing, right?

So clearly Jesus is saying that portion of scripture is my personal mission statement.

Now, Jesus was only here, public ministry work for how long?

And I know this sounds a little heretical, but did Jesus win the whole world?

He came to do his portion of the work to do the work that no human being can do, to be the sacrifice, right?

To be the Lamb of God who takes away the sin.

I mean, he had a whole other big picture, but in practical terms of spreading the message to the whole world, he really only got the ball started.

For instance, a lot of the people that Jesus planted seed for didn't even harvest until he was gone until the day of Pentecost, right?

And so he had always in mind that what he was doing here was just a good start that would finish after he left, right?

Now, what I find fascinating is you see that in his mission statement.

In Isaiah chapter 61, Go now to verse 11.

Jesus was always in His ministry talking about plants because it was part of His mission statement.

Look at this now, Isaiah 61 verse 11, for as the earth brings forth its bud, as the garden causes the things that are sown in it to spring forth, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations." Now, I didn't know if you catch that linguistic construction there, but as this or as that, so this.

That is, that's is to say in the same way that the garden works, so will the spreading of the message go to the whole world.

So when we look at Jesus, yes Jesus used parables to break down big ideas and the simple concept that people connect to and he would sometimes talk about fishing, he would talk about sheep and he would talk, but over and over what was the theme Jesus kept going back to in his concrete object lessons?

He would always talk about seed and a farmer and the soil and the crop and the harvest and the grain and always this agricultural motif because he was trying to get involved, get in our minds that the work of giving the gospel to the world is like the work of a garden, okay?

And that's the very first thing, if you look at your worksheet there, I don't know if we're calling these worksheets or handouts, handout is the term you like to, I don't know, but the paper you have in your hand.

This is the most important critical idea right here at the very beginning to get in mind.

I promise you, if I go to churches in the Michigan conference right now, good, faithful, solid, Seventh-day Adventist church, and say, did you do evangelism?

And the picture they have, when you say evangelism, they infer public evangelism, where it is a program that starts on September 23 this year, called Jesus is on Prophecy.

We have our evangelist, we put our advertising, we have the budget for it, and it's a box called evangelism.

And then all the rest of it is just, you know, church stuff.

Jesus never intended for us to have that kind of rigid box-like silo thinking, right, this in 1 container here.

That the evangelism that we're supposed to be doing is an all-around continuous cycle where the public proclamation of the present truth is a vital component but it is not its own thing separate from the rest.

So you're gonna see this as we go through.

Again, the evangelism cycle is not an event.

Jesus used the practical illustration of planting and harvesting to describe the process of making disciples with saying such as a sower went out to sow.

They came in and had like a mustard seed.

We refer to this process as the grow cycle and it has 5 elements.

And You could probably name them off if you're a good Seventh-daveness here in Michigan.

The very first part is the preparation of the soil.

Next part is the sowing of the seed, or the planting of the seed, right?

Third comes the cultivation of that seed, cultivation of the crop, then you have the harvest of the crop, and then you gotta do something with it, you gotta preserve it and put it to use, okay?

So the goal would be that that generation of crop then becomes the workers and the seed for the next generation around and around and around it goes.

It's an ever ending, a never ending cycle.

So what we're gonna do in this presentation is just walk through the biblical basis for those 5 different distinct phases of a 1 continuous cycle, okay?

So, and we'll get into it, we'll come back to that question if every member were involved would your church grow?

As we go through this, you'll kind of see why.

We'll address it more specifically later.

But let's take a look at Matthew chapter 13.

This is the well-known parable of Jesus, of course, talking about the sower going out to sow his seed.

And it says in chapter 13 verse 19, that seed is what?

I assume that we've got pens out we can fill in the blanks.

This is he who seeth the seed by the wayside.

The word which was sown is the Word of God.

The seed that is sown is the Word of God, right?

When Jesus talks about the parable, it's the Word of God.

So how did Jesus prepare people for the Word of God?

Did Jesus just walk up to people and he's like, behold, the kingdom of God is at hand?

Ignite Your Church - Part 3: GROW-The Soul-Winning Road

Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this day, for any day, really.

We don't deserve any 1 of them, and you've given us this day.

And Lord, with the time that we have together in this room, let us improve ourselves, not for our own self-help, so we can be better, but we wanna be better for your cause.

Help us to know more and more practical ways that we can share you effectively with those around us, so we can be those co-labors you want us and need us to be.

We've been talking about the cycle of evangelism.

It's based on the agricultural cycle, where you have the preparing of the soil, the sowing of the seed, the cultivating of the crop, the harvesting and preserving of that crop.

And I started the last 1, I realized I didn't answer the question, so I started last time with that question, like with the great general conference initiative, total member involvement.

If every member were involved in your church, would your church grow?

Ah, and I know for the people who are just showing up it's a trick question you want to say yes so badly when the correct answer is maybe, not necessarily, could be, but no guarantee.

Now the reason why is because again we talked about this if your church says our evangelism is just being friendly doing social outreach community needs that kind of stuff praise what you can have every member doing that but if no 1 is sowing the seed You can have every member involved in some part of the cycle, but if it's not sowing the seed and it's not doing the Bible studies, if it's not calling for decisions, if it's not integrating in the church, then you're gonna very, very little, if any, harm.

So What you'll find is this interesting dichotomy now.

You'll have churches that have a lot of activity, have a good name in the community, blah, blah, blah.

They say, but we've got every member involved, but we're.

So just as important as to ask, are your members involved, is to say, how are your members involved?

Because we want to make sure we're doing the whole cycle of evangelism.

So we talked in more detail about phase 1, the importance of preparing the soil of the heart by doing good deeds like Jesus did, disinterested benevolence, but it's not random acts of kindness, it's purposeful acts of kindness because in sowing the seed, I mean sorry, in preparing the soil, the purpose is to sow seed.

Yes, I want to have fun just because we like to golf together or something, but I'd really like to get in there so I can give you something better than just golf.

I want to go beyond the superficial, the temporal, to the eternal.

So we should have no qualms about saying, and people, you're just trying to win them to do, yes, You're just trying to make them followers of you.

Yes, I'm trying to make them followers of Jesus and members of Seventh-day Adventist Church and on-fire Christians.

So it's not like a friendship, oh, and then you brought church in, wah, wah, wah.

The highest thing you can do, the best thing you can do for your friends is give them the greatest joy in your life, which should be following the Lord.

Anyway, so we touched on those things in the last section there, how preparing the sowing of the heart leads to, or is the inevitable preparation for, the sowing of the seed, which is the word of God.

At some point you have to be, I love this passage.

We didn't bring this up, but I wanted to highlight this very briefly.

When it comes to the sowing of the seed, In the book of Ecclesiastes, it says this, you find this in Ecclesiastes 11, verses 4 through 6.

You can jot that down if it's not already written down in the plant section there, which it's not.

But the question is like, well how long do I have to wait?

Here's a great little rule of thumb that I found in Ecclesiastes chapter 11, verses 4 through 6.

And he who regards the clouds will not reap." Now again, it's the agriculture metaphor, but it works in the evangelistic cycle.

As you do not know what is the way of the wind or how the bones grow in the womb of her who is with child, so you do not know the works of God who makes everything.

So you don't understand the weather, how it works, you don't know how babies grow, you don't know how God's stuff works.

So your job isn't to understand it and wait till you get it right and then act.

Your job is to do what you're told and let the miracle be on God.

And it goes on to say, so in the morning sow your seed and the evening do not withhold your hand.

And I love the concluding thought, for you do not know which will prosper.

Now if it just stopped right there, you're like, yeah, 1 this 1 might prosper and that 1 might fail, but it gives another option.

Either this or that, or whether both alike will be good.

What happens if I go and offer Bible studies to 5 people and all of them say yes?

Wouldn't that be a great problem to have?

People say, you know what, I didn't think this was going to work, so I asked several people and they all said yes and now I've got a scheduling conflict.

We often go geared up for failure, assuming it's going to be a no.

And by the way, with that assumption in mind, it comes out in our demeanor.

We come up like, hi, would you like the file?

We start to demure, we start to push away, almost talking them out of it.

And they're like, no, I really don't have time for that.

And they're like, yeah, I knew you probably wouldn't.

And so it becomes a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy in that way.

He's like, why don't you just confidently step forward?

And if they say no, they say no, but odds are they'll say yes, and this 1 might, and this 1 might, and you just sow your seed and see what God does, okay?

So anyway, I wanted to make sure we got that in there.

There isn't going to be, if you wait for the perfect moment, it's never going to come and Satan wins.

Series

Emmanuel Institute - Ignite Your Church

Ignite Your Church - Part 14: Coordinating Interests

Transcript

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