ASI 2021: Into All the World

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Narlon Edwards

Patti Guthrie

Chris Matts

Online or At the Door: Panel Discussion

Nomination in optimizing and developing content for them.

And we also have a project called Ask an Adventist Friend.

And if you stop by our booth, you'll see that that's what we're promoting at this event.

Ask an Adventist Friend is designed to capture that audience of people who are asking questions.

And we'd be happy to talk with you about it and show you some of the pages and so on.

But that's a little bit about me and I'll hand it off to Narlan.

My name is Narlan Edwards and at the tender age of 17 the Lord tugged on my heart.

And through some of his providences, you know, I became an Adventist at age 17.

And God immediately thrusted me into vandalism.

So I had some young friends and we were very zealous for the Lord.

And we went all over the streets of New York, the buses and the train stations.

In the midst of rush hour, I'm not sure if you guys have ever been to New York in rush hour, but we'll be on the trains and buses preaching and teaching and giving out tracts, the National Sunday Law, great controversies.

And I quickly became the evangelism leader for our church.

And then I became a Bible worker and then an evangelist myself.

So evangelism is engraved in who I am as an Adventist.

I don't know of any other way but to evangelize.

And I was trained as a medical missionary in 2009, and then I became a medical missionary evangelist, and I saw the combined work, how effective it is to combine health with the gospel.

And since then, God has opened doors for me to travel the globe, pretty much sharing the gospel of health.

And through that experience, I was called at Weimar, and I became the vandalism director there for the last 4 years.

And we started a program initiative, which is a spin-off of the TMI initiative of the church called TCI, which is an acronym for Total Community Involvement.

And it's pretty much just doing friendship evangelism, finding out what the needs of the communities are, and simply going out and meeting them.

And I work with all the community leaders, the mayors, the governors, the councilmen, and different persons of that nature, And we created a model that I believe is, it could be and should be replicated in all of our institutions and in all of our churches.

This May, I transitioned out of Weimar because the Lord blessed me with another ministry that I'm now directing in Stanton, Kentucky called Red River Outpost.

And again, this entire ministry is driven by evangelism.

And what we're trying to do with this school is a practical training school.

And what we're trying to do with it is have a model where every single department and every single person is involved in evangelism.

So I know that there's stipulations at times that, you know, I'm only the gardener or I'm only the grounds person or I'm only the cook.

But what we're trying to do is create a model where everyone sees a need for themselves to be actively engaged in evangelism.

And every department has to have an evangelism thrust.

If you wanna learn more about that ministry, you can come and see us.

We're opening up a restaurant and bakery and doing various things of that nature, but it's all through the lens of evangelism, and we'd like to share more of that plan with you.

And I'm happy to be with you this morning.

Hello everyone, my name is Chris Matts, and I became an Adventist about 5 years ago.

Came into the church, did a bunch of Bible studies very quickly and just fell in love with Jesus and wanted to share Him with everybody that I could come in contact with.

And so I started doing canvassing and Bible working and just going all in with evangelism and sharing Jesus.

During that time, I had a lot of skills in digital marketing, social media advertising, things like that.

And so when I was working with different ministries, they would ask me to help them with their social media marketing and digital marketing.

And then it seems like there was a lot of demand for that, a lot of people needed that type of thing.

And so we started working with a lot of ministries in the church and it grew past what I could do myself and so we hired a team and my company, Advent Digital Marketing, was born.

So we work with a lot of different ministries in the church, and then we also work with a lot of for-profit companies owned by Adventists as well.

And we have some projects that we do from time to time that involve digital evangelism, which is the intent of reaching people through online means.

What we specifically do is the paid advertising side of that.

So this is those ads that you would see on Facebook and Instagram and Google and YouTube and LinkedIn and all these different platforms and we Pay them to get an ad in front of specific target audiences and when people click we often are trying to get them to sign up for a Bible study or a prophecy seminar or a health program or many different things.

And so over the past 24 months, we've generated about 100, 000 Bible study leads using these different methods and have tried a lot of different things, found some success and experienced some failures.

And so we've learned a lot and kind of carved the way to figuring out how to do that through paid advertising online.

We've created a course for people to be able to learn how to do this in their local church.

Because at the end of the day, everything comes down to what the local church can do.

So, we want to empower and equip people in their local community to be able to reach out and win souls for the local church.

So, happy to be with you guys this morning.

Okay, so this is going to be an interesting discussion because we have diverse backgrounds here.

So I'll share mine as a homemaker and a retired homeschool mother, but not retired from working because I work for free and there's a lot of people that would like to employ anyone who's willing to work for free, including ASI.

I would just like to share, so for maybe 20, 30 years I've done health ministry, I have a master's in public health, so that's been a passion of mine in our local church doing health ministry.

And then without, we have a very small church, So then I branched into giving Bible studies and that's been very rewarding.

So I love the personal contact, one-on-one, small groups, sharing.

I'm comfortable sharing up front, but I don't have any burden to, you know, be a public evangelist, but I love the one-on-one.

During COVID, there was a real challenge because there was this tremendous fear that descended upon us that we needed to stay apart.

I think that still exists to some degree, but I believe that God has put in our hearts a need to be together.

And so we've tried to navigate that in our own church during COVID.

So the first summer of 2021, we had a 4 night series on natural remedies and we invited the community and we had, I think it was over the course of the week, 90 people came for each night.

We had more like 60, but some would come some nights, and we did a variety of natural remedies and cooking demos, and we just had everyone spaced out through the entire sanctuary.

We have a high flow ventilation system in our church that evacuates the air from the back to the front.

So we also have, we're in the mountains, we're not in the city, so we didn't end up having any problem with spread in that environment.

And people were so eager to be together and just really relished that opportunity for in-person.

Going forward to last winter, we had an evangelistic series in-person in our church.

Just on the online versus in person aspect, with that evangelist that came, he did a tremendous job.

And his format is that when you have people come, you get all their contact information, you type it into a computer, and then you give, print out a name badge for them with a barcode, and every time they come in, you scan their barcode so it's all computerized, and then you can leave the contact information with the pastor afterwards and continue to follow up.

No 1 wanted to give anything more than, at most, their first name.

And so the evangelist had no contact information to go on, except what he could glean from personally talking to some of the guests who came.

We had a good series, but in terms of having contacts, it was very minimal.

So as a follow-on to our evangelistic series, we planned a pathway, let's see, what do we call it?

Like, it's not a series you can find anywhere.

But Nature's Path to Better Health, we invited all local people.

Every week, we had, it was a component of the Bible, some Bible story that related to natural remedies or health or healing.

And we emphasized Jesus' love and we also had a cooking demo and we had someone who would give a talk on gardening or vitamin D or some aspect of health, a local health professional.

And people engaged in that, they were very asking a lot of questions, but on the contact side was where I was headed with this.

When people came in, knowing that we were unable to get contacts at all via the computer, and I used to have like signup sheets, this time I had little three-by-five index cards in which we hand wrote name, address, phone, email by hand on each card.

And we just had them up there and we just put them out on the table.

And if it was your first time coming, we just invited people to fill out 1 of those cards so we could let them know I could send them.

And I made a little flyer, a digital flyer for every week.

So I would say, I'll let you know, we'll send out any updates for the next week.

And we got everyone who was coming to fill out 1 of those cards with their contact information.

And then I had their cell phone and I can text them.

And then they would text me back and share, Oh, I tried this recipe or what about that?

So we began a relationship that way and I connected with them.

And also, so the most recent thing we did was in prayer meeting a week and a half ago, someone said, So-and-so is really lonely and feeling isolated because of COVID.

And I thought to myself, we just had a big wedding at our home or in our community our daughter got married in.

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