Michigan Camp Meeting 2022: Knowing the Time

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Sabbath School and Personal Ministries: Getting the Most Out of BSO

Kameron DeVasher

Mark Howard

01 A Bible Study Reformation

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2022 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

Father in heaven, we are so thankful for the opportunity to come together at camp meeting.

We thank you for the many blessings we've already received.

I pray, Lord, that this seminar and the others would just bring revival, rejuvenation spiritually to your people.

And Lord empower us to be a greater witness when we go back to our homes.

Bless our time this morning for we ask it in Jesus name, Amen.

All right, now also, if you don't, so let me back up a little bit more.

I am the Associate Director of the Sabbath School and Personal Ministries Department here in the Michigan Conference.

The gentleman passing out those flyers is Pastor Cameron DeVazer.

She actually is assisting with our department.

She's the administrative secretary assistant, sorry, administrative assistant is the official title.

And Also, as most or all of you should know, does the accommodations work now for camp meeting?

So you had to go through her or Deanna Hutchins and or to get here.

But at any rate, and that's, Wow, that's a job.

And of course, some of you remember Jodi Murphy.

We lost Jodi Murphy a little over a year ago.

We're learning all that Jodi did to get ready for camp meeting.

And at any rate, But that's, you know, Pastor Cameron and I in our department, 1 of our responsibilities is personal ministries.

And personal ministries, the goal of personal ministries, how many of you are personal ministries leaders?

Okay, You know as leaders that most of the members don't realize that the role of the personal ministries leader is to get everyone in the church active in personal evangelism.

You know that as a leader because oftentimes the People in church are like, why are you pressing me?

Go talk to the specialists over here, right?

We have this mindset, like there's the specialist 5 or 10 people in the church that are really good at going out and witnessing.

And the rest of us, we're good with other things.

But the personal ministries leader's job is to get everybody involved.

And Bible Study Offer was, and I'm going to talk about this more a little bit tomorrow, but it was really developed to aid the personal ministries leader to get every church member active in soul winning.

So I want to talk a little bit about, now this, the week's seminar is predicated on our relaunch of BibleStudyOffer.com.

BibleStudyOffer.com was actually birthed out of Unlock Revelation.

How many of you were here in Michigan when we did the first Unlock Revelation in 2016?

Okay, we did conference-wide evangelistic meetings.

Now, the idea behind Unlock Revelation, of course, as a church, we've always, that we understand our mission is to proclaim the 3 angels' messages, and we do that on a regular basis.

Public evangelistic meetings is 1 of the things that we do to do that, the proclamation of the message.

The idea of Unlock Revelation was what if we pooled our, primarily it's advertising, because that's the most expensive part about, you know, proclaiming the message is advertising materials and getting people aware of it.

And if we as a conference, we figured if we could do this and launch where everybody started a meeting at the same date, then we can advertise for that series.

Now, just so you understand, pastors had the liberty to modify.

If the pastor had different topics, different number of some, 1 pastor may have 15 meetings and 1 may have 25 meetings, but they all started on the same night with the same message, with the same meeting title, Unlock Revelation, and then we could advertise across Michigan, and we saw a huge uptick in opening night attendance, thank you.

All right, And you're still working on that.

So we saw a huge uptick in our attendance because of that advertising, that collaboration with advertising.

And it was coming out of that, my brother, Jim Howard, some of you know, in fact, my brother Jim was just elected as the personal ministry, Sabbath School and Personal Ministries Director for the General Conference at the at the session just last week, was it?

Anyway, so he has, thank you Pastor Phil for all your work on that.

So at any rate, he was here in this conference at the time working as the director of Sabbath School Personal Ministries, and he got to thinking to himself, you know, we put this money and advertising and what have you into the evangelistic series, but What if we were to do that with something like getting Bible studies?

Had that same kind of awareness to try to increase, because the bottom line is this, and you're gonna hear us say more, I'm gonna say more about this later this week.

1 of the biggest challenges I think we run into, and I say we, I don't know how that applies to this group or beyond you, to the local members, to what ratio or whatever, but many Seventh-day Adventists do not understand what it takes to win a soul.

We get an interest lead card and we run to that, oh, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna check this person, ask for Bible studies, could be a Bible study offer interest, could be some other kind of interest.

And we go and the person just kind of, ah, well, I'm not, you know, I filled that out.

Many of us just give up and don't realize that this is not just limited to Christianity and Bible studies.

People often respond to things and then later on just don't want it.

So for example, when we do evangelistic, we do advertising for evangelistic meetings, we send out evangelistic flyers and we typically send out, we typically get a response of 1 interest.

Like if we're gonna have an evangelistic meeting, if I send out evangelistic meeting flyers, I'll get 1 person on average to come out for every thousand flyers I sent out.

And so we look at the cost of that and a lot of church members are tempted to say, I've heard this over and over, ah, what a waste of money.

I'm not even gonna bother sending those out because we only get 1 per thousand.

So I like to remind members that DirecTV also only gets 1 per thousand.

You're not going to stop getting their flyers in your mailbox.

Now there are other things that you can do to enhance that, maybe increase that, and we've worked on and we're working on that with BSO, social media advertising, etc.

But the point is that's just how it works.

And when you're trying to win souls, you're gonna go through, you may have a lot of people express interest in Bible studies and then you go, say you have 10 people who expressed an interest and you go and follow up on those interests, you might only have 3 of those that actually say, yeah, I'm gonna go forward and do some Bible studies.

And then you may have 1 of those who sticks with it.

You don't know what happened to the rest of them.

You don't know if the other 2 who went halfway through the Bible studies and dropped off, you don't know what impact that's gonna have.

So there's a lot of more faith needed in soul winning work.

And there's a reason it's called soul winning labor.

It's not easy and the fruit doesn't just drop off the trees but the Lord will help us win souls through these efforts.

So Bible study offered the idea was we want something to generate more interest because the more interest you start with, the more results you're gonna end up with, despite the fact that people are gonna drop out and whatever else.

And so that's how Bible Study Offer got started.

We wanted to have something that would, you know, increase the number of interests and responses we receive.

Now I'm going to talk a little bit more about that and quite a bit more actually tomorrow in tomorrow's message, tomorrow morning's topic.

But we've noted now for several years with Bible study offer that there has been a need for some updates.

For example, when COVID first hit, 1 of the things that I began thinking is what an opportunity we missed with BibleStudyOffer.com because our advertising was just BibleStudyOffer.com and I thought, what if we would have had something attached to that where we said, you know, has the Bible talked about or did you know the Bible talked about the pandemic?

I'm just coming off the top of my head, maybe you'd word it different.

BibleStudyOffer.com, what would that have done?

You know, maybe get people thinking, oh wow, there's answers in the Bible, now I didn't know that.

And so there were opportunities, it just made me think and our department think about some of the opportunities that maybe we could increase with different advertising and so we'll be sharing some of that this week.

The BibleStudyOffer.com website and the signup process for coordinators, If any of you are Bible study offer coordinators, there were some challenges there that needed to be addressed and fixed.

And so we have been working on those, which again, that's why we're here this week, sharing some of those things with you.

I mean, I'm really excited about what we have been able to do in that, with that website sign-up process, functionality of, you know, tracking interests, of logging in, and that kind of thing.

So that was a thing we noticed needed to be fixed.

When you're talking about, you know, I don't know how many, if anybody here, has anybody here ever built a website?

Okay, I've built our Sabbath School Personal Ministries website.

I mean there are templates and you can do simple websites and things like that.

But something like Bible Study Offer is not a simple website.

There's all kinds of layers of, you need a programmer to be able to put that together.

02 The Power of Personal Ministry

Father in heaven, we are so thankful for this time we have at the Michigan camp meeting.

We thank you, Lord, that we are able to be here together in person.

We thank you that we are privileged to live in such a time in earth's history, a time certainly filled with uncertainty, but at the same time, Father, we have a certain hope in Jesus, and we want others to have that same hope.

So Lord, as we are discussing how to reach people for your kingdom, I pray your Holy Spirit would guide us in our study this morning.

So, BibleStudyOffer.com, I'll just give you a brief review of what we talked about yesterday.

And I also want to let you know, let me give a brief overview of what we talked about yesterday.

And even for the week for yesterday and today, we're kind of laying some groundwork.

I want you to understand why this is so important, giving Bible studies, not just, but BibleStudyOffer.com is an outlet for finding interest to give Bible studies.

But if church members have no passion for giving Bible studies or don't understand the importance of it, then what's BibleStudyOffer.com?

And so that's what we're talking about a little bit yesterday and today.

Tomorrow Pastor Cameron is going to be getting, tomorrow and Thursday, into the nuts and bolts of the redesign and how Bible study, I mean, whichever system, if you've never worked in BibleStudyOffer.com, if your church has not been participating in that and you're just starting, or if you have been active with BibleStudyOffer.com, he's gonna just walk through how the whole process of BibleStudyOffer.com works, the nuts and bolts of it for the next couple days, that will be the topic.

And then Friday, we wanna talk about how to increase your results with biblestudyoffer.com because we've talked to a lot of churches who have participated with biblestudyoffer.com, but they've not seen the interest or they've not seen the responses that they wanted to.

And some of that had to do with some of the redesign, things that needed to be put into Bible study offer that weren't yet there, but some of those things have to do with just the process you follow.

So Friday we'll be talking about that as we wrap up our seminar.

Now yesterday we talked about a Bible study reformation and we looked at a little bit of the history of giving the question answer Bible study which started out at a what?

A camp meeting of all things, which was interesting.

And then we talked about the, what my brother Jim coined as, perhaps somebody else did, but he always talked about the Bible study bottleneck.

How when it comes to ministry in the church, we have far more members that are willing to kind of be friendly and hospitable than we do those who are saying, hey, I wanna go give Bible studies.

You say, hey, we're gonna go out and we're gonna distribute water, bottles of water at the 5K that somebody's doing and we're just gonna show ourself a presence in the community.

There's very little self-sacrifice to that compared to having to give somebody studies and tell them, yeah, what you've believed your whole life is wrong.

Not that you tell them that way right up front, but it's, you know, how many of you have given Bible studies?

In fact, giving Bible studies, and the first few studies are easy.

You talk about, you know, belief in the Bible and some of the more common things, and then you start getting into things like the law, which most Christians are okay with that until you get into that study on the Sabbath.

How many of you have given somebody a study on the Sabbath.

It's a whole different ball game than giving somebody a study on the great controversy.

The great controversy is an interesting study.

It's like, oh, that's why there's so much evil.

But the Sabbath, especially if they're a Sunday keeper who really sincerely and genuinely loves the Lord and you're just telling him, yeah, but that has been misdirected all these years.

It's much easier to hand out the bottle of water at the 5k race.

And so we have this bottleneck in our churches where we have all kinds of members that are willing to do some of the more soil preparation work of, you know, making friends and connecting with people, which is an essential work, and we're gonna talk about that today.

But then when it comes down to giving Bible studies as a bottleneck, because it's just a handful of members, so we find all these interests in all of our different things that we're doing, but when it comes to saying, okay, now our interests are interested in getting Bible studies, we don't often have enough people to follow up on those.

And 1 thing I hear regularly, how many Bible study offer coordinators in the room, in your churches?

Okay, when Pastor Cameron talks about setting up your Bible school, a lot of times people say, oh setting up the BSO Bible School, we're gonna order our materials, we're gonna have the Bible studies, and we're gonna have put them in a certain place in the church, and we're gonna have banners and this and that, and that's all good, but if you don't have a team of people that are gonna follow up on those interests, you're suddenly gonna be in a world of hurt in that situation.

Suddenly you've got these interests coming in, it's like, okay, now we've got a bunch of new Bible study interests, who's gonna go?

And nobody wants to go, and you realize that we promised them Bible studies within 5 to 7 days and I got nobody to go out and give Bible studies.

So the Bible study bottleneck, we talked about that and thus the reason we need a Bible study reformation.

Ellen White talked about and I shared with you the quote where she says that pastors need to teach church members that in order for us to grow spiritually, we need to be involved in leading souls into the truth.

Now Friday, I'm gonna break down what that looks like in very practical terms.

But we made the deduction yesterday that leading souls into the truth is more than just giving a tract.

To lead somebody into the truth is going to involve giving Bible studies.

And Eleanor White talked about the importance of that.

And I also shared a quote from Testimonies 9 where she saw at the end of time, she saw a great, what she called a great reformatory movement among the Seventh-day Adventists, where hundreds and thousands were going into homes and opening the Word of God to people, giving Bible studies.

And we finished up by saying, I like to think that some of the faces she saw were those sitting here.

We talked a lot about yesterday how this is not our work, it's God's work.

And God, we think we worry too much about what we can't do instead of thinking about what God can do if we're willing.

We're going to be talking about that today more as we go into our topic, the power of personal ministry, as you see on the screen.

Now, what I would like to do is start with a, an almost, dare I say, overused quote of Ellen White when it comes to ministry, and probably for good reason.

We talked about this a little bit yesterday, but I wanna break this down a little bit today.

Ministry of Healing, page 143, he says, I wanna be out of everybody's way so you can see the screen, Christ's method and that word alone, interestingly, did anybody attend any of Dr.

Saman's, I don't know, he's just doing the 1 seminar, Dr.

And interestingly, for years, the book was out there as Christ's way of Christ's method of reaching people isn't that Cameron wasn't that the way now the original title he's republished it and it's called Christ's method alone but apparently I probably should be telling this But apparently when it was first published, the publishing house said, I don't know, alone sounds a little bit too restrictive.

Sounds a little bit too, you know, alone, like it's the only way.

Christ's method alone, and I think in our time today, I want it to be clear that there's a reason that this is the only, this is the only way that works.

I'm gonna tell you that there is nobody who comes into the truth and commits their life to Christ who doesn't follow Christ's method, who doesn't come in through going through this method, this process, if you will.

Christ's method alone will give true success in reaching the people.

The Savior mingled with men as 1 who desired their good.

Sympathy for them, ministered to their needs and won their confidence.

Now, many times when looking at this particular passage, we will emphasize that first part, because you're looking at the personal ministry of Christ, where He mingled, he showed sympathy, he ministered to people.

He didn't just go out and start quoting scripture to people.

He didn't go out and start with Bible studies.

And I've known people who think in ministry they're just gonna go out and give tracts and start preaching to people and giving testimony and that's going to do all the work.

Well, there's a place for that, but the better way is to win their confidence first.

And oftentimes, again, you see that emphasized.

In recent years, I've noticed, there sometimes becomes a, the help work, the building relationship aspect of things almost supersedes the rest of the statement where he bade them follow me.

And I just want you to notice from the passage itself, this little phrase, he won their confidence.

When Cameron and I go places, it's always a question as to whether or not we're gonna use sly.

Because some churches just aren't set up for it.

Now, this idea of winning their confidence, I wanna work backwards from that.

Because I want you to understand that Everything up here was for the purpose of winning confidence.

Why was Jesus trying to win their confidence?

And so Jesus understood that if I'm gonna get this person to commit to me, they're gonna have to know that I'm genuinely interested in them.

They're gonna have to know it's gonna be for their best interest to follow me.

And if we want people to follow Jesus and the truth, we've got to show them that following Jesus does something in the life that they want.

Now, if my life, and we've heard this in Pastor Bradshaw's sermons, my life isn't reflecting what I want, what a person would want to be as a Christian, why do they want to...

03 Establishing Your BSO Bible School

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this absolutely beautiful, sunshiny day.

And thank you that we are here for a united purpose.

Lord, we want to see people come to a knowledge of the truth.

And we don't want you to just watch it, we want to be working for it.

So Lord, teach us how to be effective laborers in our local churches.

Help us to give Bible studies and to recruit others to do it and train them and equip them and organize them for service.

We know that's why the church was established and we want to do what you've called us to do.

So Lord bless us now as we turn our attention to this topic for we pray it in Jesus name, Amen.

Getting the most out of BSO, establishing your BSO Bible School.

Now I've put a lot of, I realize I put a lot of questions up there and I suppose we could actually open the floor to some comments and thoughts on this, but I will say that this is not a made-up term.

It's not like, oh, BSO now wants to start this newfangled Bible school in every church.

In the Seventh-day Adventist Church, every local church having a Bible school pre-existed BibleStudyOffer.com.

It is a long time understood given that every church has a Bible study ministry called a Bible school that they're operating.

I take you to, for exhibit A, let's turn to the church manual.

By the way, did anybody bring a church manual with you?

It's just a handy resource to have around.

We do have a manual that teaches how to do stuff so it's handy.

If you ever want 1 by the way, you can just go online and there's free PDFs of it.

You can carry 1 in your pocket on your smartphone and I like to put mine in the reader app on my iPhone so you can actually like search it so you can keyword search and just zip zip zip zip zip anyway all right Church Manual page 101 it speaks of the Bible school coordinator that's a job in the local church is someone who coordinates the Bible school which if you're gonna have a coordinate coordinator for something it implies you're gonna have the thing itself right now says here the Bible school coordinator organizes and coordinates the church's Bible school outreach ministry to the community.

So it doesn't, ironically enough, it doesn't actually give a definition and a whole how-to guide in the church manual to how to run 1.

It just writes this position in, you know, the Bible school you all have.

Okay, but it might be helpful to know what's involved with the Bible school.

But either way, it says the Bible school coordinator organizes and coordinates the church's Bible school outreach ministry to whom?

Okay, now when we talk about having a Bible school this is not saying we're gonna have prayer meeting and Bible study and devotional time within our own congregation, right?

When we're talking about a Bible school, we're talking about something specifically designed as an outreach to the community, not an in-reach to the members.

Now it's going to be operated by the members and they're going to be edified in doing the work, but its aim and objective is not to build up those who are already in, but to reach out to those who aren't yet.

So the focus of this is an outreach ministry to the community.

The coordinator should work closely with the pastor, the interest coordinator, and the personal ministries leader.

If we had time, we would walk through the job description of pastor, interest coordinator, and personal ministries leader.

But just very briefly, boy this 1 would take, I've got a full five-part series and at least a full hour we could do just on the role of the pastor, but the pastor's job is not to be doing all the work of the church, it's to train and equip the members to be doing the work of the church with them, right?

So, no wonder this person would work close with the pastor.

The pastor's supposed to be overseeing all the outreach work, but drawing in laypeople, training and equipping, because the next 1 we're going to talk about is, well, we've got an interest coordinator.

Now, how many of you come from small churches?

Michigan, you know the Michigan Conference is unique in that it has a lot of churches that aren't particularly large.

Now you go to some conferences, they don't have that many churches, but they're all 100, 200, 300 member or more churches but the Michigan conference the I don't know the statistics on it but I promise you the average church in Michigan doesn't have a hundred people right and even in attendance even if you did have a hundred in the books, you're not having a hundred people on a Sabbath.

Some are those, there are double-digit churches and sometimes single-digit, but most of them float in that 30 to 50 range, right?

Series

Sabbath School and Personal Ministries: Getting the Most Out of BSO

05 From Click to Christ: Winning Souls with BSO

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Sabbath School and Personal Ministries: Getting the Most Out of BSO

02 The Power of Personal Ministry

58m

Plenary Sessions

Illuminated With His Glory: Revelation 18

1h 2m

Decision - Discipleship - Destiny

01 From Decision to Discipleship

1h 9m

Righteousness By Faith: The Rest of the Story

05 Righteousness by Faith and the Heavenly Sanctuary, Part 2

1h 6m

The Three Angels' Message

07 The Fourth Angel’s Message

1h

Decision - Discipleship - Destiny

02 Discipleship that Doesn’t Dumb or Dump

55m

Sabbath School and Personal Ministries: Getting the Most Out of BSO

01 A Bible Study Reformation

1h 4m

Sharing the Three Angels’ Messages in 30 Seconds

03 Sharing the Three Angels’ Messages in 30 Seconds

1h 2m

Are We Ready for the Storm Ahead

02 We Are in a Battle

57m

Principles for Succesful Soul Winning

Evangelism Cycle: Holistic Evangelism

57m

Plenary

Who Are You? The Remnant and Its Mission

1h 13m

Morning Devotional: It's War Time

It’s Wartime - Part 8: Marching Orders

53m

Sound Doctrine