ASI 2022 Convention: Revived to Witness

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United

John Lomacang

Angela Lomacang

To Have and to Hold

I'd like you to welcome my lovely wife Angela.

It's so good to be able to be here at ASI.

And you know what's amazing about coming to ASI is every year there's something new we can learn.

And what we're going to do today is share with you about this seminar is a preview of what works for us.

And as was just mentioned, you wanna say hello, honey?

We've prepared, We gave it to the Lord, we prayed, and I'm excited to see what the Lord's going to do.

Now before we go any further, if you're here with your spouse, I want you to turn to your spouse and say, this is a miracle.

Now the reason I say that is because after being married 39 years, I was walking down the hall, I passed by Goren and Merrilee McNeilis and he said, try 63 on for size.

And I said, well, I'm trying to catch up.

But we have learned quite a bit through 39 years of marriage.

But we're going to walk you through basically kind of a little story about ourselves.

We are on air and off air the same person.

And normally we would cover what we're going to do today in about 5 different modules, which is about an hour and 15 minutes each.

So our greatest challenge is to fit it all in to an hour and 15 minutes starting now.

And so we want you to listen carefully as we share with you carefully.

And let's begin with telling you a little bit about ourselves.

This is a picture of us when we were dating.

My wife and I, we had such a funny beginning together.

First of all, we were both in the same church.

Tell them about you were born where, honey?

My parents are from Jamaica, the island of Jamaica.

And my parents moved to England and it was 8 of us.

5 were born in Jamaica and the last 3 were born in England.

And after my father died of a heart attack, my mom had a sister, her Jamaican sister.

She bought a house, and we all lived in that house in Brooklyn until my mom was able to purchase her house, and we all moved.

And, you know, Growing up, we lived about a mile and a half from each other, but in New York City, where there are millions of people, you never know.

You might be able to guess, because a lot of the young kids always say, tell me your age and after we give certain statistics they figure it out.

But this is us standing in front of the church where we both attended.

We were young, we had not been engaged yet, we were clueless.

I'll tell you a little bit about that story.

Tell them about you, about the lady that died.

Well, I was abandoned at 3 months old, left at an Adventist babysitter.

And that was my exposure to get to know about the Lord.

Didn't know anything about the church, but she passed away when I was 12 years old.

And I went out into the world at 13 years old, got involved in gambling, partying, pool hustling, gambling.

I was a consummate party, a disc jockey in New York City, in the World Trade Center, on Broadway.

And I would go to church, because that's what I was raised to do, but I was in the building, but not in the Lord.

So 1 evening at AY, anybody old enough to remember AY?

I was going to get anybody but what about MV?

So I came to MV in an army jacket and jeans and I saw this young lady that I've been seeing at church from Sabbath to Sabbath.

By the way, my wife is the youngest of 8 children.

But I saw her from a distance from Sabbath to Sabbath and always wondered about her.

Never thought I could ever get to know her, never thought she would even pay attention to me.

I was just out there and she was in the Lord.

So 1 MV, my friend said, there's a girl that wants to meet you.

He said, no, she really wants to meet you.

But at that age, tell them a little bit about your dating.

But you know when you're 16, you like guys, but you can't tell your family.

So I liked him and my cousin and I, she was, but anyway, both of us had our eye on him, but he chose me.

She started to say, well, how could I date this guy?

The only permission she had was to invite people over for family worship.

So I was a victim of family worship when I didn't like anything having to do with church.

And her mother would invite me over for Friday night family worship.

And then 1 Friday evening They asked me to read the Bible.

And he picked up the Bible and my mom says she had a strong Jamaican accent she said John will you read this scripture and he picked up the Bible and he says and the Lord is for instance that the Lord is my my my my my my shepherd I shall not want I'm thinking he can't read but beads of preparations Listen to me perspiration was just beating on the Bible he was so nervous to read the Word of God.

And so I kept inviting him on Friday nights, honey, no honey, John come to my house for Friday night Bible study and he came.

And he came every Friday night because he couldn't come for anything else.

So Friday night, you could come for family worship, because I'm the youngest of 8.

Jerry Page

Thriving In All Our Relationships: Jesus Prays We will “Be One”

No, I was asked to speak on making 1, and we have done that over the years, because Janet and I have had a very long career.

Over 40 years married and 40, well 40 years next year I guess, but God has taken us to be leaders in conferences.

I was conference president for 23 years and personal ministries.

If I do, just raise my, raise your hand and say, come on guy.

Cuz I can preach in Papua New Guinea and people hear me at a long distance when the electricity goes out.

But if I'm not thinking about it, I don't always.

But anyway, and then of course traveling the world the last 12 years for the General Conference, we've been in every culture and seen that this is probably, in fact I had a meeting with Elder Wilson just before I retired, And the ministry magazine you have there is 1 that Pablo Goya and I put together in May.

It's kind of the special farewell from me.

And I said to folks, I said, I want to pour my heart out to you as pastors and elders and everybody about what I believe is the greatest opportunity and the greatest problem in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, greatest challenge.

It is not stepping on each other and crushing each other and fighting over position and all this kind of stuff.

That is the biggest thing, holding back mission in the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

And certainly when we get in larger organizations, whether it's ASI or it's conference, ASI changed our lives.

My son was kind of wild like me when he was young and he when he came back to Jesus his girlfriend dumped him just in time before he married her and he got a wonderful 1 now but when he came back so what am I gonna do and we said well let's pray about it We decided to go on a share him trip to Kenya.

And he and his new girlfriend on fire for God from our lay evangelism team, our youth evangelism team, preach with power in these little marketplaces and whatever.

And the elders all said to both of them, you should be pastors.

So anyway, my son is a pastor today and we're living next to him in California, so praise God for ASI and all that.

But anyway, I don't feel like an expert today on this, nobody is in ways, but Jan and I have seen God work in some amazing ways When we go to him, talk to him, watch him.

To get us out of jams, to help other people resolve their marriages or their organization problems, we've seen real miracles.

So we know some of the methods that we have seen work when you get down to methods and what to do about it, you don't always hear people talking about.

So I'm going to focus on 1 of those today that maybe you haven't tried or maybe you haven't seen tried.

And the whole issue I'll be talking about I think is the core issue or 2 that really solves these conflicts in the best way.

I'm surprised all of you didn't go to Bradshaw's seminar.

I was gonna cancel and just go there, but anyway.

Let's just pray silently, and I just invite you in your hearts to pray a prayer.

You know, Jesus said, when we ask for the Holy Spirit, we always get a yes.

He comes, he convicts of sin, he gives us gifts, he gives us instruction, He helps us in so many ways.

So Luke 11, let's claim that promise and just pray that the Holy Spirit will fill you right now, speak to your heart.

If you get 1 or 2 key things out of this, it can change your life and your ministry and your church and your family.

So Let's ask him to do that for us and get me out of the way.

Lord, we are so thankful for Jesus and what he's done for us, Father, for sending him.

Holy Spirit, we thank you that you're with us, that Jesus is with us, his mind can be in us through you.

Cover me with the blood of Jesus, and righteousness take self, and all the sinfulness out of me at this moment so you can use me, and I thank you in Jesus' name, amen.

Well, I'm gonna begin with 1 of the biggest conflicts I've seen solved and it relates to Janet and me and it's a confession really on my part.

I was in drugs, selling some cocaine and doing all kinds of bad things in Denver.

I got kicked out of 3 of our academies and the whole thing.

But when I was converted, my folks prayed like crazy and I got miserable and I came back to Jesus.

But when I came back, I wanted to be all for God.

All the other way, now I want to be all for God.

So I went to Andrews, they were having a big revival, 1971.

Got hooked in and first thing I walked on the campus, they made me, a guy asked me, He said, well, you're coming here.

And I cut my hair, my beard, I looked almost like a preacher in some ways.

They didn't know what I was coming from 6 months ago.

But they asked me to coordinate a bunch of Mission 72, that's how old I am, evangelistic meetings that the youth were gonna have.

I didn't know anything about evangelism or anything else, but God threw me into TMI, threw me into getting involved right at the beginning.

And I thank God, he put me in leadership, and that was over 50 years ago.

I was doing my best as a pastor, a youth pastor.

And I knew I needed to get my laymen involved more.

We had a lot of lay involvement, Bible studies, 25 Bible studies going.

And we baptized a lot of people and I looked so successful now we went to Pennsylvania and I was personal ministries and Sabbath school and ministerial then a year later the president left and I was 36 and they elected me to be president of the conference 36 in North America which is very young looks very successful the thing is if you know Janet my precious wife some of you've heard her testimony she was at home praying it wouldn't happen.

And she had tried since her days at Southern University to get to know Jesus.

She'd gotten discouraged though over the recent years.

Felt like she was just never gonna get together, wasn't gonna be good enough, didn't have assurance of salvation, and basically she had given up on her ever being saved.

And was just taking the kids to church as a pastor's wife, doing what you gotta do.

And here I am, gonna be president, bringing home roses.

But the point of this is I was so insensitive that I didn't even realize what my wife was really going through about her spiritual life.

And that's, guys, I hope you listen better than I do and talk better than I do at times.

So I share that as a confession because I didn't know, she testifies now and says our marriage was having problems.

I didn't know much about it at that point.

So the first thing is for us to communicate and know each other and pray together and really have, not just be doing ministries.

And I was so good at my ministry and wanting to do well at my ministry.

And there were sincere motives in that, but also a lot of self and other things.

So anyway, I won't tell her whole testimony.

Some of you heard it, but it's an amazing thing God did where as a new conference president, Bradford canceled our camp meeting speaker and everything began to fall apart on us.

Mark Finley

Partners in a Finished Work

We will put a study guide online so that if you didn't get a chance to get a study guide, then you would be able to download it online.

We'll get 1 on the ASI website and I can easily easily do that.

I always like to put something in your hand so that when you go you can recheck the biblical references, you can take a look at the statements from Ellen White, you can see the principles that we have followed and are using.

When I attend a seminar, I always like to know the purpose of the seminar.

What is the specific purpose of this seminar?

The purpose of our seminar is to look at the relationship between self-supporting institutions and conference work, as well as looking at basic biblical principles and principles from the spirit of prophecy on how to relate as supporting workers in our local churches and how to develop a unified approach to mission.

We're gonna do that by looking at 3 specific areas.

We're gonna look at the Apostle Paul as a self-supporting minister, and how he related to church organization.

We are going to look at the Book of Acts and take a brief look at it and see principles we can learn there on church on relationships.

And then at the end we're going to take a journey down Adventist history lane and look at Madison College and see some vital principles there.

Now to help me kind of direct and shape the class, I want to ask just a series of questions as we begin before we have prayer.

How many of you are either working at a supporting ministry, leader of a supporting ministry, 1 of our institutional ministries, supporting schools, colleges, sanitariums, or you have your own supporting ministry?

How many of you are lay people who are actively involved in your local church and you're supporting yourself in your ministry?

OK, how many of you here might be working for the Adventist church?

Your salary comes through denominational employment.

Okay, how many of you are in another category that I didn't mention?

Where's that text in the Bible about retiring?

I've been looking for that text for 55 years, I didn't find it yet.

Okay, so how many retired volunteers do I have here?

Father in heaven, thank you so much for the opportunity of coming to class today.

Thank you for the ability that we have to study your word, to learn principles that will enable us to be more effective in our ministry.

Thank you for the meeting we had this morning so far with Dr.

Thank you for the fact that as we uplift Jesus, our hearts are 1 with you and 1 with 1 another, and we're 1 with you in your message and mission.

Let's suppose that you were living in 51 AD and your home is Corinth.

And shortly the Ishmanian games are going to come.

You've just come into town because there were 3 major games in Greece.

There were the Olympic Games, the games at Delphi, and the Ismanian Games.

And you're going to be there for 3 or 4 weeks, so you need a tent because you need some housing.

And there's a young businessman, he's an entrepreneur, his name is Paul, and he's making tents.

Now the kind of tents that Paul would make were generally not canvas tents because the canvas tents wouldn't have fared well in the weather at that time.

They typically would be leather tents, and according to the Egyptian papyrus, Young boys in that generation would learn the skill and trade of self-support and tent making by the time they were 13 years old.

Their parents or they would be apprenticed to some tent maker and that tent maker would begin to teach them.

So by the time Paul was 15 or 16, he was pretty master craftsman at making tents.

Now the value of that as a self-supporting missionary is the fact that the tools you need for tent making are pretty portable.

You don't need a horse and buggy to carry them.

You need an awl, which punches the holes in the tent.

You need some pretty sharp tent making equipment, something to cut the leather with.

Now what did Paul not expect as a tent making missionary?

And I set this out very early in the presentation because I think it's a fundamental principle.

Paul was not working for the church because he was an employee.

He was working for Jesus because he had come to the cross and his heart was broken with the love of God, and he did not anticipate a salary for his work.

Now, that doesn't mean in any way that it is wrong to receive a salary, but what it does mean is that there's a class of workers within the Seventh-day Adventist Church that believe that God has called them to ministry, but they're not depending on the church for a salary.

As a self-supporting missionary, I'm looking here at the bottom of page 1 in your study guide.

You may want to underline this, encircle the word self-support.

As valuable as it is to have a donation-supported ministry, there are those ministries that generate, like the old Madison model, like the Apostle Paul, their own support.

And so as a self-supporting missionary, Paul did not expect anything in return for his labors.

His passion was to share the Christ he loved with others.

His greatest desire was to experience, to see others experience the joys of salvation.

The Apostle Paul gave his life for the 1 who gave his life for him.

Any time there is a self-supporting institution in a local conference, and if you happen to be a conference representative here, praise God that you have people in your conference that are not trying merely to get conference funding for their ministry, but they are serving for love's sake, because Christ has broken their hearts.

I praise God when I walk through the booths here at ASI and see large numbers of lay people, by the hundreds and by the thousands, that serve for service sake, that witness for witnesses sake, that love for love sake.

Some of them leave the comfortable conveniences of American and European society and travel to the ends of the earth, not because they're sent by a denomination, but they're sent by Jesus Christ our Lord.

There is a motivation in the cross when you come to Christ.

I thank God for lay people who are working from early morning till late at night.

Physicians that I know well that spend 60 hours a week in their occupation, not asking for 1 dime or penny from the church, but are coming home and giving Bible studies, traveling on mission trips.

This is the essence of what it means to be a self-supporting missionary.

Now there are extremely valuable lessons that we can learn from the Apostle Paul in navigating the relationship between supporting ministries and denominational work.

And so we're going to look at some of those lessons.

You'll recall that Paul was not brought up as a committed Christian.

He was brought up in a very traditional, formal, ritualistic Jewish home.

But yet on Damascus Road, he came to that awareness of the Savior.

And you remember when Paul was on Damascus Road, Jesus spoke to him and Paul said, Who is it that's persecuting you in essence?

And Jesus said, Paul, you're resisting the ministry of the spirit.

Now there's a very important point outlined in Acts chapter 9.

So if you have your Bibles, you may have them in the ancient scrolls like I do.

You might have them digitally on the phone.

But I know if you're here at ASI, you've got them.

And I also know that you're not texting, but you're looking at the text.

When Paul is converted on the Damascus Road, and we're looking at page 2 on our study guide, When Paul's converted on Damascus Road, what happens?

Acts the ninth chapter, we're looking there at verse 10.

Series

United

Partners in a Finished Work

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

1-Defending the Faith

The Authority of the Scriptures

1h 15m

Personal Spiritual Enrichment

Powerful Sanctuary Secrets

1h 7m

ASI 2012 Plenary Sessions

Friends Forever

1h 28m

Plenary

One Life to Live, One Life to Give

2h 24m

Seminar: Health

FIT & FREE! Building Brain and Body Health

47m

Seminar: Spiritual Enrichment

Reaching the World Next Door

1h 14m

Plenary

Members in Action

1h 55m

ASI 2011 Plenary Meetings

ASI Presents

1h 54m

Personal Evangelism

Apologetics In the Marketplace

1h 25m

God's Last Message: Christ Our Righteousness

God’s Last Message: Christ our Righteousness, Part 3

49m

Plenary

Sabbath School Lesson

1h 27m

Plenary

Sent

2h 13m

Sound Doctrine