GO! Evangelism 2011

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GYC Southwest

Mary Bernt

Sikhu Daco

Gary Gibbs

Taj Pacleb

Wes Peppers

Eugene Prewitt

Panel Discussion

Father in heaven, we are so thankful this morning that we are here and we are delighted that we can be a part of this weekend to receive evangelism training and not to just come to Christ but once we come to Him, then we can go for Him.

And so we just ask your spirit to be with each 1 today, and we pray that this will be a weekend that will change our lives, that we will not be the same people when we leave as when we came, but that we will love you more deeply, and indeed deeply enough to go out and share you with others, to go.

That is our desire this weekend, Lord, and we ask your blessing now, in Jesus' name, amen.

My name is Wes Peppers and I am very happily representing Amazing Facts this weekend, AFCO, the School College of Evangelism, and just delighted to be here, so thank you.

Hi, my name is Siku and I work with the Center for Adventist Ministry to Public University Students.

And we work with Adventist students who are going to non-Adventist schools, so to give them resources, training, support while they're on their campuses to be missionaries for Jesus.

My name is Mary Berndt and I have Veggies, a health food store and vegan restaurant that originated in Rapid City, South Dakota and is now located in Ardmore, Oklahoma.

My name is Eugene Pruitt and I work for Ouachita Hills College for a few more months.

I represent particularly the call porter work in North America, but this fall I'm gonna be working with Mr.

Wes Peppers, I'll be under him, helping establish international AFCO programs around the world.

My name is Taj Pakleb and our ministry is called Revelation of Hope Ministries and we currently work for Central California Conference as the Conference Evangelist.

We're based out of Maryland at the General Conference.

All right, well, we have a number of questions that we're going to begin with, so we have some questions I think that are really tailored towards each speaker, not that anyone can answer freely, of course, but we'll just begin with the first 1 here.

How would you suggest someone who is excited to get their church active and going when they are faced with people who prefer the status quo.

So basically, in other words, how do you get church members involved?

How do you get them passionate about Jesus enough to have them go out and share him with others?

Well, that's a common problem, I think, you'd find in most churches.

How many of you face that problem in your church?

Now, there's the majority of the hands right there, and it could be frustrating if you say, well, before I can do anything, I've got to get the church alive, got to get them moving.

Well, you know, that's going to take forever.

That would be like trying to warm this place up in the next 10 minutes.

And so what you need to do is you need to get involved yourself.

Start ministering yourself and find the people in the church who are interested and get them going.

I mean, look at how Jesus changed the world.

You know, he started with just a handful of others that he discipled.

And then together, they began ministry, and then that was created a ripple effect out.

And now we have, you know, even time split up by Jesus' life and death.

And I'd say that what you need to do is try to get your pastor on board.

How many of you would say that's a difficult thing to do?

Yeah, that's a whole other topic, but if you can get your pastor on board, that's very advantageous to you.

If not, try to get the next, you know, major leader in your church on board.

And if you can't do that, then just do ministry.

Start doing something, and then tell your story.

When other people see you doing something and being blessed by it, then they'll get excited and they'll want to be a part of it.

Now, if you're going to map this out as how to do it, you know, first you'd go try to get pastors and leaders on board.

If you can't get them on board, start Bible study ministry outreach with the interested people and then try to get testimony time in the church service or Sabbath school where you're taking somebody, it might be the most unlikely candidate in your church to do witnessing, but that person's life is just majorly impacted by it.

Get them up and start telling the stories about what witnessing is doing for them.

Okay, so When they see you on fire and they see a passion in you, they're gonna wanna know what's going on, right?

And we pray that the Holy Spirit, as the wind will blow, and that fire will spread, right?

Another very important critical component of this is prayer.

We're living in the Laodicean era, that's all there is to it.

We can only expect what we see, but we're told that it's an answer to prayer that we will see revival.

And so what we're doing at my local church, I actually asked my pastor to be my prayer partner, and he and I have been praying every day, and then we got our Bible worker to do a revival for our church, and so we put much prayer behind that and we're seeing incredible answers to our prayers and our revival I would say about a third of our church has come on a regular basis to this revival and they're getting fired up and I just encourage everybody to find somebody to pray with.

And if you can make it your pastor, so much the better, because it's very helpful if he gets engaged and wants to see revival.

We have a new General Conference President who's all about revival and I believe we're going to see it but I believe we do need to pray.

If you want to have a chance to study something interesting, look up the history of the Tract and Missionary Society in the Adventist Church.

It started out with just a few lay people, in fact, ladies in a church in Massachusetts, and they met together to pray and to do witnessing, and it was a 0 or low budget project.

So it didn't have to go through a church board because there was no appropriation of funds needed.

That little project grew until nearly 40% of Adventists in North America were sharing tracks.

It was a major revival in the time of our grandparents.

I remember a story about a young Welsh boy that was just a young man, about 10 years old, and he saw the condition of the church, and he said, something has to be done.

Every day after school, he'd go there and he'd pray in the church, and people began to wonder, what is this young man doing?

And they said, oh, he's just a young boy.

But then 1 member of the church went and knelt beside that young boy.

They were inspired by his passion, his desire to have Jesus transform his church.

And so that person began to pray with him.

And then another person came, and another person, before they knew it, they had 05:10 people.

And then after about a week, the entire church was on their knees, praying that God would revive them.

And that little church, someone came to visit from another town, and they went back to their church and started praying.

And after a series of just a few weeks, a few months, all the churches in the entire country were on fire for Jesus.

There was a great revival, all because of 1 little boy.

I'm not the pastor, I'm not the Sabbath school superintendent, I don't do any of those things, but God can use you to do something big, amen?

And He wants to do that, but you start with prayer and you do these other things and God will indeed do something.

He's waiting And I'm thankful for what Mary said.

I believe we have a general conference president that is truly committed to seeing revival in the church and God's Spirit being poured out and the message carried to the world.

All right, our Next question is, what are some techniques for witnessing to colleagues in a professional setting where frequent contact is inevitable, and how do I do this even if they become offended, if they're offended at what you're doing?

Anybody want to Take a challenge at that take a stab This is I just thought of a testimony that a friend of mine shared he works with a cell phone company in Detroit And he's just on fire for Jesus and he had that same question, how am I going to be able to share with people when if I tell them outright, you know, do you believe in Jesus, they'll be like, ah.

And so he thought of a way that he could do it in a non-confrontational way.

So this is from his example, okay, not from my wisdom.

He took glow tracks and every day at the end of work when no 1, everybody else left, he would stay working late.

And then he would take, he had the whole, like all the glow tracks that you could have, and he would take the glow tracks and put them on everyone's desk before he went home, like when nobody was there.

And then in the mornings, people would get there and they would find these glow tracks on their desk.

And they didn't know where they were coming from, the mysterious glow track angel.

And he said after he did this, he would put 1 every week, a new glow track every week, give them time to digest the message.

And then after about 3 months, he got caught putting glow tracks on his workmate's desk.

And so word went around that he was the mysterious glow track angel.

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