Do you want to see young people excited about serving God? Do you want them to experience a deep, growing relationship with their Lord? Do you want young people in your sphere of influence to live a life full of purpose and joy? Then join us as we explore God’s endless possibilities to use young people to make a difference in our world for eternity.

Michigan Camp Meeting 2023: The Boldness of the Cross

<p>Do you want to see young people excited about serving God? Do you want them to experience a deep, growing relationship with their Lord? Do you want young people in your sphere of influence to live a life full of purpose and joy? Then join us as we explore God’s endless possibilities to use young people to make a difference in our world for eternity.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Called to Lead

Chad Bernard

01 But Everyone Else is Doing It!

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2023 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

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

Lord I thank You for the opportunity to talk about young people.

I know they're really important to You, too.

I'm sorry for the times I'm not a good dad.

There are some mothers here that feel like that way.

We so desperately want our young people in the kingdom.

Help us to see where you're at in all of these things.

So maybe to give you just a little background, my name is Chad Bernard, and I serve as the youth director, your youth director for the Michigan Conference, and I have had the pure pleasure of working with young people for about 26 or 27 years.

And I've had the pure pleasure of teaching kids from, actually I've taught classes from kindergarten to college, so kind of had a fun little broad experience with that and then I have a nine-year-old who just changes everything.

Have you ever found figured out like it's really easy to tell other people how to raise their kids?

It's like well I'll tell you what you need to do right there.

You give them their little thing, you walk away feeling like you're Dr.

Then you have a kid and you want, sometimes you want to, I don't know, sometimes I wanted to tell my daughter, do you understand how much experience I have?

And I don't know how she became a first class manipulator at 9, but she's really, it does me well.

Do you ever hang out with other families and their kids do the same thing and you're like, oh thank you.

I thought I was the only 1 that had this crazy child.

This kind of started off with just having conversations of man you're trying to raise your young person to love Jesus and to just be really respectful and what you have deemed successful in life and for eternity.

And then they go hang out at another family or they hang out with a youth leader who thinks you're super cool and they do something and you're like why did you do that you know and and how do you deal with when your kid goes out and leaves the home and and they learn new things or pick up new habits I remember 1 time a parent told me, this is horrible, this story is not about this conference, but not that we're immune to just poor things, but they sent their kid away from school and when he came back he came back with a hardcore video game addiction that he learned from the dean.

I mean, he dropped out of school and he was just this delinquent.

He's like, I sent my child to this school because I thought they would draw him closer to Jesus and he's this is what he's got.

How do you deal for these these types of things?

And so I want to I want to I want to share this with you.

I'm a little off a little bit because I was going to show you some things and I don't have any of it, so I'm going off my brain, which is, I'm 50, so my brain's, I'm losing ground every day.

I want to give you a little bit of a disclaimer.

What do Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and even potentially Lucifer have in common?

They grew up in really, really good homes.

And sometimes as parents, I've talked to many, I just talked to a parent just recently, their child is making really, really, really bad choices.

I mean, really, really bad choices right now.

And then so what'll happen is you'll start, you'll go down a rabbit trail.

Well, you know, if you wouldn't have done this, and if you wouldn't have done this, and you remember that time you talk harshly to them, and you just, and then you own 100% of all of these choices that your kid's making right now.

That's what this family's doing right now.

And I'm here to tell you that sometimes kids just make bad choices and it's not on you.

I'm not trying to let you off the hook on everything, but just sometimes they make poor choices.

And so what I'm going to share with you today is just some things that I really believe in and I think They're really good practices, the things that have helped me as a youth guy, and the things that have helped me as a husband, and as a pastor, and as obviously a father, and I hope there's a value to you.

I don't know why I was out late dad, you know, type of thing.

Okay, so I want to share with you a couple of quotes that I think communicate some of the crazy that we're in.

I don't think it's just because we're getting older that we say this.

Man, this world is way more wicked than it was when I was a kid.

I think that many of us, I mean if you have a if you've been paying attention since about 2008 so the last 15 years.

Does anybody have a crazy idea of what happened in 2008 that was pretty transformative in our culture?

Let me see if I have, can I see that right there?

And We've been dealing with that ever since.

Yeah, things have been getting really, really crazy.

It's the special work of Satan in these last days to take possession of the minds of youth, to corrupt the thoughts and inflame the passions, for he knows that by doing so he can lead to impure actions and thus all the noble faculties of the mind will be debased and he can control them to suit his own purposes.

Have you ever had your kids say this to you, just trust me, Why don't you trust me?

He's trying to ruin your life and I'm trying to help you.

I'm trying to protect you from the crazy that is out there.

The youth of our day are ignorant of Satan's devices.

Like I don't understand why I can't be on TikTok all the time.

Some of us might go, I don't even know what TikTok is.

But I mean, there's all kinds of just really, really, really, really wicked things that'll pop up at any minute.

Jeremy Hall

02 I Thought, So...

States where the greatest access exists, nearly 1 in 3 are going without any kind of treatment at all.

And this is from the Mental Health America, MHA.

It's not something that's just affecting youth.

Do you realize that youth end up growing up to become adults?

Do you realize that what we are looking at when it comes to mental health and depression and all kinds of clinical diagnoses, we are actually looking at issues that youth from the previous generation were struggling with, maybe didn't get resolved, and then they become adults and they have children, okay?

So we're seeing this in adults, 50 million, or 19.86% of American adults experienced a mental health illness in 2019.

I don't even need to tell you that COVID compounded everything, right?

4.5% of adults report having serious thoughts of suicide.

This has increased every year since what day?

Now I'm a teacher by trade, so I'm going to ask you to fill in.

Just be ready to jump in and yell it out.

Almost a quarter of adults with a mental health illness report an unmet need for treatment.

So the mental health crisis that we are seeing in our country, and it's interesting, we are the most progressive country probably in the world with the most stuff in the world, but it's not making us happy.

Because where does true happiness derive itself from?

It's from God and a relationship with him.

More than half of adults with a mental illness do not receive treatment, totaling over 27 million US adults, And that is sourced from the same place as the previous slide.

How about the financial impact of mental health?

Serious mental health illness is a significant public health concern.

The estimated economic impact of SMI is more than $300 billion every year.

$193 billion in loss of earnings, people calling in sick, people not able to go to work because of depression or because of anxiety.

$100 billion in healthcare expenditures, $24 billion in disability benefits are paid out because of mental health.

I'm laying the foundation of legitimacy when someone tries to tell you that mental health is not something that is a current or real issue.

It is, It's impacting people individually, it's impacting people corporately and institutionally as we see from these statistics.

Positive psychological well-being can reduce the risk of what?

Depression has been linked to many chronic illnesses such as diabetes, asthma, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and arthritis.

The mortality rate from cancer and heart disease is higher for people with depression or other mental condition.

Around 50 to 80% of people with mental health conditions will also have what?

People with mental health challenges are more likely to smoke, and smoking leads to other significant health challenges.

Because you're trying to figure out a way to get yourself out of the ditch.

And so you find sometimes substances that can help with that, but really, obviously, they don't.

There is an interconnectedness between mind, body, and soul.

What does the Bible say in Genesis 2, in verse 7?

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." You see the equation.

You have to have the body, the dust, combined with the breath of God.

So the mind and the body are dependent upon each other and correlated to 1 another.

How we feel mentally can manifest itself in physical symptoms.

Conversely, how we feel physically can affect how we feel mentally.

We see that manifests itself all the time and in counseling terms it's called a psychosomatic effect.

Mental health issues do not always need to be a diagnosable disorder.

If you're feeling depressed or you're feeling anxiety, it doesn't mean that you are clinically depressed or that you have clinically diagnosable anxiety.

We all struggle at times with stresses and anxiety and depression.

It doesn't mean that those things are clinically diagnosable, but we also shouldn't ignore them either.

We should be in tune with ourselves and understand that there is a correlation.

Youth and adults can deal with challenges that have an effect on their lives and ultimately can lead to anxiety, stress, depression, worry, and of course guilt.

There are 2 different kinds of stressors.

It's important as we work with our youth, it's important as we work with 1 another, that we actually understand some of the foundational bases for how we get to the ultimate problem we're dealing with, which is the manifestation of mental illness in behaviors and choices and so forth.

1 is called eustress and 1 is called distress.

It's not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.

It's not stress that kills us, it's our reaction to it.

It is a stress that negatively affects you and impacts mental and physical health.

If you're dealing with stress or your young person is dealing with stress in such a way that is starting to grind them down to a halt and they're not able to be productive anymore and move forward in their life, that is taking stress and it's becoming distress.

It's having a negative impact on them and their blood pressure.

You ever heard someone say, you're gonna make my blood pressure go up, right?

Eustress, on the other hand, is what energizes us and motivates us to make a change and be productive, okay?

And as you're dealing with the stressors in your life and you're examining them and you put them down on a sheet of paper and you can almost categorize them and move some to the left and move some to the right.

We're always gonna have things in life that are stressful.

If it's affecting you to the point where you're not able to actually be productive and functional, then it's moved itself into the category of distress.

I enjoy singing and doing music together as a family.

And when we perform, there's a level of stress there.

You don't want to walk up and start doing music and not have a little bit of stress there because that can affect your performance.

But when that would move itself into a situation where I'm not able to function or when I get off stage I pass out, I'm being dramatic, then we've moved the enjoyment of that from eustress to distress.

I want to talk to you this afternoon about something that is incredibly powerful relative to young people, okay?

Relative to young people, and it's the power of choice.

Delwin Garcia

03 Identity Crisis

Heavenly Father, we thank you this afternoon for the opportunity that we have at Michigan Camp Meeting to talk about topics that will hopefully, prayerfully, help us to be better parents and leaders and mentors to young people.

Father, this idea of identity and our identity that can be found in you is under attack.

And we recognize that, and our leaders in our conference recognize that, and that's why we're having this session today.

And Lord, I just pray that you know I'm not an expert and I just pray that you would make the message clear even though it may be jumbled in my mind I pray that there will be clarity as it comes out of my mouth and Lord if there are things I need to skip over or things I need to add I pray that you'll make that clear to me as well as I present I thank you please send your Holy Spirit now to be in this place to open our minds and take away distractions in Jesus name we pray amen so this is the chapel it's an auditorium too but we have chapel in here so this is where I've spent a lot of time not typically here in the middle of the aisle but my eyes are getting a little bit older and I need to be able to see the screen and Hopefully you can see the screens all the way over there as well.

The topic we're talking about today is identity crisis Identity crisis and you read the description.

Oh no, see that's why we need to start early.

I'm clicking but there must be something wrong and that's okay.

What I'm gonna do is, a teacher is always prepared.

Just in case something like this were to happen.

And that's really small and I think that's the smallest font of the afternoon.

But the objectives today are to identify what the problem is and why young people are struggling with identity.

We want to identify the truth as found in God's Word.

And finally, we want to attempt to identify some solutions.

Now, I have to tell you, as I was preparing the presentation, this is the part I struggled with most, because there isn't just a clear-cut solution to this issue of our young people struggling to discover what their identity is.

This idea of identity crisis, we've heard this term before, right?

And it actually derives from psychology, specifically Eric Erickson.

And he came up in the 1950s with these stages of psychosocial development.

And he came up with the 8 stages throughout life, beginning on the left there with infancy where there's a tension between trust and mistrust in early childhood and preschool and school age, but I want to focus today on adolescence.

That's my wheelhouse, as I have the privilege of working with teenagers all year long.

Even during the summer, I say all year long, because I have teenagers at home.

And the stage, the fifth stage in this human development, and I'm gonna say, you know, a lot of psychology would argue this is normal human development.

The fifth stage in adolescence is this tension between identity and role confusion.

When did I say this, that Eric Erickson came up with this?

Do you think it's worse today or better today?

First of all, just identifying that when we're talking about this stage, this fifth stage of adolescence, we're talking About ages 12 to 19.

Now we recognize that young people are actually growing up faster today than they were in the 50s, and they're staying in this adolescent stage longer than they were in the 1950s too.

So maybe today we could say ages maybe 10 and 11 all the way into the early 20s.

The significant relationships for someone in this stage of psychosocial development are their peers and their role models.

The stages prior to that would say parents are the significant relationships in the young person's life.

As kids, they depend on parents or the caregivers, whether that's guardians or grandparents.

When they get to their teenage years, and let me rephrase, when you got to your teenage years, when I got to my teenage years a few years ago, peers start to have more of an importance in what we value, what we find valuable, what my friends say, and role models.

Now we're gonna talk a little bit about the role models of today versus the role models maybe in the 50s, but you can understand why this is problematic if it's peers and role models that are telling your teenager who they should be.

Because role models today are not people that they actually know.

Role models today are people online, professional athletes, Taylor Swift.

And then the existential question for a young person today and back in the 50s is, who am I and who am I going to become?

And in the process of trying to figure that out, you experiment with and develop different roles and you develop an identity.

Now I'm gonna show some examples in a sec and hopefully they bring back some memories, maybe good memories, maybe bad memories of your adolescent years.

But in essence, an adolescent, a teenager is trying to find the approval of peers.

And this sense of belonging is part of who we are as human beings.

That's why Paul talks so much about unity within the church.

That's why we should not forsake gathering together for church.

But young people have this to a higher degree.

And I'm gonna talk a little bit later about the difference between fitting in and belonging, because I believe there's a difference.

So, When I was in high school, people fit into different groups.

Because teenagers back in the 90s wanted to fit in.

Can someone tell me what group this person would belong to?

Because it was the same at your school as it was at my school.

Because they had similar interests and They wanted to belong to a group of people.

And with the jocks, oftentimes, the cheerleaders were there.

Back then, they were the nerds and the geeks.

Okay, rebels, what's another, how else would you describe that?

The stoners, the skaters, the punk rockers, you know, we had groups.

Because we all have a desire to fit in or belong to something or someone.

You may have been in high school in the 60s or the 70s or the 2000s or I don't know.

Craig Harris

04 This Is Gonna Hurt Me More than It Hurts You

Our Father, we're so thankful that you've given us this day, and we are so thankful that you disciple us and plus you discipline us in sometimes the same manner.

So we ask you that we would listen to your Holy Spirit speak to us today and touch our hearts and have us to know what we need to do, what we need to change, and congratulate what we're doing right.

So, you know, hey, when Amy asked me if I could teach a class on discipline, I'm going, why me?

Well, she had heard that I taught a discipline class for the Pathfinders.

So I took the Pathfinder discipline class and I made it for you, right?

And with a lot of changes, because as I looked at it, I'm thinking, well, this isn't gonna necessarily fit, but a lot of it does.

And it says, how to disciple your children at every age.

And I'm thinking, that's a really good thing.

And I was gonna just summarize it, But instead of summarizing it, I printed this lady's article.

So if there's some great ideas in here, say, Pastor Craig has some great ideas, not me, Laura does, right?

The first section is Craig Harris, the rest of it is Laura.

And we're not going to go through each 1 of those, but there's some highlights we wanna do of discipling.

How many of you had an adult disciple you?

What it means to disciple you, it means to teach you, right?

Anybody have somebody that discipled you?

And there's different ways to accomplish that.

And, but let's just read this together, Jeremiah 17, 7 through 8.

And it begins, 1 thing that comes with being a grandpa is needing reading glasses.

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Series

Called to Lead

06 Changing Lives Through Service

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

01 But Everyone Else is Doing It!

57m

02 I Thought, So...

56m

03 Identity Crisis

51m

04 This Is Gonna Hurt Me More than It Hurts You

59m

05 Understanding God’s Heart for Children and Youth

42m

06 Changing Lives Through Service

1h

Sound Doctrine