ASI 2011: Inspired to Finish Strong

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ASI 2011 Seminar: Finishing Strong

Gerald Klingbeil

Bill Knott

Needle to the Pole: Personal Integrity in a Shifting World

I'm the editor of the Adventist Review and Adventist World.

I'll let him introduce himself, his background.

I've been all my life, my ministry life, involved in teaching.

I was a university professor in South America, in Asia, and now we live in Maryland.

For the record, I only have 1 wife too, but 2 sons.

Gerald and I have been friends for a number of years, and when the Lord opened a way for me to not only find a talented editor, but a good friend to be part of the Adventist Review and Adventist World team, I knew where to look.

And though he turned me down at first because of other responsibilities, if you wait long enough, the Lord creates the opening ultimately.

And we've had a good time working together and decided to take the opportunity to work this topic together.

Gerald has a background as a biblical scholar, particularly in Old Testament.

My background leans toward other things like church history.

So we're kind of an interesting combination of both experience and the word.

And so we thought that might be useful to you to share from this topic together.

Before we go anywhere else, though, we pray together.

Lord Jesus, take our time, this next hour ahead of us.

Conform our minds to that of Jesus Christ.

May we come from this hour more clear on what you want for us and our integrity in the days to come.

I'll just back off a little bit, which is a little hard for me.

We're going to take a moment, first of all, to do something that an English teacher, by training, which is what I prepared to do originally, will always do first.

What do we mean when we say this word, integrity?

I'm sorry, we've got audio going right now, and I think that's the only version I'm allowed to work with.

I thought they were doing it all through.

When you hear the word integrity, give me the first set of associations that come up for you.

And this is the challenge because the term is used either as a compliment, we like somebody, or when we don't like someone, we say something like you heard last week in the debt deal, their position lacks all integrity.

It's a term thrown around in our culture, and there are a wide collection of meanings attached to it.

Well most words that we use come from Latin.

And that 1 is 1 of those that also comes from the Latin background, meaning something that's whole, that's complete.

There's a word in English you probably forgot ever since math classes, but there's a word very much like it.

When you realize where a word comes from and what it thus is shaped by, we get some kind of a sense of what the meaning of that value might be.

Somehow, integrity isn't just about telling the truth, though that's part of it.

It isn't just about credibility, though that's part of it.

Dictionary definition will use language like unimpaired.

Sounds a little dangerous to some of us because we think of alcohol or something, but unimpaired, whole, round, full, complete.

And when we go at looking at it, we discover why that is such a quality we need in a chaotic and splintered culture, and truthfully, why we can never have enough of that wholeness in our life of faith together, in the way we interact not only with those outside of our faith, but also within.

We've decided to take this next hour to talk with you through a particular vehicle, a particular method.

Why don't you introduce what we're doing?

Well, I don't know if, when you walked in, most people, when they sat down, they kind of moved the paper to the next side There's actually 2 sets of paper that we put we located it at You know the first chair and maybe you could pass that along you need 2 different documents.

1 is called rap sheet and the other one's called workplace sanctuary.

Now I've been teaching undergraduate graduate students and I noticed that the best way to learn is actually when you do it together.

You don't need somebody telling you, especially not adults.

That's the reason, that's the solution, that we have the pearls of wisdom.

But I think a great teaching tool is to look at a case study.

And we have 2 case studies here, to read it together and then to talk about it.

I'm going to suggest that a way we will do this, so that you get the story firmly in your mind, you both read it and you hear it all at the same time, is that Gerald and I are going to alternate paragraphs and quickly move through the 1 called rap sheet in front of you.

It brings to bear the issue of what integrity means, first of all, in a family environment.

The second 1 will take us to looking at what it means in our professional or business or our social relationships.

But the first 1 focuses specifically on family.

So we're gonna take the time, we'll read aloud, but you let your eye run down the page, absorb everything you can, and then we're gonna be turning to you.

You'll note at the end, if you've already turned it over, there are a series of questions which we don't plan to answer.

You know it wasn't fair for dad to break all of my Eminem CDs, " Eric snarled.

And if you try to defend what he did, you're just as bad as he is.

Karen stared intently into the muck of formerly hot chocolate that she had been stirring for the last 15 minutes.

She sighed, pulled the teaspoon up, and let the brown liquid drip slowly off its end.

I never said I agreed that breaking your CDs was the best way to deal with the situation, Karen finally said.

I know you worked a long time at the nursery this summer to earn the money to buy your music, But I really need you to respect your father and his authority in this house And when he says no rap music we can't have any how can I respect someone?

Kelly Mowrer

Reaching Out: Why People Leave the Church and What We Can Do About It

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much for an opportunity to come together and to think a little bit more about the way that we can show our love for you by feeding your sheep and by going into the parts of the field of work that you put each 1 of us in and bringing the good news that you have reconciled us.

Please be with us now as we talk about these things and send your Holy Spirit to open our hearts to the things you would have each 1 of us to hear.

We love you so much and thank you for loving us.

Some of you were asking how I began to be sharing on this topic.

It was about 4 years ago and I had been invited to the Iowa-Missouri conference to do their camp meeting and I had been invited to the Iowa-Missouri Conference to do their camp meeting, and I had been invited to play music, which is what I do.

And the person who was my contact Also asked if I would be willing to share my testimony for the early service Sabbath morning about why I left the church and why I came back.

And when I was growing up, I was reared in the Seventh-day Adventist Church And in growing up, I had attended many a camp meeting, and the testimonies that I heard seemed to fall into 2 basic categories.

1 category was I left the church and I went to Hollywood, or I went into the music scene and I became very famous, and found that it was all emptiness, and so then I came to my senses and returned to the Lord.

Or the other testimony was I left the church and I found myself face down in the gutter and came to my senses and came back to the Lord.

And neither of those testimony formats fit my story at all.

And my story is very precious to me because it is the story of how I came to know and understand the friendship that God wanted to have with me, the relationship, and why he came and died for me.

So that was very precious to me, but it wasn't really what I considered a compelling narrative for Sabbath morning at camp meeting.

And so I said, well, I really don't have a story.

And he said, well, Kelly, it's the focus of our conference to be reaching out to the people who have left and are coming back, and we would really like to hear from you.

And so I said, well, let me pray about it.

You can tell anything you want, you know, just handle it whatever angle you want.

So I prayed about it and I thought of some of the things I could share and I thought about the different angles I might approach it from.

And I went back to him and said, well, I could tell it from this angle or this angle or this angle or this angle.

What are your other speakers covering so I don't double up, you know?

And he came back a couple days later and he said, none of our speakers are covering any of those angles, would you do a seminar for the week?

And I wanted to start with a little bit of history trivia.

And so to begin to focus a picture in our minds here, in the history of the United States, what was the first armed conflict that is recorded in the present day history, not the different tribal Indian wars, but the Revolutionary War.

I'm going to start with the Revolutionary War because I'm starting with a Congressional Research Service report that begins with the Revolutionary War.

So because I don't have the casualty statistics of the French-Indian War.

The total number of deaths from combat, disease, and infection, any type of death, 4, 435 dead.

The next war after the Revolutionary War?

The next war, the big 1, Civil War, The war between the states, 364, 511.

And that figure, according to the Congressional Research Service, is low because they did not have accurate statistics for the Confederacy deaths.

Spanish-American War was next with 2, 446 dead.

After that came the Korean War, 36, 574 dead.

And then the report here has Persian Gulf, Iraq, and various other conflicts, 12, 618 dead.

The date on this report is February 26, 2010, so this figure is a little low.

But the total number of deaths from all causes, from all armed conflicts, from the Revolutionary War onward, 1, 016, 262 deaths.

You take that figure And you add 383, 800 to it, and you have the number of people who have left our church in a five-year period.

1, 400, 000 church members gone versus 1, 016, 000 armed forces.

In the corporate world, they say that there are 3 barriers to change.

The first barrier is you don't see a need to change.

Things have always been done this way, you know.

The second barrier is you see, well, maybe we need to do a few things different, but we don't know what action to take.

It's so big maybe, you know, how are we going to make a difference with something this, you know, this huge?

And then the third barrier to change is failure to follow through once you do start to take action.

Wow, this didn't turn the way I thought it was going to turn out.

It seemed so much easier back there in the seminar.

And so then you kinda let it go aside and you stop following through on the action.

Albert Einstein said the significant problems that we face will not be solved with the same level of thinking we were at when we created those problems in the first place.

And so, as I prayed about how I would address this topic about why people leave the church and what can we do about it, I thought 1 of the things that I wanted to do was to say, what can we, each 1 of us individually, begin to do differently?

I usually am sharing this seminar in 2 main venues, either in a camp meeting venue, which would be something like this, where we have members from many different churches represented.

And so, different churches have different issues that might contribute to this topic.

And then the other way I might be presenting the seminar is a church will have me come in for the weekend and we'll 0 in on their church and the different things that they would like to do.

Today I'm going to take points from both of those types of presentations, there is overlap, and I'm going to interweave them together.

And the thing that I've been asked over and over again is, do you have proof?

And I have found in this particular topic, it's very much a human nature to want a program to follow, a recipe, you know, a place where we can take and find our milestones and make sure we're going in the right direction and then we know we've reached the end point and we can have a celebration.

In the topic of reaching out to people and in pursuing a new way of looking at this through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, I don't believe that it is a topic that we can say, here are the measurable results all the time.

We will, at times, be able to see a reaping.

But I have had so many people come to me and say, my mom prayed for me all my life and she died before I came back to the Lord.

Now there is 1 of our sisters or brothers who have gone to sleep in Jesus never seeing the result of their prayer and of what they have done through the years, but they will see the reward in heaven.

So I believe that in this topic, I have 1 goal that I believe is biblical.

There is no end to this program until we hear Jesus say, well done, good and faithful servants, enter into the joy of your father.

But my prayer is that anybody who I have a chance to sit and to share this topic with will never go to church the same way again.

Because so often when we think about reaching out to people who left the church, we get this nebulous picture in our mind that how can we go knock on the door of somebody who hasn't been there for 10 years?

Or what about my loved 1 who hasn't really shown any interest in things of God for most of their adult life?

And we look at some of these sort of cases that seem so like cold cases almost, And we wonder, well, how do we resurrect them?

How do we get some life into those dry bones?

But there are future former Seventh-day Adventists that we are interacting with in church every week.

When you think about the parable of the lost coins, where was the coin lost?

When you look at the 3 parables that Jesus taught, Those parables, those stories were told in response to a specific accusation made to him, made against him by church leaders.

They said, this man eats with sinners and welcomes them.

This man hangs out with a wrong kind of people and seems to enjoy it.

And Jesus told the story of the lost sheep, the story of the lost coin, and the story of what we call the prodigal son.

But there was also someone else very prominent in that story, and that's the older brother.

And so all 3 of those stories speak to an element of why people have left.

And in the case of the lost coin, the coin was not even aware it was lost.

The 1 who felt the sense of lostness was the woman.

When our older son, our first son was born, I had a wonderful pediatrician who gave us a number of fine pieces of advice, I'm sure.

The 1 piece of advice that I remember was always watch out for the baby at the family gatherings because that's where we see the most injuries because everybody thinks somebody else is watching out for the baby.

When we come together at our family gathering week after week after week, God has commissioned each 1 of us to be watching out for the spiritual babies.

Carlos Moretta

Adrian Zahid

Total Church 2.0

Okay, so in the beginning God began with the family.

And He created Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

And as we all know, they fell and they were kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

But before they were kicked out, God gave them the plan of salvation.

And the whole idea was that through the unit of the family, the plan of salvation would be perpetuated till Jesus would come.

And during that time, if you remember, Cain, he killed his brother Abel and he began a separate line of families.

And he began a separate line of individuals throughout history, a separate line of people that worked sometimes against God's plan.

And over time what happened is the sons of God and their families intermingled with the sons of the world.

And they co-mingled and over time the family unit of the church got corrupted.

And at that point, God had to completely take an eraser and erase the world and start over.

Then He began with a nation model and He started to try to work things out with a nation.

And He began with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and down the line.

And so they began this, God began again with nations.

But the problem with that was that as the nations grew, guess what?

And they wanted to be like everybody else.

And so Samuel talked to God and God told him that he shouldn't be upset that they want a king.

It wasn't because of Samuel, but he said, they haven't rejected you, they've rejected me.

And so God gave them a king, With warnings, with caveats, letting them know what would happen if they had a king.

And so they started with 1 king, he ruled for 40 years, that was Saul.

And then after that came David, and then Solomon, and down the line.

But over time what happened is, the nation model that God had, the idea that this would be a representative of God's work in the world, of what God is trying to do with human beings, got corrupted.

And As you go through history and you take a look, what ended up happening is you have people starting to become insular.

The nation just started to focus inward and they lost their focus on God.

And they began to either copy the things of the world or they began to just be among themselves and lose contact with the world.

The whole idea was that people would look at this nation and they would see what God is doing with it and they would inquire as to why God is blessing them and then they would be taught of Israel.

And over time that failed and they went into exile.

And when they came out of exile, they began to live in Jerusalem and repopulate the Promised Land again.

But the city of Jerusalem itself had some issues.

And 1 of them was that the central area of location, the central location for Jerusalem was unprotected.

And year after year went by and the walls were not getting built.

And Nehemiah, he lived, as you remember, Nehemiah lived back with the king.

And he found out that this was happening, that God's work was being retarded.

And so he came and he decided to invest himself into this work.

And so he began by developing a certain set of principles.

He began first by getting buy-in of the people.

He went in, he surveyed the whole area, he found out what was going on, who the people were that were in power, and what they were doing.

And he made a personal survey of the whole city.

Then he began to formulate a plan in his mind of how he would build the walls.

Then He presented himself with his certificates and everything else from the king to the leaders of the city and he told them his plan of building the wall.

He organized the people and then he built that wall.

And what is interesting about that, about Nehemiah and what he did, is the speed with which he accomplished it.

Do you know how many days it took to build the wall?

52 days is what it took to build the wall.

There's a paper that was written in the Ministry Magazine by Alexander Sentrak, And he had some ideas of Nehemiah, and he was talking about some of the principles that Nehemiah used.

And 1 of them, and I'm just gonna list them real quick, but Nehemiah had a vision.

He saw what needed to be done, and he decided that he was going to do it.

He wasn't trying to force himself on people.

A lot of times people lack the motivation to do something, but he had a motivation of the task to accomplish.

To do something that no 1 had ever done before, to accomplish something that had not been done in years, takes faith.

And so as Nehemiah was thinking about building this wall again so that God's work could go forward, he had to exhibit faith.

And here's the thing about changing your church or making a difference in your church.

If you think that you're going to be able to do it by yourself, you're sadly mistaken.

God has to work with you to get this accomplished.

Another point was that he was persistent.

No matter what came before him, no matter what the problems were, he did not quit.

It was a steady march towards getting the work done.

He did get tired, but he didn't get frustrated.

And what I mean by getting tired is, yes, You can get tired in God's work.

But you don't want to lead that to burnout.

You don't want to get so tired that you just finally can't do anything more.

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Series

ASI 2011 Seminar: Finishing Strong

Reaching Out: Why People Leave the Church and What We Can Do About It

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

Needle to the Pole: Personal Integrity in a Shifting World

1h

Reaching Out: Why People Leave the Church and What We Can Do About It

1h 13m

Total Church 2.0

1h 15m

The Power of a Man

1h 13m

Sound Doctrine