GYC Conference 2023: But If Not

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

On the Shoulders of Giants

Adam Ramdin

The Domino Effect: International Impact Before Social Media

You've gotten plenty of welcomes I'm sure.

Welcome to the workshop seminar session at GYC.

This 1 is entitled On the Shoulders of Giants and we have a five-part series.

The seminar titles are slightly changed, I'll explain that in just a moment.

And let's have a word of prayer though as we get started.

Father in heaven, we thank you for the opportunity we have to gather together, to learn together, and to cast our minds backwards and forwards together.

As I mentioned, this workshop is entitled On the Shoulders of Giants.

Just a straw poll, how many of you are familiar or have heard of Lineage Journey?

This workshop is entitled The Domino Effect.

And then our second 1, which is advertised out there, is called Female Influencers.

The third 1 was gonna be You Died for That, and the fourth 1 was another 1 on women.

What I've done, I've combined the 2 female presentations together, because we're putting another 1 in there, number 3, that's called The Message in Media, which won't be so much a historical presentation.

I have 1 of the Lineage team members here, if you would stand please.

Ashley Bloom, he's our photographer, he's 1 of our media experts that works with Lineage, and he's gonna be primarily sharing that workshop called The Message in Media, and how media ministry and how lineage utilised media ministry etc.

So we're going to be looking at that, we'll have some Q&A of that, we'll be talking a little bit about our journey, how lineage started, the progress we've been on and so on in the message and media.

Fourth 1, you died for that and the fifth 1, youth changing the world.

You may have heard this quote before by Isaac Newton.

Isaac Newton was a famous scientist, but in many ways he was a theologian as well.

He wrote more on the books of Daniel and Revelation than he did on science.

And he made this quotation that has been quoted by many people, quoting him, if I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

And today I believe we really have that opportunity, and I'd say privilege, as Adventists, to stand on the shoulders of our Adventist pioneers, and then the Marxists and the reformers of the Christian Reformation, and as we stand on their shoulders, We can look back and see what they stood for, and also it gives us an opportunity in a sense, symbolically speaking, to look forward, to see where we're going because we're riding on their shoulders.

I believe the study of history is important.

How many of you went to school and you thought history was pretty boring?

And yet you've come to a history workshop.

But in many ways, you're right, because the way that history is often taught, not by all people, and the way it's often graded in schools is quite rightly boring.

Where you're memorizing a date, and you're memorizing a name, and you're memorizing an event with very little memorization or discussion about the impact of that or the meaning of that or why that impacts or why that connects with you today.

So it's just names and dates and it's just kind of devoid of the actual connection between the present day.

I want to share with you a couple of quotations before we get into it.

History is inextricably linked to identity.

If you don't know your history, if you don't know your family, then who are you?

On a personal level, you want to know your parents' stories.

And if you don't want to know them now when you're younger, as you get older, you'll want to know their stories more and more the older you get.

What made my grandparents who they are, and how does that impact me today?

Because they're all links to your identity and this understanding as to who we are.

Edmund Burke said this, those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it.

Sadly in this world today, we live in a society and a world that really, I saw 1 person say this, that if there's 1 thing we learn from history, unfortunately, it's often that we don't learn much.

But we have the opportunity to, in a sense, personally, break that cycle.

Because if we don't know our history, we're doomed to repeat it.

Ellen White said something with a similar theme when she said these words.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory, destroy its books, its culture, and its history.

And before long, the nation will forget what it is and what it was.

When you look at some of these dictatorial regimes over the past just hundred years of Earth's history, you can see 1 of the things some regimes do is they get rid of the history books.

In the Cambodian Revolution, they just burned all the books, erasing the history of the country.

Erase the history, erase the nation's identity, and then try and recreate a new 1.

Today we live in a society where people do read.

If you look at the literacy rate in North America, it's gonna be close to 100%.

But sadly, what we have in North America is the same thing we have in Europe and the same thing we have around the world.

It is not a problem with literacy, and it's not a problem, obviously, with the opposite, illiteracy.

The challenge we have in our society is a problem with alliteracy.

Not the choice, maybe the choice, maybe that's strong, I don't know.

But the reality that even though we can read, we don't.

We read news articles, we read labels when we go shopping, we read signs.

But actually sitting down and reading a book and differentiating between different author styles.

I'm sure there's many readers in this room, or at least other books or things like that.

Ellen White noted the importance of history when she said this, in reviewing our past history, we often focus on the last sentence, but I'll read the whole quotation.

In reviewing our past history from 1844 to 1892, having traveled over every step of advance to our present standing, I can say, praise God.

As I see what the Lord has wrought, I am filled with astonishment and with confidence in Christ as leader.

Then the famous bit, we have nothing to fear for the future except as we shall forget the way the Lord has led us and his teaching in our past history.

If we're going forward, we have nothing to fear, she said, unless we what?

Unless we forget where he led us and unless we forget what he has taught us.

The dealings of God with his people should often be repeated.

For his people in this generation, the Lord has wrought a wonder-working God.

The past history of the cause of God needs to be often brought before the people, young and old, we need to recount God's goodness and to praise Him for His wonderful works.

When you think about things that changed the world in our day and age, inventions that have transformed society and the way we communicate.

You go back to the 1500s and they invented, or they perfected, the printing press.

Female Influencers: Women Who Gave All

So as I mentioned in the previous workshop, we're changing our order slightly in our workshops.

The third 1 is going to be called the message in media.

We're going to be looking at the story of lineage and where we came from.

We're also going to talk about the importance of media in ministry today.

There'll be an opportunity for questions and so on during that 1.

This 1 is gonna be a combination of this 1 and what was gonna be workshop number 4, which was, there's 2, I'm pushing number 3 to number 4, if that makes sense.

So this 1 is entitled Female Influences, Women who gave all.

Let's bow our heads for a word of praise as we start.

Father in heaven, we thank you for the opportunity we have to gather together to study and to look at the past and look at the future.

Bless us, we pray in Christ's name, Amen.

But if not comes from Daniel chapter 3, and I really do like this theme.

Daniel chapter 3 is a story where you have 3 young men.

And they stand before the king after they've already been told what to do.

And then they'll hold in front of the king, and the king says, I'll paraphrase, I know you might not have understood the instructions because you speak a foreign language, so let me make it very clear to you.

And they look back at the king and they say, king, we got the instructions.

And they said, our God, who we serve, is able to deliver us.

Then they say, but if not we still won't worship you.

That's the God, I'm not saying we don't like him, but that's the God, and that's the experience that's harder to go through.

Hey, I gave my life to God, and I went to university, and then we had an exam, and the exam was supposed to be on Sabbath, and I went to see my teacher and I told him that I couldn't take this exam on Sabbath.

He said there was nothing he could do, but then I prayed to God and guess what?

But what about when the exemption doesn't happen?

What about when God doesn't deliver you from the flames?

We're gonna look at some stories of women.

Women who were, some of them, given the ultimate choice between their beliefs, their convictions, and their life.

When you look at, let me just, when you look at the historical, many of the historical figures that we're looking at, what sets them apart from everyone else?

What sets them apart from the rest, in a sense, of society?

This quotation we looked at here, if I've seen further than others, it's by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Is that these men that we looked at in the previous presentation and the women we're looking at in this presentation, they had something about them and that something is this.

They lived for an idea, they lived for a belief, they lived for a conviction that was bigger than life itself.

So if you have the choice between your beliefs and your conviction, or the choice between preserving your breathing, I'll take my convictions, but I will not give up them in exchange for life.

I will not give them up in exchange for life.

The first woman I like to look at is a woman way back in history, Perpetua.

We don't know too much about her, but her story has been recorded.

She wrote as well, and she recorded some of her experiences.

She was born, or she was from Carthage, the Rome of Africa, which today sits in modern day, testing America's geography knowledge.

She was 22 years old and she was born into, sorry, not the third, yeah, well, the turn of the third century.

She's 22 years old, she's born into a wealthy family.

And together with someone called Saturninus, Secundulus, Revocatus, and Felicitas, they were preparing for baptism.

I have put an asterisk mark next to Barokatos and Philistines because they were slaves.

The other 2 were free people, they were slaves.

She was arrested for refusing to worship Roman deities and Her father strongly opposed her and visits her in prison many times trying to get her to recant or change her mind.

Her own father, her flesh and blood is like, stop being a Christian, et cetera, trying to get her to change her mind, but she refuses.

She refuses and they were condemned to die.

She said this, this is 1 of the quotes she said, she said, neither can I call myself anything else than what I am, I am a Christian?

The newborn child was taken away from her while she was nursing the child.

And she had a lot of pain in prison, physical pain as well.

And her father took her child away from her.

And there she is probably imagining that now her child is going to grow up not to be a Christian, etc., because her father was taken away from her.

She wrote a diary in prison called Passion.

This is how passionate, in a sense, they were.

The other lady in prison, Felicitas, was pregnant.

They had some weird rule there that you couldn't die, you couldn't be martyred while you were pregnant because they were very humane I guess.

And so the woman who was pregnant had to have her baby first And then they would martyr her.

But she really wanted to be martyred with everyone else.

For strength and support and all the rest.

And so they prayed in prison that she would have the baby.

They prayed in prison that she would have the baby early so that she could die with her fellow prisoners.

And she had the baby 2 days before the scheduled execution day.

On the day of the execution, they chose a bear, a leopard, and a wild boar that day.

So what happened is the bear and the leopard and the wild boar would mutilate the prisoners.

And then if they hadn't done their work, then the executioner would come with the sword.

And so the bear and the leopard and the wild boar, they went to work, and after being brutalized by the animals, the Christian gathered together in the middle.

They gave each other a kiss before they were killed with the sword.

It was a, the executioner wasn't very well trained, and he didn't stab her properly, And so she actually grabbed the sword.

And the picture there kind of illustrates, she grabs the sword and she brings it to her neck.

And in this way, they say she embraced her death as a martyr, dying with a dignity or a courage.

1 of the first female Christian martyrs that we have recorded in history, laying down her life for her beliefs.

At the age of 22, We're here at general, you know, generation of youth for Christ.

And as much as we can, as we go through the stories that we're sharing, we'll see that they were young people.

Ashley Bloom

The Message in Media

Father in heaven, we thank you for our lovely lunch, and we thank you for bringing us back this afternoon.

Be with us as we continue to look back in our past, and also as we discuss media in this presentation.

We pray for your blessing in Christ's name, amen.

This is part of our series on the shoulders of giants.

Some of you here would have heard of Linnea's Journey, which is a ministry we started about 6 years ago.

Ashley has been on the team since the very beginning.

We did our first filming trip, and I'll tell you, what should I say?

We did our first filming trip and Clive who's the videographer says I've got ash I knew actually very well I've got actually to come along to take pictures and in my mind at the time Because I'm like we had a really tight budget and I'm thinking it's an extra hotel room and everything I'm thinking what's the point of a photographer coming on our trip like we're doing videos we don't need a photographer and anyway he came anyway that was just my internal mind he came on the trip and well he's been an integral part of the team since our website is all his pictures, our books are all his pictures, he does illustrations, our coloring books, all those illustrations and the coloring books are his original artwork.

He told me not to say exactly what he works in media, but wherever he works in media, he's big time.

And he's going to be sharing on the message in media.

I did not know that part of the story actually until today.

This presentation's gonna be slightly different from the others in the series in that we really wanted to kind of focus on, obviously like we said, lineage is a media ministry.

And I wanted to share some principles of media ministry, some biblical principles that I've gleaned from working in the team for a while, but also just share some of the stories behind, like Adam was saying, how it came together.

Has anyone seen, just show of hands again, anyone who's seen Lineage episodes, hands up still, keep them up.

Have any of you seen the behind the scenes kind of episodes as well?

So maybe you enjoyed the behind the scenes.

It is kind of interesting to see how the team come together and how we do that.

So in terms of what we'll be covering today, I just want to kind of divide it into 4 things.

When we talk about ministry as a whole, we know the Great Commission, we know God's injunction to us to spread the gospel to the whole world.

But also, where does media fit into that, and how does it fit into that?

Secondly, lineage specifically is about the history of our faith, the history of our movement, Christianity as a whole.

So knowing that history and why it is important.

How we got here, so the kind of story of that lineage ministry.

So these are the things we're going to look at.

I'd love this to be kind of interactive as well, so I may throw out some questions.

I'd love to get responses from you guys as well, or maybe little discussions going.

So like we said, Lineage, now we see a lot of the time mainly Adam on the videos, kind of presenting to camera, but it is a team.

There's not a lot of us that tend to go on these trips.

It's usually the amount that you can kind of see there.

Maybe a couple of videographers, myself usually on photography or helping with some of the video.

We have Anton who's our amazing kind of sound guy and somebody usually catching the behind the scenes and as Adam said Aiko, his wife, is usually there helping out with the sound or other things too.

This team's small enough that a lot of the time just getting around is Adam driving while simultaneously memorizing a script as well, but within that everyone's got these different roles and we, this is roughly what the team looks like now.

Some of the ones who won't be necessarily on the trips will be involved in other areas of the ministry.

So that might be involved in, say, the social media side or on the website writing some of the articles.

And it kind of brings up, like I said, What is a media ministry?

I was kind of doing that thing where you read through the Bible in a year.

And sometimes you get to passages that people don't usually put sermons around.

So it's a passage that you might just gloss over.

And I remember this is something that really spoke to me.

And if you've got a Bible with you, feel free to turn there.

It's from the book of Exodus, chapter 35.

And the context of this passage is it's the time where God's giving Moses the instructions to make the sanctuary.

And he asks all the people to come together and bring an offering for the sanctuary.

And the people kind of give what they have.

They might have their gold, they might have their precious kind of materials, And that's kind of donated.

But then he asks for something specific around verse 35, which is the skill, the craft of some of the people.

It says, He has filled them with skill to do all kinds of work, as engravers, designers, embroiderers in blue, purple, and scarlet yarn, and fine linen, and weavers, all of them skilled workers and designers.

And in the verses before this, he actually mentioned some of them by name.

There's a guy called Bezalel, who's an amazingly skilled carver.

There's a few others that he mentions by name.

And he says something really specific, which is God has given them, the spirit has given them the ability to do this work as designers, as carvers, et cetera.

The modern equivalent, I guess, might be media people, might be illustrators, might be graphic designers, might be photographers or videographers.

But you know what hit me about this passage, particularly about this, was I was thinking about that, and I was thinking, OK, God says it's his spirit that's enabled them to have this skill.

But it also got me thinking, where did they actually learn their craft?

Where did they learn their craft as designers or embroiderers?

Because what were they doing before they got to this point in the desert?

They were slaves in Egypt, and they would have done the work that the Egyptians needed them to do.

And if anyone's been to kind of a museum, oh, sorry.

Series

On the Shoulders of Giants

Female Influencers: Women Who Gave All

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

GYC 2013 Seminar: Witnessing to the Wealthy, Worldly, and Well-Educated

03-The Experience

1h

On the Shoulders of Giants

The Domino Effect: International Impact Before Social Media

1h 1m

GYC 2013 Seminar: Making Friends for Eternity

01-Making Friends for Eternity, Part 1

1h

Every Wind of Doctrine

4. Confusion on Ecclesiology and Church Authority

1h 14m

GYC 2013 Seminar: The Gay Puzzle: Loving Gays to Christ

06-Turn Around: Q&A

1h 16m

I Know Something You Don't Know

The Lure of Conspiracies Q&A Panel

1h 9m

Ignite Your Local Church for Mission

Q and A and Final Charge

1h

Repairing the Breach Caused by the Doctrines of Devils

02 Distortions about Death

1h

GYC 2013 Seminar: The Neophyte and the Great Controversy

01-The Mystery

40m

GYC 2013 Seminar: The Most Important Book Outside of the Bible - A Deeper Look at The Great Controversy

03-Adventism’s Prophetic Message in the Great Controversy

1h

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!

2. By Sword, By Flame, By Captivity: The Protestant Reformation

59m

GYC 2013 Seminar: Daniel: Defining Adventism's Role in the Great Controversy

03-Daniel 8 & 9: The Shadow and the Cross

1h

Sound Doctrine