   How can God use a local church in connection with a lifestyle club to reach secular people? Come and see how a lifestyle club can be organized in a systematic way to offer health lectures, cooking courses and other health events in a way that meets people‘s needs.    

ASI Scandinavia 2014: Sharing Christ His Way

<div> <div> <div> <p>How can God use a local church in connection with a lifestyle club to reach secular people? Come and see how a lifestyle club can be organized in a systematic way to offer health lectures, cooking courses and other health events in a way that meets people‘s needs. </p> </div> </div> </div>

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ASI Scandinavia

Simon Karlsson

Jeremy Zwiker

How to Develop Discipleship Models and a Lifestyle Club Locally

We thank you Lord for ASI and for the inspiration it is to see people who are like-minded and want to reach people for you.

We pray that you will direct us here in this seminar.

We will talk about how a lifestyle club can be a tool in reaching people.

We pray that you will guide us and that you will inspire each 1 of us.

So here, just a short overview over what we're gonna be talking about.

Christ's method, obviously, to reach people, the vision of the livestock club as such, what tools can be used to connect the church to the livestock club, or how to, yeah, also make the church feel ownership for the things that for evangelism that is going on in the churches.

Then we're going to have a short exercise break and then events and structure of the club, partners and cooperation with the community, church and businesses and how can I use this concept in my local church?

So that's what we're going to be covering and hopefully also have some questions and answers hopefully in the end that you can write down as you go and then we can take those in the end of the seminar.

Good, Simon, Why do we do health evangelism?

Isn't Jesus and the gospel all about reaching their hearts or their souls?

Why do we focus on the health of analysts?

Exactly, yeah, Because Jesus healed the sick.

Jesus focused on that, yeah, Jesus healed the sick.

And as you said as well, I mean, if you're done door knocking sometimes, you know that many times you maybe reach 5% or even less of the population by asking directly do you want to have a Bible study.

So if that's the only method we will lose 95% of the people.

So the health ministries or the health evangelism and how Jesus did it with healing the sick, it's created a desire in them to want to know more.

So health evangelism is, as Ellen White talks about, the right arm of the gospel.

It opens the door to the body to step in.

So I think that we all understand this at this conference and we talked a lot about it.

So it's logical that health evangelism will be a powerful tool to reach people, especially I would say in Scandinavia and in this secular part of Europe where people have everything in life.

They're closed to the gospel many times, but health can be a way to step into them.

And Christ's method of reaching people, this famous quote that we have read already, and you probably all know about, that this is the method, it says, Christ's method, what's this word here?

So we see that there is no other method if you want to have success.

And Christ's method is of course, we won't spend too much time on this quote now, is to mingle as well as decide they're good.

So we need to be where people are to show this simply for them we need to feel with people with the empathize people we need to understand that in order to reach people we can't just be interested in sharing intellectual knowledge or something like that.

And here is a crucial part, minister to their needs.

And that is what Health Awareness is all about.

It's to see if they have diabetes, we can help them with that.

If they have a poor diet, we can help them with that.

If they have a problem exercising, we help them with that.

So to minister to their needs and that will win their confidence.

And that's something I have experienced personally quite a lot with Steps for Life, these health weeks, in a powerful way, how you win people's confidence and it breaks all the prejudices and barriers down when you do these kind of help ministries.

So this is Christ's method that we want to apply in this lifestyle club as well.

This is also a famous quote that you may have heard before.

We have come to a time when every church member, when every member of the church should take hold of medical missionary work.

And that's just another word of comprehensive health evangelism that Ted Wilson usually expresses now.

Christ is no longer in this world in person to go through our cities and towns and villages healing the sick.

He has commissioned us to carry forward the medical missionary work that he began.

And I think probably you know, what did Jesus do most?

So we need to have a big emphasis on reaching and in meeting people's physical needs.

In the Ministry of Healing it also says that there's a need of coming close to the people by personal effort.

If less time were given to sermonizing and more time was spent in personal ministry, greater results would be seen.

So we can see that by just preaching and preaching that we as Adventists are good at, and not doing so much practical meeting people's needs.

If we could do less time with that and focus more on actually helping people practically we would see greater results.

Just a question, why did we think about starting a lifestyle club?

How many of you do health events at your local churches?

Your local church does health events, like health expos or something.

We also do events, especially my background is within math and admissions school.

We do lots of things, evangelism, and training the students how to do these events.

We have lots of health exposures, we have lots of cooking courses, we have lots of events.

I started thinking, how sustainable is actually the work that we're doing for the people.

How are these events actually creating a community?

Are they actually creating a community of people that are interested, or is it new people every time, and we don't really know who's on this event and who's on that event, and we don't really know how to follow up.

And this was 1 of the problems that I faced, that I saw that the evangelism that we did was not as much focused on the community as it was on the missionary students that we were wanting to teach how to do evangelism.

But in doing that, we actually forgot to focus or put our main focus, obviously it was a part focus, but we didn't have capacity in a way to think very strategically for the local community and when it comes to sustainability to continue the communication with the community.

The Lifestyle Club as such is now a tool where we create a community of people that think or want something better.

They want something better for their lifestyle.

And when people want something better, you can lead them further through personal relationships.

But the Lifestyle Club also, what it does is creates ownership and the ones that are part of it, they're part of a club, which means they themselves give, in a way, effort to be part of this club, even money or resources to be part of this club, so they actually want us to follow them up.

They actually expect us to stay in contact with them, they expect us to come again with new events and new things and updating all the things all the time, and they want to be part of a community that thinks about lifestyle, that thinks about something better.

So it's not just events now that we're doing disconnected from each other, but it's actually creating a community of people that care about lifestyle and connecting the church to that and becoming personal friends and, in a way, creating that platform where people can meet each other.

And that's why we thought about starting the Lifestyle Club in the first place.

And probably many of you have experienced, maybe, how many of you have done health expos for example before?

And how many have been part of a health expo where you've done 1 event and then the follow-up really never happened in a very effective way.

That's usually, and that's what Sierra was saying, by doing this Lifestyle Club we connect them to our community more or less and that's, yeah, We have follow-ups with health lectures or cooking classes and different events that have become part of our fellowship, you could say.

We're trying to now just start a process of creating this.

We have high expectations that this will work in a more effective way of bringing a fellowship where you have the same interests of living a healthy lifestyle.

And the vision of the Lifestyle Club is also to become like a model for Scandinavia and for Europe to be like a franchise model.

You could say that every church, every local church can have the potential of being a lifestyle club.

And in the future we also hope to be able to create materials and have resources that local churches could use in this stage we can give inspiration and talk about the plans and the model of what we plan to do and hopefully you can apply that in your churches as well.

And yeah, this will be more like a pilot project then.

And hopefully this will be a very effective tool for churches to be applying.

Through the conference you've heard about the Evangelism Spiral several times.

And since it is such an integral part of Christ's method, we also would like to take this up, and actually, it's such a great tool that I believe you can use in your local churches as a great tool to find out on a chart how is our church doing with Christ's method.

And so it's Just to explain what this is, we have Evangelism Spiral and we have a year calendar.

And then we have the 4 layers, we just put them into 4 layers here to simplify, contact making, events, and Now we're talking about different events that create or mingle.

So where do we have first contact with people, new people, and so forth?

Then we have confidence building here in the green, and things that are more reoccurring and people are coming again and builds confidence in the work that we do, credibility.

And then conviction comes a little bit more into the spiritual aspect of evangelism and with care groups and different things, and then discipleship as such, and that's in the church as a, the church is the main objective of bringing people to the church and doing discipleship in the church.

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How to Develop Discipleship Models and a Lifestyle Club Locally

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