OCI 2014 Leadership Retreat: One Thing

Ministry Workshops

Mark Guild

Outpost Centers International

One Accord: Team Building

I have for many, many years worked in corporate America, Fortune 500 companies in various levels of management.

And then for the last 6 years, I owned our own business.

We have a manufacturing company based out of South Carolina.

We actually live in Chattanooga, though, so I have to commute back and forth.

Kind of an arduous task, but I have to drive back and forth.

I don't get to meet people quite the same way you do, though.

I have to be careful when I have conversations with people, especially when I was in corporate America, to make sure that I didn't try to proselytize or talk too much about religion, because it's frowned upon.

If you are doing that type of thing in the office with your colleagues, eventually you're going to be fired.

So I had to be very careful, but I did have opportunities to talk to people on airplanes, sometimes in the office, or on business trips.

The Holy Spirit's working amongst people everywhere, even in secular business America.

And in the business world, where a lot of people think it's all greed and corporate greed and such.

There are a lot of really good folk and a lot of people looking for answers.

And so it's been rewarding to be able to touch out to a few people here and there.

I'm envious, though, that I don't get to focus 100% of my efforts like you do on just being out there and reaching people as much as possible.

But now that I own my own business, it's a little bit easier because I can't fire myself necessarily.

So I feel It's easier for me to reach out to folks.

I have a lot of people that come in and buy our products.

Most of the customers that buy our vehicles, we build four-wheel drive motorhomes, by the way.

People that come in and buy our vehicles, we usually will come to our facility in South Carolina and get a chance to develop a relationship with them.

Many of them are very into new age, green type living.

Our vehicles are 4 wheel drive and they're self-sustaining, so they take them and go out in the middle of nowhere.

They travel in South America, up in Alaska, the backwoods of North America.

We have 2 units going to Mongolia next month, and so a lot of people that have different ideas of what spirituality is all about, but they're still looking.

I've handed out quite a few great controversies, I've had lots of interesting discussions about end time events because people know something is happening.

Whatever you believe in, something's going on.

So we have kind of a ministry, a little commonality.

A lot of you are in nonprofit and ministries, but we all have the opportunity to reach out to people around us and meet folks.

I believe this is the first time I've ever given a business presentation to a group of Adventists.

I've done dozens of presentations to business folk, and I've never had the opportunity to have prayer before a presentation until today.

Father in heaven, we are so grateful that we are here together in this beautiful place, in this beautiful day, to learn more about practices to make our businesses and our ministries more efficient, and so that we can reach more souls for you.

It's all about you coming soon, Lord, And we look forward to that great day, and we ask that you will indeed come very quickly.

So let me give you 1 example of what it's like in the corporate world as far as religion is concerned.

I worked in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the corporate headquarters for a division of Eaton Corporation.

And 1 year after 9-11, we had a memorial service or a memorandum, you know, like a little, how would you say, yeah, memorial service for marking the 1 year anniversary of that.

So we all went outside in front of the building, gathered around the flagpole, and 1 of the vice presidents gave a short speech.

It was a very powerful time in America, those of you who were here and experienced that.

So the director of HR for the division was standing near me.

I know her quite well, and I said, Diane, as we're going back into the building, I said, Diane, how come we didn't have prayer?

In 1 nation under God, we might offend somebody by having prayer over the 9-11 event.

But that's how it is in secular America nowadays.

We have to be careful what we do, who we talk to, and things that we say.

Every time you have an opportunity to approach somebody and talk to them about Jesus, because it's a real opportunity, especially if they're open and receptive to it.

You never know when you get another chance.

Well, first of all, before I start, most of the material I'm gonna present is observations and things that I've learned over a few years.

I am borrowing a little bit from a favorite author of mine.

He writes a whole bunch of these little books, how to be a CEO, how to get to the top, how to be sales and marketing, how to be a rainmaker.

Each chapter is literally about a page or a page and a half.

And just powerful stuff about how you can be better at what you do.

If you ever want to pick 1 up, you can read this halfway across, in 1 of your plane trips, halfway across the oceans, an easy read, and it gets you kind of fired up about how to be a better business leader or ministry leader.

If anybody wants to see this afterwards, I'm more than happy to show it to them.

Do you consider yourselves to be entrepreneurs?

How many people consider themselves to be entrepreneurs?

You are a visionary and a leader of a ministry.

If you haven't thought of it that way, Maybe you should.

I set the vision, I set the strategy, and we execute on it.

If you work in a conference building, for any conference in the world, for the Adventist Church, if you work in the conference building and are paid by the conference, you are not an entrepreneur.

You might be at heart, but you're not an entrepreneur.

When you work for yourself as an independent ministry, you're an entrepreneur.

Do you consider it okay to take some of the business practices in the secular business world and use those in your ministry?

I believe that there are practices in the business world that probably aren't okay.

There's some things that take place that we all recognize aren't good.

So by and large, great minds have thought of great ways to do things.

Craig Harding

One Word: Communicate

Okay, let's bow our heads and get started.

Dear Heavenly Father, we praise you for the opportunity to be together.

We ask that you would be the 1 heard today, that you would speak to our minds and to our hearts that we could be more equipped to share the gospel with the world.

So, on our 1 thing theme, I was invited to share about 1 word, the idea of communication.

And so I thought, how do you start a topic that's going to be very practical, but tie it in to the fact that we are all our ministries, and how does communication play into that?

You know, I've heard people say, you know, if you want to be a communicator, you know, it's important for people maybe like David Asherick or maybe Frank Fournier to be experts in communication, but if I'm working in an industry, at a ministry, or I'm, you know, working in an office, or however my capacity is, a ministry leader, is it really that important that I communicate well, and maybe even consider becoming a communications expert?

And so let's talk a little bit about that.

And so as I thought about that, I thought, well, you know, what about the verse in John 1, verse 1?

You know, the apostle John was probably the closest human being to Christ while he was on earth as a disciple.

And it says that in the beginning was the word.

You know, as inspiration was resting upon the Apostle John, he could have used any description, any human language to describe the creator of the universe.

And what did he use to communicate that idea?

He said, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God.

And you have in the Greek this interchange of communication, of giving and receiving this community that focuses on communication.

In Romans, the Apostle Paul says this, he says, How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed?

And how shall they believe in him whom they have not heard?

And how shall they hear without a preacher?

After all, isn't the goal of every 1 of our institutions to reach people for Christ?

He's been making this masterpiece of righteousness by faith evident in the book of Romans, And he gets here and he says, it's all good, but what are they going to do if they can't hear it through a preacher?

And so it underlines again the need of communication.

We also find a few quotes in the Spirit of Prophecy.

Multitudes are perishing without 1 pitying look, 1 word or deed of sympathy.

If that isn't the saddest thing, but it's the true fact of many people throughout the world today.

Many have fainted and become discouraged in a great struggle of life whom 1 word of kindly cheer and courage would have strengthened to overcome.

So today we're going to look at what makes an idea succeed or fail.

But first I want to ask a question, what is it that makes 1 idea go viral, become a common knowledge versus an idea fail?

What are the, maybe some ingredients that make something succeed or fail as an idea?

So Tell me a little bit more about communication when you say that.

You can't get your idea across to somebody else.

So a great idea, not communicated well, might not become as popular as another idea.

A word that fits the need of somebody else.

So an idea that could fit in with someone's perceived need might be more well accepted than another idea.

There was a man and he was on a business trip and he was certainly not a Seventh-day Adventist and I would suggest probably not a Christian.

And he is in his hotel and he goes down to the little restaurant and bar and he's at the bar and he's getting something to drink.

And a beautiful lady comes up and she says, hey, you know, I've got a drink here, you're welcome to have one." And she gives him 1 and they're visiting for a little while and she walks away.

And the next thing he knows, he wakes up in a hotel room in the bathtub full of ice.

And there's a note and a phone and it says, call 911 and don't move.

So he gets his phone and he calls 911 and they ask him, where are you and he tells them, I'm sitting in a bathtub, it's filled with ice and it says don't move, call you.

And they said, I think you've been had by a ring of organ harvesters that have spiked your drink and reach around your back, and is there a tube coming out of your back?

He reaches around, and there's a tube coming out of his back, and he realizes at that moment that he has a significant problem.

And of course, it indicates that he needs to have emergency services come to the scene.

Now this idea in some form or another has gone around the world many, many, many times.

But, if I ask you at the end of this retreat and probably at the end of next year to tell me that story, you could tell that story and almost all of its important details without ever hearing it again.

Because even though it's a bad idea, even though it's a lie, it's communicated in a powerful and memorable way.

And so, what we want to look at today is not necessarily how we communicate, but what is it that we're actually communicating itself.

You know, a lot of times, you go someplace and they're going to have, you know, a speaking class.

Are you, you know, techniques, looking above people's heads so you don't get nervous?

You know, you get all this stuff that people will tell you, but very little is said about the actual substance and the techniques for making what you say actually be remembered.

You know, it's a tragedy, but I myself don't remember most of the sermons that I've heard in the last year.

If you thought back, it would be interesting to sit down and take about 30 minutes and see how many of the sermons over the last year that you've heard, and some of you will have heard many, you would actually remember.

And for some of us, it might even be worse than that.

It might be how many of the sermons that we've preached we actually remember.

And it comes based largely on something that we struggle with.

You might say, well, I think knowledge is kind of a good thing.

I mean, I could be dying of some disease that I could prevent because I have knowledge, and that is, of course, true, but there is a thing we call the curse of knowledge, and it goes like this.

What happens when you discover something?

For example, 1 that we run into a lot is if you were a non-SDA and you come to the truth and you learn about the state of the dead, you now have a different paradigm in your world and oftentimes we rush back in State of the Dead, The Mark of the Beast, these surprising discoveries that we have on the journey of becoming a Seventh-day Adventist, these truths, and we go back to share them with the people that also don't know.

The problem is we now know, and we forget what it was like to not know.

And so we tell a story that doesn't have the details that were playing in our mind but not communicating through our mouths.

An example of this we'll look at here in a second, but here's a quote I found interesting.

It says here, talking about the curse of knowledge, there are actually only 2 ways to beat the curse of knowledge.

The other is to take your ideas and change them.

And we'll look at this in the next illustration.

You know, I always wonder about scientists because they'll like study, you know, the life of cockroaches in an urban environment.

I'm thinking, you know, they're getting paid to do this stuff?

And so what they did is they brought, and we could do this, but I don't have time, but we could bring any 1 of you up, and we'd bring another 1 of you here, or maybe several of you, and I would have 1 of you sit and tap out the rhythm of a song on a piece of wood, a book, or something, and the other people would be listening.

What they did is they asked the people doing the tapping, how many of your listeners do you think should be able to get what song you're tapping when you tap?

The answer actually was they thought, you know, it was a 50-50 chance that they would get what was being tapped.

But what they found is actually somewhere between 2 and 3 out of 20 actually understood a single song of any of the ones that were tapped.

And it led to great frustration for the people tapping because they're sitting there and they're tapping, you know, happy birthday to you and the people are going, going okay, you're great knocking but, you know, I don't know what you're doing.

And there was this frustration, this tension, and the reason was is when you do that, and you should try it, it's a great experiment, you're hearing happy birthday to you play in your mind, because you know what you're trying to communicate.

And so this is a challenge we face all of the time as we try to communicate the messages we have, especially because the messages we have are not common knowledge generally, right?

We have health knowledge that we want to share, but it's different.

We have truths that, State of the Dead, for example, when you know the truth about State of the Dead, it's just plain and clear.

But when you don't, but we forget how it was to not know.

Steven Grabiner

One Thing: Focus vs. Fog

And so my topic this morning is 1 thing, fog or focus.

And I have a picture up here that I pulled off the internet.

I'm much more of a whitewater kayaker and canoeist than I would be a boater that would be using this.

And the question, if there are any boaters here, If you are looking at this chart, what would be the most important thing for you to know?

Channels, probably depths of water, interesting little sign down here, kind of danger zone.

That's really not the most important thing.

Probably even if you know how to swim, anyway, it's a distance.

North, south, you know, where the direction on the compass is?

Okay, well, here's an evangelistic way to look at the map.

You can know everything about the depth and the currents and the direction, but if you don't know where you are on the map, it's useless.

Now if you're good at maps and you had all this information, you might be able to determine where you were if you didn't know.

And that's kind of what I want to talk about this morning is as leaders, knowing where we are and where we're going.

A couple of years ago, I took a leadership class and someone shared this with me, thought it was very insightful.

And the speaker said that a leader is knowing what to do, knowing why it should be done and also knowing how to bring the appropriate resources together to accomplish that task.

Knowing what to do, why it should be done, and how to gather the resources.

Those resources could be monetary resources, they could be people, time, materials, whatever is involved in that.

But the important point for us this morning is knowing what to do.

And oftentimes, Leaders find themselves uncertain as to where they are on the map.

Certain things happen in their life, and this isn't just for leaders.

That's who we're talking about this morning, the leaders in training, some of the students that are here, some of us who have had experience for a long time, but both in leadership and personally or experientially, oftentimes we lose our bearings.

And so it's important for us to kind of come back to that.

And so I want to use a little illustration now.

I think I actually shared this here at Uchupines a few years ago.

And that is oftentimes leaders or at times leaders find themselves in what I'd like to call a fog.

Now if you're driving down a highway and you've got the nicest car, and if my son was here I could ask what the nicest car is and he'd probably tell me, Frank is our car man.

So if we're driving down into Bugatti, which must be a really nice car, Frank likes it, and all of a sudden fog comes down on the road, does it matter how much horsepower is under the engine?

Cuz you really can't see what you're doing or where you're going.

And when leaders find themselves in a fog, that's a time of danger.

Every leader, at some point in their experience, finds themselves in a fog.

Sometimes leaders feel like they're juggling a lot of balls.

Or you've probably seen those individuals who spin plates.

You know, they have lots of these plates.

And you're spinning all these plates, but you're not doing well and you know it.

You've lost your clarity and you know it.

You're dropping balls, you're dropping plates and you know it.

So The question is, how do we get out of fog?

But oftentimes when we are in fog, when we've lost our focus, when we're not really clear as to where we are on the map or what direction we should be taking, we become fatigued.

Those of you that are kind of new in your leadership trajectory, you're emerging leaders, have lunch or breakfast or walk with somebody that's been in the ministry for a long time and ask them a question, have you ever experienced that?

I'm sure you're going to get the answer, yes, because every leader falls into this.

And when we're fatigued, then we begin to have flirtation.

And I'm not particularly talking about flirting guys and girls, although men and women, that can happen.

I'm talking about the kind of flirtation that comes about when we begin to think, maybe the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.

I begin to flirt with this idea, I should move on to another pasture.

There's times when it is time for us to move on.

Actually there's times when we should be moved on, actually.

We need wise nursery men that can transplant trees, Ellen White's expression, where individuals have been in a position for too long for their own spiritual health, and it's time to move on, oftentimes a difficult situation.

But here I'm talking about when we're in this fog, when we've lost kind of our focus, we're not really sure what we're doing and we realize it.

But exceptional leaders try to find a way out of that fog quickly.

Chad Kreuzer

Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Witnessing With the Word

Let's bow our heads for a word of prayer before we begin.

Heavenly Father, more than anything, I want to be right with you.

I want to pray for forgiveness for speaking behind anybody's back.

Lord, I want to walk in your ways of righteousness.

Back to Menu

All Teachings

One Accord: Team Building

48m

One Word: Communicate

52m

One Thing: Focus vs. Fog

49m

Witnessing With the Word

59m

The Great Controversy Theme

1h 25m

The Holy One of Israel

45m

10. The Reformation Will Not Be Televised

2h 6m

9. A Poisoned Lottery Ticket Winner

1h 38m

8. The Enoch of India

1h 38m

7. How to Ace Your Exams and Still Be Normal

1h 13m

6. The End of Social Injustice

1h 36m

12. Demon Possession in India

1h 41m

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