GYC 2014: At The Cross

Training Center Churches

Kameron DeVasher

Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

5. Discipline

This message was presented at the GYC 2014 conference at the Cross in Phoenix, Arizona.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

It's part of our Training Center Church seminar session here, seminar series.

But Before we get into any study at all, we of course want to start with a word of prayer.

So please, if you would, bow your heads with me.

Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this day.

Thank you that we have it at all and that we can spend it together.

And Right now in this room, Lord, we would ask that you would teach us things we need to know so that we can work for you the way you want us to.

I'm just gonna go pretty strictly to the script here, but I'd like you to follow along and you can kind of see an idea that's developing here.

We mentioned the Bible's great commission that Christ gave in Matthew chapter 28, says go and make disciples.

The opening lines of the great book, Acts of the Apostles, says the church was organized for service, its mission is to carry the gospel to the world.

And the Seventh-day Adventist church has a mission statement that says we're going to go make disciples by giving the everlasting gospel in the context of the 3 angels' messages.

And it includes the line discipling them.

And I mentioned in a previous seminar that that little word discipling kind of bugs me because it's not an actual word.

It's a made up term, I believe, to sound nicer than the real word, which is discipline.

The root word of disciple, the process by which you become a disciple is a process called discipline.

Now popular as it may be today, the word disciple is a noun.

The true discipleship requires discipline.

Notice what the Apostle Paul writes to the believers in Philippi.

Verse 12, therefore my beloved, As you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence.

So clearly he has set up, he's preached the message, they've been obedient, but now he's planning to leave, or he has already left, but he says to do what?

I thought it was just something you received, you accepted it, it's a transaction, you got it.

You mean there's more to do than just simply say, I've gone through the Bible studies, I've listened to the sermons, I've accepted, I came down front, I've...

Paul says, yes, now that I'm gone, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

For it is God who works in you, both to will and to do his good pleasure.

Now to be clear, he's not saying these are your works that do apart from Christ.

He's saying Christ now dwells in you, but allow him to do his work, and you must continue this growth process.

Now that the message has been preached, work out your own salvation, discipline.

Christian Service, page 58, 1 sentence that should give us pause.

It is evident, This was written, I believe, in 1902.

White was able to look at the condition of the remnant people, the Seventh Adventist Church, and she was able to look and say this, it is evident.

This is not a thing that the Lord had to reveal to you on the surface you couldn't see.

It's clear, it is evident that all the sermons preached have not developed a large class of self-denying workers.

We've preached sermon after sermon, crusade after crusade, campaign after campaign, and what do we have at the end of it?

We have a whole lot of members, but where are the missionaries?

We got a lot of watchers, but where are the workers?

It is obvious that the message has been preached, it's been accepted, and people have joined, but where are the workers?

And we've noticed in the cycle of evangelism, discipleship ministry, well, we'll get to it.

In the cycle of evangelism, we talked about preparing the soil and then sowing the seed and then cultivating with Bible studies, guiding new people to the word, and at harvest time, perhaps, in that own home environment or in a public campaign, someone makes an appeal, a commitment to get baptized and join God's Remnant Church and we think, aha, the cycle is complete.

What do you do with the crop that's harvested?

What's the purpose of even having a crop?

You've got to do something with the grain.

That's what this particular session is about, is looking at that preservation, that last phase of the cycle.

Let's say that you have done all of the things.

You mingled with people and met their needs and won their confidence.

And then you sow the seed of the Word of God into their lives through either literature or media or your own gospel presentation out of your own mouth, which, give that a shot sometime.

Don't just let John Bradshaw do the work for you.

Then you have cultivated, they were interested in Bible study, they accepted what you said in this, would you like to learn more?

And you go through this series of Bible studies, they come to the evangelistic campaign, they give their heart to the Lord, and they get baptized and you're there smiling.

In a lot of times, we put $10, 000 on this end of the cycle.

We put 10, 000 hours into this end of the cycle.

We put all our creativity, all our energies, all our attention in getting them to walk them through the thing and get them to make that decision for Christ.

And then the next Sabbath, after the chairs have folded up, the banners have come down.

And then we're shocked when a year later, where were those 9 decisions for baptism?

It was a great harvest, collected it all, then we just let it sit on the shelf and rot.

Which is where it brings in discipleship ministry.

Guiding someone through the application of the theory that they've heard.

The doctrine, the Bible discourses, all of those sermons that have been preached, how do we now integrate that into the life So that you not only be on the books, but you'll be in person and beyond that, you'll be a worker for Christ going to sow your own seed and start the cycle all over again.

Discipleship ministry involves more than publicly preaching or even personally teaching God's Word to others.

At its very core, true discipleship requires personal mentoring.

In the same way they needed to come to Christ through someone leading them step by step through the Word, now they need to see the application of that in the same way on the other end.

All right, you gave me the theory over here, now help me learn it in practice over here.

Help me integrate into this new lifestyle.

4. Soul-Winning DNA, Part 2

According to my clock, it's 3.08, and that's plenty of time to start a 03:00 meeting.

This 1, if I'm not mistaken, is the 1 with the color chart on the front of it, okay?

That's Session 4 in our Training Center Church curriculum here.

I'm sorry, these shorter time blocks are really throwing me off a little bit, so I just get going, and the time was up 5 minutes ago and I just want to, you know, hit myself with a hammer.

But we're just going to get started and we're going to try to take all these principles and put them, all right, what would the cycle of evangelism look like in the local church?

And how was your church supposed to operate?

Are we talking about some rebellious, newfangled, crazy, off-the-wall thing, or is this legitimate stuff we're talking about?

That's going to be the burden of our message today at this time, but before we get started, let's have a quick word of prayer.

Heavenly Father, Again, we thank you so much for the privilege of coming together and working for you.

Teach us how to do it well and help our local churches to be centers of evangelism across this world.

Again, we see the Great Commission there.

Is a pretty big loaded question, but the purpose of the Church is to win souls.

All authority has been given, and heaven and earth has been given to me, therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them, in the name of the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I've commanded you, and lo, I'm with you always, even to the end of the age." Acts of the Apostles, page 9, the Church.

By the way, these are the opening words of the book, Acts of the Apostles.

The Church is God's appointed agency for the salvation of men.

It was organized for service, and its mission is to carry the gospel of the world.

The members of the Church, those whom He has called out of darkness into His marvelous light, are to show forth His glory.

So now we have the Bible with its mission statement for the church is to go and make disciples.

We have the spirit of prophecy saying this is the purpose of the church, it's the members would go and make disciples.

And then let's go to the official Seventh-day Adventist Church mission statement.

The mission of the Seventh Adventist Church is to do what?

That's all it is, is a retooling of the Great Commission in the context, of course, of the 3 angels' messages.

To make disciples of all people, communicating the everlasting gospel in the context of the 3 angels' messages of Revelation 14, 6-12, leading them to accept Jesus as personal Savior and unite with his remnant church, Discipling them to serve him as Lord and preparing them for his soon return.

I'm not going to get on my soapbox right now, but that's not an actual word.

Put it into any word processor and click define.

It's a word we've made up, but we'll talk about that in another seminar.

But what would this look like in the local church?

Well, what I want to go through is basically help you understand the local church structure.

We're going to be reading from the church manual and other sub things, but I want you to see what a local church, by our own admission, by our own documentation, is designed to be like.

Okay, now what this chart is, Let me explain what you're looking at.

This is simply a picture, a JPEG that's stuck in there of a document that I made 2 years ago.

In fact, you can see in the very bottom corner there it was updated in 3-14-13, okay, 2013.

We're coming up on our nominating time again, beginning of this next year, so keep us in prayer.

But what you can see here is that the, I was very frustrated at, I was at a larger church before this 1, and the nominating committee report was several pages long, and it was all black and white, and it was just all these names and offices and stuff, and you'd have to, like, on page 3, here's 1 of my positions, on page 4, here's the other 1, I don't know what, between, and you don't really know, it's basically just a list of names with jobs, names of jobs, names of jobs, names of jobs.

It's not particularly organized that well, at least in the church where I had come from.

And I said, well, here I am the senior pastor of this thing.

I want a thing that I can understand and organize for myself.

So I said, what if there is a way that we could take the entire nominating committee report?

Now, this is for a church, by the way, of 200 membership.

And On Sabbath, we have about 100 to 120 in the sanctuary.

So just to give you an idea, this is a good cross-section of Adventism.

There's a good number of churches smaller than it, a good number above it, but that's about the average church size.

Now, The church, the highest authority in the local church is what or whom?

That meets together in a thing called a church business session.

The board is not the highest authority in the church.

The board works for the business session.

Okay, the pastor is not the highest authority in the church.

The pastor is not the highest authority in the local church.

He's a conference employee assigned to an area that has your church in it.

The highest authority, governing-wise, of course aside from Jesus Christ and the Word of God, you understand what I'm saying, but earthly-wise, ecclesiologically, is the church and business session.

But every time you have to spend some money or organize a thing.

You don't call a church business meeting.

So you have a thing called the church board that is a representative body working on behalf of the church and business session.

It helps to put everything in terms of money for some reason, but if you wanted to spend, let's say $50, and you're on the personal ministries team, and you're a personal ministries leader, and you want to spend $50, do you have to call a church business meeting to get the authority to do that?

Do you even have to go to a church board meeting to spend $50 out of your own department?

Now, what if you wanted to spend $5, 000?

But does that even need to go to the church in business session?

Well, that kind of depends on how big your whole church budget is.

For the most part, maybe not, but definitely go to the church board.

But let's say you want to spend $50, 000.

You call a business session, you advertise, you let people know, we've got to talk about this.

There are certain things that are good for the whole church to look at, and other things like, man, we trust you, take care of it.

The church in business session, the highest authority, next comes the church board working on their behalf.

The church board is constituted of the department leaders.

Basically, it's the pastor and elders and all the department leaders.

For instance, in this 1, and this is, like I said, this is not just made up names.

This isn't Joe Smith and John Sally, whatever.

3. Soul-Winning DNA, Part 1

This message was presented at the GYC 2014 conference at La Crosse in Phoenix, Arizona.

♪♪ Now, just to briefly recap, the previous material, is everyone who's here now was at least The last 1 or the 1 before that?

In the last couple of sessions, we were looking at the big picture philosophy of why we need training center churches.

And we looked at the ministry of Christ, first of all, as the leader of the heavenly host.

He delegated many of his duties, especially ministering to other people, and we don't have time to go into that, but we saw that.

We also saw that when he was here on earth, he brought that same model of ministry to the New Testament church.

And I should say, I don't remember where it is in here or if we get into it.

Either way, If we haven't gotten to it, it is in here, I'll spoil the thing right now, but this was the Old Testament.

They've already been passed out, so just any newcomers can get 1, that would be great.

God has always operated through organization with the goal to bid every member to be a missionary, everyone being a disciple maker, not just a follower, but a doer, a worker, not a watcher.

So now we saw in Adventist church history in our last episode how that was the original building block model and help our church to grow faster, but a church has emerged, thus the real emerging church, that is pastor-centered.

Instead of lay member doing the ministry, it's everything is about the pastor.

So what would it look like, as we transition now to more practical things, what would it look like for a church to operate under some of these training center church principles, where the minister's primary job is education, equipping, and training, and organizing the work, and the member's job is to fill those roles we typically think is pastoral.

And that's kind of where we're headed now in the first of 2 sessions called Soul Winning DNA, how to take these concepts of soul winning and infuse them into the very fiber of who we are in a local church and as individuals.

But as other people come in, I want to let you know we do have, come up wherever you are, we do have handouts ready to go, but we're going to be, or maybe they're in the back, something here.

Okay, there's some here, there's some there, but there's handouts available for everyone.

And we're going to start with a word of prayer and then after our just brief review we just did, we're going to be off to the races.

So if you would, let's just bow our heads.

Heavenly Father, thank you again so much for the opportunity to visit together.

Thank you for this GYC occasion that brings us here.

And now as we continue to study your word and the principles and practices that you've instructed for us, Help us to truly, truly follow your instruction and see the results that only your spirit can lead to.

As we should with everything, start with a Bible study.

I don't just list the text, I give some of those things, but oftentimes we'll give more context than what I have room to put in there.

So these are just the notes that you have in your hand are good for helping you follow along the flow of thought to take them home and to remember.

But when we look at something or any other thought, please have your own Bible out and you have your own pencils and papers ready to go.

Luke chapter 4, Jesus begins his earthly ministry by going to the home church of Nazareth.

Luke chapter 4, and we find the story of that Sabbath morning when Jesus came home.

And we'll start with the verse 16, again that's not in your notes, but we're just broadening it out a little bit.

So he came to Nazareth where he had been brought up.

And as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood up to read.

Now, the way that's written is interesting to me in the fact that he, it was his custom to go to church on Sabbath, but it also says that he stood up to read.

That he was involved with church even before he was the, you know, the public Messiah figure?

He always went to church and always had something to do, so he was coming to read.

And it says in verse 17, and he was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah.

And when he had opened the book, and of course this book is not codex like we understand it, it was a scroll, yes?

When he had opened the book, so, not to get too nitpicky, was the book open when it was handed to him?

No, he was simply handed the scroll in its entirety, And he opened the book.

Now, I don't know if there is an assigned reading for the day, but look what happens here.

And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written.

It certainly gives you the sense that he's looking for a very specific passage.

He finds the thing and he says, ah, wait a minute.

You don't have chapter and verse and stuff.

Verse 18, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.

He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

Then he closed the book and gave it back to the attendant and sat down.

And the eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed on him, and he began to say to them, today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.

So clearly Christ has identified himself with this prophecy.

He was the 1 who looked for it, he's the 1 who found it, he read it, and then when he was done, he said, this is me right here today.

So this is where Christ understood from the Bible his mission statement to be for his work on the earth.

You guys felt guilty about being late and you did the color thing.

If you want, we have some of the ones with the color chart.

If you'd like to, you know, I should say, here they are.

Let's go back to the Old Testament now to the book of Isaiah, chapter 61.

And let's find in our Bibles what Christ found in his.

And you see right off the bat, he started with verse 1.

The Spirit of the Lord has abounded me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor.

He sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, the opening of the prison, blah, blah, blah.

Now, and it goes on to say, to comfort all who mourn, to console those, and it gives a more, this is where you have that, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for a more, it says, we're very familiar with this, but I want you to draw your attention to the last closing line of Isaiah 61, verse 11.

The last verse, as we would have it in our Bibles.

For as the earth brings forth its bud, as the garden causes the things that are sown in it to spring forth, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations." So how is the Lord God going to cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations?

As the seed goes in, it will be growing and planting.

And this garden harvest metaphor is right there in Christ's mission statement that he himself said, I am doing this in front of you today.

So it's little wonder that Christ repeatedly compared the spreading of the gospel to the world, the work of soul winning, to agriculture.

It's right there in his mission statement as he understood it.

Back to Menu

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4. Soul-Winning DNA, Part 2

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