    Objectives:  Demonstrate unique opportunities that dentists/physicians have to widely impact their community  Analyze the value that community involvement brings to the dental/medical practice  Discuss follow-up strategies to maximize outcomes     

AMEN 2015: CrossTraining

<div> <div> <div> <div> <p>Objectives:</p> <p></p> <p>Demonstrate unique opportunities that dentists/physicians have to widely impact their community </p> <p>Analyze the value that community involvement brings to the dental/medical practice </p> <p>Discuss follow-up strategies to maximize outcomes </p> </div> </div> </div> </div>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Adventist Medical Evangelism Network (AMEN)

Breakout Sessions C

Dwayne Lemon

A Special Key in Developing the Mind of Christ

Michael Hollie

Dinner With the Doctor

Joe Kretschmar

CrossTraining With the Latest in GI

Chester Clark

Ronnie Hold

Community Involvement

Bradley Smith

Corp Fitness: Crossing the Chasm From Served to Servicer

I hate to interrupt your conversations, but it is time to start our last dental session.

And so we can get out in time for supper.

If you could please take a seat and we'll have a word of prayer and get started.

Gracious Father in heaven, we thank you for the things that we've learned today We thank you for the experiences of life and for the privileges We have of serving the needs of our patients and our families and friends.

I pray that you will bless this session here as we share the ways you've led in at least the lives of 2 of us here.

And I pray that we might continue to learn and find ways to serve you better.

Well, the topic today is community service, community needs, And I was asked to share how the Lord led and directed in my experience in serving the community in a way that probably very few of you have been called to do.

We went to a dark county after I finished school.

We owed $30, 000, which was too much for the general conference to send us to mission service.

And so my wife and I decided we'd go to mission service in our home conference, which was Arkansas and Louisiana.

And we found a county that had no Adventist witness and began a health ministry and a church and later on a school, and we had no intention of doing that originally.

But It was the era when it was unethical to advertise.

Now not many of you remember that period of time.

And so it was suggested, you know, when you're starting a practice, and this was a scratch practice, I built my own office, spent the first 6 months out of dental school, you know, hammering nails and building the office according to the design that I had developed in my senior year of dental school.

Anyway, so 1 of the suggestions was get involved in the community.

And so it wasn't long, I think I'd been practicing maybe a year and someone asked me to serve on the housing authority board.

And I said, well, whatever that is, yeah, I'll do that.

But the city had a low income housing project of 20 or 25 units, I guess, and so I served on that board, and it met every 3 months, I think it was, and I met with him twice, and then My receptionist was the wife of a former mayor in the town, and she suggested that I run for city council because they really needed some help and leadership on the city council.

Of course, that was never in my wildest dreams, but the Lord impressed me to run for city council, and of course I was elected.

1 thing you'll find in a small town, and I was a town of about 800 people, there's always a leadership void.

And so if, regardless of where you practice, if you want to get your name in the public and, you know, get some exposure, then it's good to serve in a public way like this.

So I served about 18 years actually on the city council which was a commitment of about 2 hours a month.

They had a council meeting, you know, second Tuesday of every month.

And it wasn't long though before there was some things going on.

1 of the council members came to me and said that the mayor, who was his uncle, was doing some things illegal and wanting me to take care of it.

And, and so it took a while for me to figure out what was going on.

Actually, he was drawing disability and he was paying his wife for work that he was doing for the city on the side.

And anyway, so When we figured this all out, we asked him to resign.

And everyone thought that even though it wasn't public, that I wanted the job of mayor, and which was far from the case.

So as years went by, I regularly declined every 4 years when there was election for the mayor.

And during this time we also saw there was a tremendous need for a new city hall and fire station, and I won't even try to describe how deplorable what we had was.

But we had voted a half cent sales tax to pay for a new city hall and fire station.

After about 5 years or so, we had $50, 000.

And council wanted to build a nice farm type building just a little metal structure that Would house the City Hall and fire station and I said no I'd really like to see a nicer building I'd like to get an architect and and and have a building we can all be really proud of And actually in the back of my mind I was also devising a building that had large enough room for health education and evangelistic meetings and things like that as well.

And so they said oh no we can't afford that Let's just take the money we have and build what we can.

And I said, well, there's a foundation that was just formed.

3 little ladies that had owned the bank had sold it and formed a foundation.

And I said, if I go to the Olds Foundation and ask them for a hundred thousand dollars to build a new City Hall Would you agree to get a architect and do something nice?

Yeah, we would So went to these little ladies and they said oh we'd be delighted to contribute a hundred thousand dollars for a new City Hall and we'll do that under 1 condition.

And that was coming up that year, so I was kind of in a box.

So that's how I became the mayor of the town.

So anyway, my assessment was the city just needed leadership.

And the overall attitude was we've never had anything, we never will, the city's going down the tubes, you know, and so just coming along and saying, look, we can do differently, you know, we can have something nice.

So we built actually a 7, 500-foot City Hall and Fire Station, which included a room that would seat about 200 people.

And we've done a lot of health education classes and some evangelistic meetings.

In fact, we're doing evangelistic meetings in that facility right now, 5 nights a week.

Some people have driven by thinking it's the county seat because it's such a nice nice building.

Well we've done other projects we've restored the city circle that's business areas built around a square with a circle in the middle and we have a nice fountain, colored lights and period lighting around the outside.

And that was about a $250, 000 project and mostly paid for by the federal government.

But I was very blessed because, and actually I shouldn't be talking about myself so much, but this foundation would, almost every project I came up with, they would help fund.

When we ran out of money, they would help fund it.

And as you look at a city's needs, there's needs for safe water, safe streets, recreation opportunities, medical care, jobs, adequate education, and religious freedom.

Well, we, I was also able to, there was a little medical clinic there that was sitting idle and I was able to find an Adventist physician that served the community for about 10 years, which was a tremendous blessing.

And we also were able to build a city park with mostly state funds and this foundation funds as well, a really nice park with a fitness trail, quarter-mile fitness trail around it.

And it was all a real blessing and 1 of the benefits to the Lord's work was that during this time we were Also, the Lord had led us to start a school and we had an academy, began in 1988, about 5 miles out of town in the country.

And way back when David Koresh was in the news and all people were, the rumor going around was there's another Waco right out here.

And so my involvement in, with the city council really was a help to give people credibility that no this isn't, you know anything like that.

And the school's been involved in the community.

We do community service days twice a year in helping the older people take care of their yards and houses and various things.

So it was a blessing in that it squelched a lot of the rumors and a lot of the false ideas people had of who Seventh-day Adventists are.

And we also were, well, it, we found that we, there's always an element of people who are not really, they're against or negative about just about anything.

Most people that spoke to me were very appreciative of what I with the Lord's help had done in helping the city visually and with you know economic development.

We actually, the city hall and fire station, we borrowed money and about $500, 000 and paid it off in 12 years and so the city is actually in excellent financial condition with many cities around us have borrowed millions of dollars and just barely paying the interest on that or the principal.

But about 2 years before my last term, I was mayor for 16 years, and Word got out that we were building a new Adventist church, and it was gonna be right on the main highway, actually just across the highway almost from my office.

And from then on, the last 2 years of my term, I experienced what Paul tells us in Timothy, 2 Timothy 3, 16, that all that do righteous will suffer persecution.

And It was really quite an interesting experience.

And I felt that the desire on the part of some people, and granted it was mostly the rabble, but we had a newspaper editor and our little town has a newspaper that circulates in about 3 counties, and this newspaper editor is a Church of Christ pastor, in his spare time, and he is quite prejudiced racially and also religiously as well, And I'm not sure which of his prejudices are stronger, Adventists or those of other races.

But anyway, those last 2 years, he never spoke to me once.

He would publish just about anything anybody told him, which was often fallacious.

In fact, just a few weeks ago, someone told me that they understood that they were wanting to get rid of me and the school, and my school, which of course is also just, I'm sure, a very small group of people, but nonetheless, as the last...

And the other factor going along with this was that there was a long-term employee of the city something like 22 years who was very treating the city very dishonestly and I had been trying to tell the City Council this for several years and they didn't believe it but finally after things came out the way they did and actually someone tried to burn down our house about 2 months before the end of my term but that's another another story we won't we won't get into but a week before my term ended the council voted to hire somebody else to replace him and my last day in office I had to fire him and hire this other this other person and So it was extremely stressful and ended with a lot of relief that I was no longer the mayor.

But during this, actually 32 years of serving the community, I felt that it was a very positive thing.

And I would encourage any of you, even though, you know, there's a lot of dishonesty and, and ugly things going on in politics.

But we can be a real light and a source of truth and righteousness in situations where often times there isn't that much of that influence.

But thankfully, the people in the community still stop me and tell me how much they appreciate what what was done in the in the community during during those times and we were able to leave the city with some good leadership and strangely enough the 2 people also during the last couple of weeks of all kinds of things going on, the city clerk resigned and the man that was hired to replace her is a pastor And the other water operator that was hired is also a part-time pastor that was wanting to be able to work closer to the church that he was pastoring.

And so, It was a blessing to see ungodly people replaced by people that are, at least, standing for Christian values and truth.

In terms of what I learned from this experience is that it's probably not good to take on so many things at 1 time.

And also that if God calls you to serve your community, there are many ways that you can be a blessing and point others, have opportunities to point others to truth and righteousness.

And that's basically the experience that I've had in community service.

And now Ronnie Holt is going to share what he has been doing.

I want to thank Audioverse, too, for all their hard work putting our programs together, and that's the reason we're staying behind the mic, so we can make a smooth transition there.

We've had some excellent, excellent from our speakers here with Dr.

Series

Breakout Sessions C

Community Involvement

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Sexual Purity: Lost and Found

1h 19m

Preparing For the End of Time

1. Why Prayer Matters

45m

Witnessing on Campus

Willing to Be Led

56m

Giving Effective Bible Studies

1h 24m

Whole Person Care: Tools for Incorporating Spiritual Care in a Busy Practice

1h 6m

Onward and Upward - Maintaining the Vision for Medical Evangelism

48m

Plenary Sessions

AMEN 2022 Mission Program

50m

How to Study the Bible and Empower Your Devotional Life- Part 2

58m

GoTential

The Tentmakers Tactical Advantage

33m

Going ABOVE and BEYOND

Daring to Ask for More - Part 5

53m

WYC 2012 Morning Devotional

Fruits and Gifts, Part 2

43m

Allied Health

What the World Needs…Now

57m

Sound Doctrine