AMEN 2012: Testimony

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network (AMEN)

AMEN 2012 Plenary Sessions

Ted N.C. Wilson

God’s Special Plan - Medical Missionary Work

Dale Leamon

Jesus Our Health, Part 1

Jeff McAuliffe

Contemporary Tent Making

Tim Howe

Phil Mills

How a Physician/Dentist Testimony Can Affect Lasting Change Leading to Improved Patient Outcomes

John Chung

Trust and Obey and Trust

Jesus Our Health, Part 2

Brian Schwartz

Growing in Grace and Experiencing Repentance

Mark Ranzinger

The Testimony of Jesus

Jesus Our Health, Part 3

Last year I was able to do a little presentation.

Last year we, you know, I think they take the dentists sometime and put them on the second floor.

And we had a little presentation on something called Mission to the Many, which is a program that we're initiating in Pennsylvania Conference.

I'll tell you a little bit more about that as we go along.

Basically, what my life has evolved into as a practitioner is tent making.

I found that dentistry is an excellent way to get to do other things and God really has blessed the more I challenge him on that notion the more he makes it evident that I'm headed in the right direction.

So this year I was able to cut back to about 25 hours a week in my practice and believe it or not I still can support my 3 children at Andrews.

And 1 child at home, I'll tell you about him in a little bit.

I always have to tell stories about Jaden, for those of you who are familiar with me, my youngest son Jaden, while the other 3 are in college, he is in fourth grade.

He came on later in life, and he has Down syndrome, and he has autism, and he's ADHD.

And he's got all those special things in him that make life incredibly joyful for us as parents.

I say that and I really mean it, because Jaden has taught me more than I could possibly ever have been taught from a book.

Last year, I told some stories about him, and I'll tell 1 in a little bit here about him as well.

1 of the things that we know about city ministries is it's not the first time it's come up in the word of God.

It's not the first time it's come up to God's people.

In fact, there was a prophet who was asked to go to a city he didn't want to go to, and most people don't want to go to the cities.

The prophet was Jonah, And Jonah decided he wanted to go in the opposite direction because he couldn't possibly believe that God meant what he said when he was talking about saving the people of Nineveh.

Well, I'm going to tell you that today God means exactly what he's saying in that he wants to save the people in the cities of the world.

And he's called his people to renew their energies.

This is not the first time he's called us to do this.

A hundred years ago or more, Ellen White began to give a series of invitations and ideas for us to go back and reach the cities where the people are.

It's not because God loves cities, it's because he loves the people who are in the cities, right?

And so we had the call once and sort of like Jonah, we didn't go in the right direction.

For a hundred years we've been sort of in the belly of the whale with regards to this issue in particular.

Now, this is where my story comes in about my son.

Because prior to Jaden going to school, I always thought elopement meant that you ran away and got married.

But elopement in public school means that you're just running away all the time.

There was 1 day, and I can't explain to you why they've assigned him 2 aides that have bad knees.

But there was 1 day where he got out of the building, through the cornfield, through the ball fields, and was knocking on a Mennonite lady's door before they caught up to him.

But 1 time when he eloped, something else happened.

See, the other thing that is particularly sensitive to Jaden is he can't eat anything with weed in it.

And if he gets a hold of it, he goes from ADHD to like ping pong ball ADHD.

And so somehow he got away from 1 of his aides and he got down the hall, he decided to go into 1 of the teacher's offices.

And on the teacher's desk was a donut and he couldn't resist.

And he ate the whole donut before they caught up to him and it wasn't just a short time, they completely lost him.

They had no idea where he was until they finally found him sitting on top of the bleachers in the gym.

It's sort of the life that we're used to.

Sort of what Jonah found himself in the bottom of a ship.

So in Pennsylvania a few years ago we began to look at this notion of the cities and how can we begin to address it as a conference.

Pennsylvania as we looked at it as a state has 13 metropolitan areas in it throughout the state And we began to realize as we were looking at the church planting ministries, we began to realize that in our church plants, the plants that were in the cities were growing and the plants that were in the suburbs were struggling.

Well, it makes sense because of the people that are there.

I was a church planter and I chose to plant a church out in the suburbs and we've pretty much remained the same.

It's a good church, good worship and fellowship, but our growth is stagnant because there's more deer for neighbors than there are people.

But we looked at Pennsylvania and we figured out something, and the very bottom line is what's telling.

It says that 82.5% of our population is living in the 13 main metro areas.

And yet, we as Adventists, where do we like to live?

We like to live out in the country, in the suburbs, and we kind of made that decision intentionally to live in the country, but we forgot that the rest of the story was to go back and minister to the people in the cities.

And I've been to places where I've done some coaching, I've done some seminars with Adventists who live on the fringe of the cities and we've talked about what God is calling us to do and that people are perfectly content to stay out in the country.

Today, I hope I can move you off of perfectly content.

So we realized that we've got this incredible charge given to us by the Spirit of Prophecy.

This is 1, a funny thing is that a few months ago I got to speak at Elder Wilson's church.

And then he had, now last night he put all my quotes up, so you're just going to have to see them again, okay?

This is the 1 that we all like to look at.

There's no change in the messages that God has sent in the past.

The work in the cities is the essential work for this time.

When the cities are worked as God would have them, the result will be the setting and operation of a mighty movement such as we have not yet witnessed.

Notice the word when is prophetic in its notion.

When means it hasn't happened yet, but it's going to.

And notice the words, as God would have them, suggest the fact that God has a way, he wants it done.

What an incredible statement for Sister White to say, such as we have not yet witnessed because remember what the movements were that she was through?

She went through the Millerite movement, she went through the early years of the great advent movement and yet in 1910 she comes to a point in her life and she says wait a minute folks, there's a movement coming like we've never seen before.

We set up a study group together, got together, we began to look at the quotes.

And before we realized that there had been other compilations, we actually spent time and created our own compilation, Pennsylvania Conference.

If you wanna go and look at our research, you can go to missiontothemany.com.

You can look at the research for yourself there and see what we came up and discovered.

And 1 of the things we discovered was this.

The first thing is We found this quotation, what are conferences for in reference to the work in the cities, what are conferences for if not for the carrying forward of this very work?

It's a unique notion in Adventism because most of the movement in terms of reaching the cities has come from individual type efforts or ministry efforts.

The Pennsylvania Conference made a decision, I actually have some people from Pennsylvania Conference here that we're going to talk to in a little bit.

Series

AMEN 2012 Plenary Sessions

Contemporary Tent Making

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

ACM: 3 Establishing Urban Centers of Influence

1h 27m

ACM: 1 The History of City Missions in the Adventist Church

1h 19m

To Know and Be Known

The Judgments of God

1h 11m

GYC SE 2013 Plenary Sessions

Heaven On Earth

53m

GYC SE 2012 Seminar: Leadership

I Just Wanna Be a Sheep

58m

The Remnant Responds

1h

Personal Evangelism

How to Grow Your Church: The Motion of the Movement

1h 23m

Filled by God's Spirit

01 Filled by God’s Spirit

50m

AMEN 2011 Plenary Sessions

Radical Apostleship

33m

Seminar: Lift Him Up

Health Message & Righteousness by Faith

1h 22m

Experiencing the Revival

1h 16m

Pentecost and the Latter Rain

58m

Sound Doctrine