Wes Peppers

GO! Evangelism 2011

Mary Bernt

Sikhu Daco

Gary Gibbs

Taj Pacleb

Eugene Prewitt

GYC Southwest

Panel Discussion

Father in heaven, we are so thankful this morning that we are here and we are delighted that we can be a part of this weekend to receive evangelism training and not to just come to Christ but once we come to Him, then we can go for Him.

And so we just ask your spirit to be with each 1 today, and we pray that this will be a weekend that will change our lives, that we will not be the same people when we leave as when we came, but that we will love you more deeply, and indeed deeply enough to go out and share you with others, to go.

That is our desire this weekend, Lord, and we ask your blessing now, in Jesus' name, amen.

My name is Wes Peppers and I am very happily representing Amazing Facts this weekend, AFCO, the School College of Evangelism, and just delighted to be here, so thank you.

Hi, my name is Siku and I work with the Center for Adventist Ministry to Public University Students.

And we work with Adventist students who are going to non-Adventist schools, so to give them resources, training, support while they're on their campuses to be missionaries for Jesus.

My name is Mary Berndt and I have Veggies, a health food store and vegan restaurant that originated in Rapid City, South Dakota and is now located in Ardmore, Oklahoma.

My name is Eugene Pruitt and I work for Ouachita Hills College for a few more months.

I represent particularly the call porter work in North America, but this fall I'm gonna be working with Mr.

Wes Peppers, I'll be under him, helping establish international AFCO programs around the world.

My name is Taj Pakleb and our ministry is called Revelation of Hope Ministries and we currently work for Central California Conference as the Conference Evangelist.

We're based out of Maryland at the General Conference.

All right, well, we have a number of questions that we're going to begin with, so we have some questions I think that are really tailored towards each speaker, not that anyone can answer freely, of course, but we'll just begin with the first 1 here.

How would you suggest someone who is excited to get their church active and going when they are faced with people who prefer the status quo.

So basically, in other words, how do you get church members involved?

How do you get them passionate about Jesus enough to have them go out and share him with others?

Well, that's a common problem, I think, you'd find in most churches.

How many of you face that problem in your church?

Now, there's the majority of the hands right there, and it could be frustrating if you say, well, before I can do anything, I've got to get the church alive, got to get them moving.

Well, you know, that's going to take forever.

That would be like trying to warm this place up in the next 10 minutes.

And so what you need to do is you need to get involved yourself.

Start ministering yourself and find the people in the church who are interested and get them going.

I mean, look at how Jesus changed the world.

You know, he started with just a handful of others that he discipled.

And then together, they began ministry, and then that was created a ripple effect out.

And now we have, you know, even time split up by Jesus' life and death.

And I'd say that what you need to do is try to get your pastor on board.

How many of you would say that's a difficult thing to do?

Yeah, that's a whole other topic, but if you can get your pastor on board, that's very advantageous to you.

If not, try to get the next, you know, major leader in your church on board.

And if you can't do that, then just do ministry.

Start doing something, and then tell your story.

When other people see you doing something and being blessed by it, then they'll get excited and they'll want to be a part of it.

Now, if you're going to map this out as how to do it, you know, first you'd go try to get pastors and leaders on board.

If you can't get them on board, start Bible study ministry outreach with the interested people and then try to get testimony time in the church service or Sabbath school where you're taking somebody, it might be the most unlikely candidate in your church to do witnessing, but that person's life is just majorly impacted by it.

Get them up and start telling the stories about what witnessing is doing for them.

Okay, so When they see you on fire and they see a passion in you, they're gonna wanna know what's going on, right?

And we pray that the Holy Spirit, as the wind will blow, and that fire will spread, right?

Another very important critical component of this is prayer.

We're living in the Laodicean era, that's all there is to it.

We can only expect what we see, but we're told that it's an answer to prayer that we will see revival.

And so what we're doing at my local church, I actually asked my pastor to be my prayer partner, and he and I have been praying every day, and then we got our Bible worker to do a revival for our church, and so we put much prayer behind that and we're seeing incredible answers to our prayers and our revival I would say about a third of our church has come on a regular basis to this revival and they're getting fired up and I just encourage everybody to find somebody to pray with.

And if you can make it your pastor, so much the better, because it's very helpful if he gets engaged and wants to see revival.

We have a new General Conference President who's all about revival and I believe we're going to see it but I believe we do need to pray.

If you want to have a chance to study something interesting, look up the history of the Tract and Missionary Society in the Adventist Church.

It started out with just a few lay people, in fact, ladies in a church in Massachusetts, and they met together to pray and to do witnessing, and it was a 0 or low budget project.

So it didn't have to go through a church board because there was no appropriation of funds needed.

That little project grew until nearly 40% of Adventists in North America were sharing tracks.

It was a major revival in the time of our grandparents.

I remember a story about a young Welsh boy that was just a young man, about 10 years old, and he saw the condition of the church, and he said, something has to be done.

Every day after school, he'd go there and he'd pray in the church, and people began to wonder, what is this young man doing?

And they said, oh, he's just a young boy.

But then 1 member of the church went and knelt beside that young boy.

They were inspired by his passion, his desire to have Jesus transform his church.

And so that person began to pray with him.

And then another person came, and another person, before they knew it, they had 05:10 people.

And then after about a week, the entire church was on their knees, praying that God would revive them.

And that little church, someone came to visit from another town, and they went back to their church and started praying.

And after a series of just a few weeks, a few months, all the churches in the entire country were on fire for Jesus.

There was a great revival, all because of 1 little boy.

I'm not the pastor, I'm not the Sabbath school superintendent, I don't do any of those things, but God can use you to do something big, amen?

And He wants to do that, but you start with prayer and you do these other things and God will indeed do something.

He's waiting And I'm thankful for what Mary said.

I believe we have a general conference president that is truly committed to seeing revival in the church and God's Spirit being poured out and the message carried to the world.

All right, our Next question is, what are some techniques for witnessing to colleagues in a professional setting where frequent contact is inevitable, and how do I do this even if they become offended, if they're offended at what you're doing?

Anybody want to Take a challenge at that take a stab This is I just thought of a testimony that a friend of mine shared he works with a cell phone company in Detroit And he's just on fire for Jesus and he had that same question, how am I going to be able to share with people when if I tell them outright, you know, do you believe in Jesus, they'll be like, ah.

And so he thought of a way that he could do it in a non-confrontational way.

So this is from his example, okay, not from my wisdom.

He took glow tracks and every day at the end of work when no 1, everybody else left, he would stay working late.

And then he would take, he had the whole, like all the glow tracks that you could have, and he would take the glow tracks and put them on everyone's desk before he went home, like when nobody was there.

And then in the mornings, people would get there and they would find these glow tracks on their desk.

And they didn't know where they were coming from, the mysterious glow track angel.

And he said after he did this, he would put 1 every week, a new glow track every week, give them time to digest the message.

And then after about 3 months, he got caught putting glow tracks on his workmate's desk.

And so word went around that he was the mysterious glow track angel.

Bible Work - Part 1

All right, good morning everyone I If you see this thing go pink, it's not I don't use pink lettering in my PowerPoints, so, you know, but there's a little problem with this Cord So anyway, I'm thankful that we are here, thankful that you're here, and I'm excited about what we're gonna share today, amen?

And my name, for those of you that may not, may have just come in this morning.

I've taught 10 AAFCO classes over the course of 4 years.

And we're also actually now expanding AAFCO internationally.

So we have a school in England, we have a school in Ukraine, we're starting a school this year in India, and next year we're starting a school in Philippines.

And then so I can't remember the name of the town.

I have it in my email, but I can't remember the name, how to pronounce these places.

But I just copy and paste it when I need to.

And hopefully, very soon, we'll also be in the next couple of years we'll be placing 1 somewhere in Latin America and also Africa and also in 1 of the neighboring countries to China so that Chinese people can come over and get training and then go back home to do that.

I just was in Malaysia last summer, where there's a lot of Chinese people there.

And I videotaped with translation a 16-part series on personal evangelism, how to give Bible studies and those things.

And they're gonna be duplicating that and using that in the underground churches there.

So it's pretty exciting to see what's happening around the world.

And I believe that aside from revival and reformation, training people how to share Christ with others is 1 of the most important works that we can do and putting the power of the message in the hands of lay people.

And you know, what I'm going to share with you today is very basic ways on how you can share Bible studies, and this by any means does not cover everything that there is to do.

There's a hundred ways to do the right thing.

And so I would encourage you to pray about, if you've never considered, about coming to 1 of the evangelism training schools.

Obviously, I teach at AFCO, so I am biased towards AFCO.

I mean, In fact, this could be like a third of our class this fall.

If you got all you guys signed up and quit your jobs and quit school and just come, you know.

Some people just quit everything and they say, I'm not going to run from God's calling any longer.

And so, anyway, if you've ever considered that, you can check out the website, afco.org, A-F-C-O-E, or you can talk to me.

I'm here, and I'll be happy to talk to you throughout the rest of the weekend.

We haven't decided if we're gonna do that or not because we want you guys to come and experience it.

So you can get the class, but it's not the same experience.

There's a lot that happens that you cannot put on videotape and put online.

The spiritual revival, the spiritual growth that happens, It's just really amazing.

For 4 months, including your tuition, your meals, 2 meals a day, and your housing is $4, 500.

So it's really, really much less than most schools you can go to for a semester of college.

And actually we have through Griggs University we have 16 credit hours that are transferable to Adventist colleges.

Southern accepts them, Andrews accepts them, and others do as well.

And so also we have the Weimar College there that's under new leadership, and God is really blessing.

Anyway, wish I had more time to tell you.

If we weren't getting started late, I would talk about that more.

So we'll see how ou well, maybe we'll have so Loma Linda accepts the cr right now they do.

Bec have a theology department have religion, bible cour that they do, but I think that they have kind of resisted doing that through Greg.

So I don't know, honestly I don't know the details, but I know Southern for sure, I know Andrews for sure, and we would love to see that if it's not.

I mean it is, It is a recognized university through the Adventist Church.

So it is like the official online college of the church.

So that should, probably should, would be able to do that.

So anyway, all right, well let's get started, shall we?

I'm excited to share with you today, so let me just tell you what we're going to do.

In our first class, I'm going to give you several ways on how you can get Bible studies, ministries you can do within your church to create an interest and not so much creating instant entrance but interest but build a relationship with people then you can begin to offer them Bible studies okay And so I'll show you a number of things in there.

The second class we're gonna do is actually how to give the Bible study, okay?

How to give the Bible study, how to go into the home and present giving Bible studies.

Then this afternoon, I'm gonna actually teach you 2 different ways on how you can write your own Bible studies.

So I'll teach you how to do it from a study guide, then I'll teach you how to do it from scratch.

I'm going to teach you a simple way and then I'm actually going to, if we have time, which I hope we will, we'll actually divide up maybe into 3 groups probably if we have this many people, and you're going to actually write your own Bible study while you're here.

So that way when you leave, you'll have something that you can then go and share with others, right?

So I encourage you, I'm not going to discourage you from visiting other tracks, but the reality is that it's better if you pick which track and stick with it because each track is going to build on the other, each class will, so you understand how that goes.

Alright, well let's just have a word of prayer together and then we're going to dive right in and I'm excited at what you're going to learn today and I'm sure that you're going to teach me something as well.

Father in heaven, we thank you so much for this time.

And we just ask your blessing to be with us.

And we just pray, Lord, that as we learn these skills, as we understand this information, that it won't just be information, but it will indeed change our lives.

And that once we receive these things, we are then responsible and accountable to use them as we are a witness for you.

Okay, 2 pages after 1 page 25 in your syllabus there.

Alright, so our first class is on how to get Bible studies.

Well, typically I go over this in much more depth, but because of our time restraints here, I'm just going to give you a very brief summary.

I mentioned this yesterday if you were here for the Sabbath School panel, but there's a statement in Ministry of Healing, page 143, that I believe is crucial if you want to get Bible studies, if you want to...

While you're giving Bible studies to people.

And this is basically the key ingredients to having success in what we call personal evangelism.

Now, we have students that come to AAFCO, and we have these young men that come, and they have this vision in their minds that they want to become a great evangelist, right?

They want to stand up before a lot of people and they want to preach the gospel and there's nothing wrong with that.

I mean it's inspiring to do that, but what people learn at AAFCO is that Jesus actually spent more time with individuals than he did preaching sermons on the mount, right?

You look at the number of times Jesus stopped and talked to individual people, and you find that to be a great large number more than sermons he preached.

And so personal evangelism is actually the greater work, and Ellen White says that.

That if you do the 2 balanced, if you do personal evangelism that is followed by public evangelism, that's the best method of reaching people, okay.

The delight about personal evangelism is that everybody and anybody can do personal evangelism, right.

You know, Jesus didn't say, I've approached people before about when I've been a Bible worker, I've been an evangelist, I've been a pastor, I've worked in various areas of ministry, and I've conducted a lot of evangelism training classes.

I go to people in the church and I say, hey, why don't you come and be in my class, you know?

Well, I'll teach you how to give Bible studies, I'll teach you how to how to talk to people, I'll teach you all the things you need to know." And they step back and they go, oh Brother Wes, that must be for somebody else because giving Bible studies, going door-to-door is not my gift, right?

Bible Work - Part 2

Well, we're going to move ahead here, and I'm hoping to cover this little next little part right before lunch.

And this afternoon, we will work on how to actually give Bible studies.

And Normally I take, just so you know, normally I take much more time with each of these.

So if you came through our AFCO to go course, which is 10 days, or if you came, of course, to the 4 month course, you're gonna get much more.

You can only do so much in 4 hours, you know what I mean?

So I'm doing my best to cover everything I can as depth as I can without, in just the short amount of time that we have.

So anyway, we're gonna look at, in this class, a little bit why we want to...

I skipped over a few slides, so we're going to be on the very next section of the slide, section 2, that starts...

I don't know, these don't have page numbers, do they?

But it's section 2 there, you'll see there.

In this class, I'm just gonna cover kind of the ABCs of giving Bible studies.

Then after lunch, we'll talk about how to actually give studies and then we'll talk about how to write studies.

So let's just bow our heads and again because of our time I'm hoping to be able to take some questions but if not I'm happy to answer them individually for you, okay?

Father in heaven, once again, we are delighted to be here and we thank you so much for the time we have and draw our hearts and minds near to you and be with us, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, I just wanna start with a scenario for you here and I want you to imagine that let's suppose that we have 10 people how many?

10 people that God wants us to witness to, okay?

Now what's the biggest fear people have about either witnessing to someone or thinking about giving that person Bible studies?

There's more than 1, but Okay, there might be a question that I can't answer, right, so therefore I have to have more what?

Knowledge, okay, so that's 1, and people often think that they imagine burying themselves in their closet for the next 10 years and learning exactly how to draw that 2, 300 day timeline out with gusto, right?

How many of you are nervous about doing that?

If I gave you a test right now to do it, could you do it?

Alright, you could, you could if you really thought about it.

I'm afraid somebody's gonna ask me something that's too hard, right?

So therefore I just back away And I don't do Bible studies at all, okay?

And I'm not picking on you, sister, for saying that, But I'm just saying in general, are you better than Jesus?

So if Jesus was rejected, then should you also at least be willing to be rejected?

So many people are afraid to say anything because they're afraid people are going to say no, but what if, just what if, there was a chance that they might say yes, right?

You don't know how to start giving Bible studies.

Okay, I'm gonna teach you how to do that.

So primarily, the biggest 2 reasons are, 1, rejection, and 2, because people are afraid that somebody might ask them a question that they don't know the answer to, right?

Okay, okay, I'm gonna hopefully in our time at least show you some principles for that, okay?

All right, so let me back up, Let me, so let's just imagine, I want to dispel, the devil has convinced people that for these reasons and there are others as well, that they can't give Bible studies, they can't share, okay?

So I wanna paint a scenario for you that will prayerfully dispel that, any fear, any thoughts, any misconceptions that you have about this, okay?

And God impresses you to witness to those 10 people.

And you go up to a group of 4 people, not a group, but you talk to them 1 by 1, and you start talking with them and you engage with them and then after a few minutes, you say, hey, I'd be interested in sharing the Bible with you, would you like to do Bible studies, etc, etc.

And they look at you in the eye and they say, what's your name sister?

And they look at you and say, Jessica, you got to be out of your mind.

I want nothing to do with your God, your Bible, your Jesus, your anything.

You're crazy, you're, pardon my, you're stupid for even thinking about me wanting to do it.

She goes on and she's not dead, it's not the end of the world, she's still alive.

She's just been a little bit insulted, but she'll cry a little bit and get over it, okay?

So I go to 3 of those people and so that covers the rejection, right?

Then I go to the next 3 people and I say, hey brother, sister, would you be interested in doing Bible study?

Back to Menu

Presenter

Wes Peppers

All Recordings

Panel Discussion

1h 15m

Bible Work - Part 1

1h 27m

Bible Work - Part 2

39m

Bible Work - Part 3

1h

Bible Work - Part 4

1h 13m

Get Real

1h

The Top 5 Arguments of Atheism and How to Answer Them

58m

The Case for Faith - Unquestionable Evidence or Unreasonable Hope?

56m

Seventh-day Adventism, God’s Answer to Modern Atheism

1h

There IS a God in Heaven

38m

Sharpening Your Sword: How to Give a Bible Study

56m

Panel Discussion: What do YOU Want to Know About Soulwinning?

58m

Sound Doctrine