A look at the church’s past history with urban evangelism and the unity needed to move forward.

<p>A look at the church’s past history with urban evangelism and the unity needed to move forward.</p>

<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 City Ministries

Jeff McAuliffe

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

Tonight, we're going to look at how Adventism had been working on a model for city ministries for some time.

And you're going to be excited and surprised to see how things were uncovered.

We're recording these sessions, and we're hoping to put them on AudioVerse when we're done.

So as you have questions, and you'll have lots of questions along the way, write them down.

We'll try not to answer too many questions during a session, but right at the end of the session we'll do Q&As, and then we're gonna have a big Q&A, you know, on Sabbath afternoon where we're gonna spend time together really looking to the future of city ministries.

White wrote A0I have another thing I wanna talk to you about.

How many of you, did anybody have an adventure in getting here this weekend?

You know how important this is to the Lord?

You know, if God wants something good to happen, the devil, he's right on it.

And so it's been a pretty rough go lately, I would say for my friends and I, as we've been anticipating this.

And we've just been praying our way through it You know God is good as if you just can pray your way through it you get to the other side yesterday I was coming home from work and Right between I don't know why I made the mistake But I can get off at Len Hartsville or I can get off at Hamburg to get to my house.

And for some reason I thought, I don't want to get the deer from Lenhartsville to my home, so I stayed on.

And sure enough, there was an accident in between those 2 exits.

And it was 1 of those kind of accidents where you're just sitting still.

So, about 45 minutes to an hour into it, a man with a badge came up to my car and said, I'm just letting you know, it looks like we're going to sit here for another 2 hours.

And I was literally a mile and a half from my house.

I talked to Bob, and he said, why don't you just pull the car over and walk home?

I called my sister Lillian, my sister in Christ, and she said, well, we've got to pray.

And she said to me, but keep your eyes open if the traffic starts to move.

And, you know, as soon as she said, dear Jesus, the traffic started to move.

But that wasn't the good story of the night.

The good story of the night was my friend Janet, who came from Maine.

She got to Connecticut and her car broke down.

But that didn't daunt her or keep her from wanting to get here.

When did you get your AAA premium package?

Just before she left, she bought the premium package and she called them, she paid $8, she called them and they towed her car 144 miles to my house last night.

So I want to tell you another story about a woman who is named Ellen White.

And in 1909, there was going to be a general conference meeting.

And she was 81 years old at that point, living in Santa Lena, California.

And she wanted to travel all the way across the country to be at that meeting because she had something important to say.

But just a few weeks before she said she was pretty weak and feeble to be able to make that trip.

But she determined to make that trip anyway and for those of you who are workers in the church This was her schedule at 81.

On her way to the general conference, she traveled approximately from beginning to the end of her travel.

By the way, she didn't catch an overnight flight.

You have to think about how she traveled.

She spoke 72 times in 154 days in 27 different places, from California to Maine, from Alabama to Wisconsin.

And this was her message when she got to the general conference.

She said, Behold our cities, she urged, and their need of the gospel.

The need for earnest labor among the multitudes of the cities has been kept before me for more than 20 years.

It was the last time she was able to meet with the General Conference and she wanted us to remember the cities.

Tonight we're going to take a look as to why that urgency was there with her.

Why even just before, you know, she died just a few years later in 1915, why was she so urgent about the city work?

She wasn't able to go to the 1913 conference, but she wrote from her home.

So tonight, we're gonna look at council and Adventist history to evaluate what they were working towards in terms of city work.

White wrote to conference presidents, by the way, which she, the only 1 that qualifies in the room is Brother Ray, I think.

And she wrote a letter talking about the city work.

And in that letter, she mentions this early in the letter.

She says, workers, city workers, should labor 2 and 2, and from time to time, all should meet together to relate their experiences, to pray, and to plan how to reach the people quickly, and thus, if possible, redeem the time.

In fact, sometimes we're so consumed by our city labors, by our labors independently, that we don't spend any time with other groups talking about ideas, praying together.

In fact, I've been doing this long enough to know that of city ministries, often we find ourselves competing for the same fund pool to keep our city ministries going, and so it becomes more competitive than it does cooperative.

And so we're trying to take this seriously.

I'm not exactly sure where I point this to, but it doesn't seem to be.

Okay, we're trying to have some objectives for the week, and first off, I want you to take every chance you can to pray together, because if we're not guarded by prayer, we're gonna be distracted by the devil.

So I don't care if you just walk up to somebody.

The second thing we wanna do is, If you have stories and experiences, we're going to take some time to share those stories.

We're going to have a full hour and a half where we're sharing stories and experiences on Sabbath.

And there'll be some stories interspersed about different ministries.

We want to consider something called the Ephesus model, which is a biblical expose on how the cities were intended to be worked.

And we're going to strategize at some point how can we reach the people more quickly.

And then I also want to consider how we can use ACM for city ministries as a resource moving forward.

1 of the things that we, in city ministries like in Simplicity and Pittsburgh and other places where there are city ministries going on, we're always kind of thinking about how can we find more laborers for the field who are interested in the work, and it's hard to recruit, to be honest with you, unless you have a very specific recruiting mechanism in place.

Okay, does God have a model for city ministries?

What's the first model that God has that comes to mind for us?

Yeah in fact the sanctuary is a model of the plan of Salvation right God is not a god of randomness He's a god of order And so this is a very important movement that we're talking about and we're going to see how important it is tonight.

In 1874, and What I want you to do is look inside your folders, and there's a paper called In Search of a Model.

I want you to get that out, and hopefully you have a pen with you available tonight.

Because we're going to search through literature and spirit of prophecy for a model that may develop, we may be able to look at.

What I want you to do is, as we're going through slides, and this, you can be very bold and loud because I'm losing my hearing.

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

Transcript

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