Wildwood 75th Anniversary Celebration

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Wildwood Lifestyle Center

Plenary

Vaughan Sparrow

Greater Works

We are glad that you've all come to join us on this important year in the life of Wildwood.

And the Lord has blessed, and maybe it's relevant that we're living on borrowed time.

And we pray that we are not here for another 75 years and that the Lord is going to be coming soon.

A little addition to that introduction, Michelle, thank you for those kind words.

As we were convicted to get into medical missionary work, It was an interesting journey.

The Lord convicted us to sell a portion of our farm, get out of debt, and get into his work.

And as he brought that to pass, we had nowhere to go.

And I can remember walking out of my house past my sheds.

I used to raise ostriches and gore goats and cattle, sheep, and look at this all and say, Lord, now what?

The Lord had a plan, and it was a plan that was maybe different to what we had, but yet in his time, he brought us to this place called Wildwood and I can remember looking at the financial system and how people lived here and even from South Africa the exchange rate today is 1 to 13.

At that time it was much better than that and I was 2, 300 dollars a month.

But then the Lord started speaking to my mind and saying, Well, there's people that are living on that system.

And The Lord worked it out to bring us here and it has been a blessed experience.

It's been maybe some of the most frustrating times of my life as well.

And My only regret is that I didn't get involved in this work so much earlier.

And I got to rub shoulders with Brother Jensen.

He would always walk by and say, young man, do you know what you're doing?

And I'd be operating some piece of equipment.

And I'd look at that and say, he's been in this work so long, I wish that I had had that opportunity.

Yet the Lord had other lessons to teach me, and I believe fully that the Lord brings us through a path and teaches us before for what we're about to experience later.

I never envisioned myself doing what I'm doing today.

I probably would have never come had I known that I would find myself in the role that I fill today.

And through what I want to share this morning, I want to encourage those of you that are maybe on the verge of making a decision to become involved in this work.

The Lord is looking for committed people.

And we'll unravel that a little as we go on.

I got an email last night, it was an interesting email, from Dr.

He shares his greetings with all of us here and congratulates Wildwood on 75 years of existence.

He's in the Philippines and wanted to be remembered.

He was our VP for Medical Affairs until recently when he joined the General Conference.

So before we start, let's just offer another word of prayer.

Father in heaven, We find ourselves here on the cusp of eternity.

Time is running out, but right here practically today we want to praise you and honor you for what you have done in the last 75 years of Wildwoods history.

And we know that if it were not for you, we wouldn't be here.

And so as we look at some principles and aspects here this morning.

As I was considering what to share this morning and reviewing some history, there was a certain person that many of you might be familiar with, some of you older ones, Sister Ruth Moyer.

And she had written Wildwood's history and it kind of fitted into what I thought of sharing this morning.

What brought a group of people to this spot at the end of 1941 to start a Lifestyle Center.

And what caused them to believe that they wanted to work together?

And as I reviewed what she had shared, I came to the conclusion, and maybe the answer is, was it because they were convicted that they needed to fulfill our marching orders?

And You might not understand it much in that terminology, but our marching orders were given by Jesus before he ascended to heaven.

In Matthew 28, and turn there if you have your Bibles with you, and I trust you do, Matthew 28 and verse 18 to 20, the Great Commission, right?

And Jesus came and spake to them saying, all power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.

Now, Jesus paints this great commission in an important concept for us human beings to understand.

He's not sending us forth without any authority, without power.

He says, because I have been given all power, and so it's with that authority and with that power that I'm asking you to do something.

It's been given to me both here on this earth and in heaven.

You know, that little word therefore is interesting because it always rides on something else.

And that something else is, of course, this all power.

So he says, go he because I've given you all this power and what are we supposed to do what are we supposed to go and do he doesn't just say go he gives us what we are supposed to do, our job description as it were.

That is a big task, which is correlated to the all power.

Because you can't teach all nations without authority and power.

Teach all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Then he goes on, he says, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.

You can't make disciples without an important ingredient.

And the gospel hinges on this ingredient.

And we are told whether we can teach, preach, or whatever we can do, it is like a sounding gong or a banging cymbal if we don't have what?

Christ presented to us the love of the Father.

And he says, teach others about this love of the Father.

To observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you." And then he says, I'm not going to leave you just on your own.

I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.

And the translation of that word is, so be it.

And maybe that's why this group of people came here in 1941, to answer the call, to answer the commission given.

This first, as the, these first people here, Elder Frizee and the group that was here, they conducted their first institute in borrowed tents.

Well, if you're going forth in all this power, how come you start with such humble beginnings?

You don't even have anything to start with, but they borrowed tents to start that first Institute.

Builders, farmers, nurses, and others came to attend these classes.

Clifford Goldstein

Reasoning with God: How a Post-Modern Thinker Began to Believe

I grew up in a very secular Jewish home, and the essence of the way my religion boiled down of the way we kept the holidays, which could boil down to basically, hey, they tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat.

And that was the extent of my religious upbringing.

But I was always, I always had this, I was a seeker, just seeking, and I remember, and I tell this story quite a bit, I also grew up very secular and very postmodern and this whole idea that there is no truth as with the capital T.

And there's no Archimedean point, there's no overarching point to judge because There was no overarching point.

Everything kind of emanates from us as humans.

And I'll Never forget, I was about 20 years old.

I was at the University of Florida at Gainesville, and I was in a pizza parlor.

And I'm eating a pizza, drinking a non-adventist beverage.

And he said, I was 20 years old, and my life changed in that pizza parlor.

Because he said something to the effect of, in order to live the most perfect life upon the earth, you needed to find out the reason why you were here and then live your life accordingly.

And for some reason, those words, and here's a phrase I learned from Burnell here at Wildwood.

It was almost like I had a prefrontal lobe lobotomy.

And it went in and it wiped out all this relativism that I had been taught.

Everything I had been taught, it got wiped out because it hit me.

There was a pizza sitting on the table in front of me.

Now, you could have had a thousand different people with a thousand different views on how the pizza got there.

They could have thought the god Marduk created the pizza.

They could have thought aliens dropped it from a flying saucer.

1, 000 different people with 1, 000 different views.

Maybe nobody could know how the pizza got there.

People might have started religions and died or killed for their belief in how the pizza got there.

Something had to explain it, whether anybody could ever know or not.

And that explanation of the pizza, where it came from, why it was there, what its purpose was.

I was in that pizza and I suddenly realized, hey, there's a world.

There's something out there in the same way there's the pizza here.

And somewhere out there, there has to be an explanation.

Okay, where did this, you know, something had to explain it.

And that explanation, whatever it was, that had to be the truth with a capital T.

And I'm telling you, you might think, oh, it took you 20 years to come to that.

But I'm telling you, the way I was raised and educated, everything worked against it.

And I'll never forget walking out of that pizza parlor.

Now please understand, my realization that there had to be an explanation was totally separate thing from the fact that whether I could know it or not, OK?

The fact that I knew I couldn't be wrong.

But that was a radically different thing, a completely different thing.

To want to use the fancy word, that was an ontological question.

But it was completely different from the epistemological question, whether I or anyone could ever know what that was.

See, the point there had to be an explanation, whether it was possible for me or any human being or anyone to ever know it, totally separate.

But I'll never forget a 20 years old, 21 years old, walking through this pizza parlor in Gainesville, Florida, walking through the streets.

And I can remember, because I felt it so strongly, I felt the pain in my chest.

I remember thinking, if it is, because I suddenly realized, wow, truth had to exist.

I mean, that in and of itself was astonishing.

And I remember thinking to myself, if it were humanly possible, because again, Please, my realization that truth had to exist was a completely different thing from the fact that, from the chance that maybe I could know it or not.

1, the fact that I knew it had to exist did not mean that I could ever know what it was.

But I remember thinking to myself, if it were humanly possible, and I don't know why.

I don't know where, well, I think now I know where, holy spirit.

But at that point, I thought to myself, wow.

I don't want to use the word sacred because that's too religious.

But I felt this moral obligation because I thought, wow, truth had to exist.

I thought if I could know what it was, I didn't care where it led me, what it cost me, what I had to suffer, what I had to give up.

I thought if, If I could know it, I wanted to know it no matter what.

And I, I mean, of all the ways I could have gone, I went through, you know, I went through my Marxist phase for a while, and I, this guru and that guru, of all the different ways I could have gone.

I Ended up becoming a Seventh-day Adventist Okay.

Now I'm gonna I've told this story a lot.

I'm gonna truncate it because I wanna get into the role that Wildwood had in my quest.

So I'm gonna tell just a little bit of what happened and then kinda jump ahead to how all this entered into the picture, because a very important role.

I was at that time of my life, early 20s, I was determined I was going to be a novelist, and nothing.

I had writers and editors in my family, and I had an uncle who was a well-known novelist, and when he died, there was a whole page on him in the New York Times, experimental fiction writer.

So I had it in my blood and I had started this novel my senior year at college and before long this book just consumed me.

Nothing else mattered to me other than writing this novel.

But all I wanted to do was work on this book.

It dominated my life more than I dominated the life of the characters in the book.

I don't know if any of you have gotten into that, but it's like after a while, the characters sort of took a life on their own.

I was as dedicated to this and as devoted to this as you could be.

I remember once I wrote to my uncle about, you know, how am I going to survive doing this?

He said, if I knew how you could have a life and be a writer at the same time.

I remember him saying, I'd bottle it and we'd both get rich.

Alain Bautista

Angeline D. Brauer

Charles Cleveland

Michelle Doucoumes

James Hartley

Ted N.C. Wilson

Jesse Zwiker

Panel: Missions In the 21st Century

Okay, well we have a panel for the Sabbath School today, and the topic is mission work in the 21st century, our day and age, and a special regards to medical missionary work.

With us we have Elder Ted Wilson from the General Conference sitting there in the middle, we're so thankful.

Maybe everyone can wave to Elder Wilson and say amen, happy Sabbath.

Thank you for being with us today, Elder Wilson.

And as well as Elder Cliff Goldstein, editor of the Sabbath School Quarterly, shared his testimony last night.

If you missed it, it was recorded, it was fantastic.

He shared how he came to know the Lord from a secular Jewish background in New York City And was led to the truth and spent time at Wildwood even in that experience and shared about that.

Angeline David She's our NAD Health Director.

We're grateful that you are with us as well.

Made the trip and she led 1 of our seminars here.

You could also listen to those recordings on our website.

We have Elder Charles Cleveland here at the beginning.

Elder Cleveland used to be a vice president for Wildwood and is the current president for health education resources.

Been involved in self-supporting work most all his life.

And we have Jesse's Vicar sitting next to him.

And Jesse is a, he's a field representative for OCI in Europe.

He's currently living in Austria, attending Bogenhofen, finishing some education there.

He was our Director of Education for, I believe it was 3 years, and he's an entrepreneur and he's got a passion for sharing Christ in the business world, right?

And seeing that every lay person is involved in missionary work.

We also have Elaine Bautista, and Elaine is currently serving as our Southeast Asia Director for Light Ministry.

Light is the lay instance for global health training.

Our headquarters is here at Wildwood and Alain has experience, he's worked with us I think now for 8 years with Light.

He's been working the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and more.

Michelle is our current director of education.

She was leading out in the SALT program over at Southern.

And we're glad that you're with us as well.

Well, without any further, I think We've got enough mics there for you all.

So we're going to have, we've got 10 questions, and I'll direct some of the questions to specific individuals.

And so we've got about 5 minutes per question approximate.

We can give a little more or less to a couple different ones.

Now, 1 thing that we wanted to start with.

Ellen White used the term medical missionary work extensively in her writings many Seventh-day Adventists understand this to mean the kind of work that Adventist health professionals do in Spanish and Portuguese it translates literally doctor missionary which brings an even narrower point of view to it.

White wrote in the seventh volume of the Testimonies, page 62, that we have come to a time when every member of the church should take hold of medical missionary work.

So the question is, what exactly did Ellen White mean when she spoke about medical missionary work, and what does it look like?

Let me just express what a great privilege it is to be at Wildwood today and to have us looking at what has happened and what will happen and the theme greater works looking back moving forward I think as we focus on medical missionary work that is 1 of the key blessings and contributions that wildwood has made medical missionary work is a very misunderstood term as you've rightly indicated james it's it People have kind of misunderstood it to be people who are professionals in the area of health.

In fact, that's a very prominent feature.

We're told that Jesus spent more time healing than he did preaching.

Now that ought to give us a clue as to what medical missionary work is supposed to be in God's modern church at the very end of time and let me tell you I believe that Jesus is coming very soon So he expects everybody to be involved in it and he expects us to carry out his ministry physically mentally socially spiritually Everybody can do something in the area of medical missionary work How difficult is it after?

Reading a little after training a little bit and and and living the Lord leads you as you've read scripture and spirit of prophecy, how difficult is it to share the 8 natural remedies with a neighbor?

I mean, you can do it in a very practical way.

The books that Ellen White wrote specifically about medical missionary work, ministry of healing, medical ministry, councils on health, etc., they're not just for health professionals, they're for all of us.

And later today, I'm going to read a quotation about how ministers ought to be very much interested in medical missionary work.

We have tried in the last 3 years especially to give an emphasis to the world field about what we are calling, which is essentially medical missionary work, comprehensive health ministry.

Means everybody is involved, not just the health ministries department, which is to lead the way, but all of us are to be involved in medical missionary work comprehensive health ministry helping people to understand spiritual and physical health so Medical missionary work is for all of us God will help us to find ways in which to touch the lives of people where they hurt amen.

Thank you so much Yeah, I love the Ellen White quote from medical ministry where she says medical missionary work is the gospel in practice.

It is the gospel practically carried out.

So it's more of an attitude that we have towards people than even teaching physiological health laws.

That is part of medical missionary work, but it's even more than that.

It's actually the gospel in practical ways, in being nice to the people around us, right?

And just caring for people and visiting the sick and in prison and so forth, you know?

And just giving some bread to somebody, you know?

So it's very, very basic and it can get to so high competencies and all to the surgeons and to the hospitals and so forth.

So it has all the levels that engages really all of us.

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Plenary

Panel: Missions In the 21st Century

Transcript

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