GYC 2016: When All Has Been Heard

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Soulwinning 201: The Next Level

Mark Howard

1. When Evangelism Doesn’t Work

This message was presented at the GYC 2016 conference, When All Has Been Heard, in Houston, Texas.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

So if you wanted Gardening 101 or some other kind of something or the other, you're in the wrong room.

But if you wanted Soulwinning 201, you're here.

And we're going to dive in in just a minute.

The only slide, 1 of the things GYC did before this seminar, this conference, was to take our sermon notes, which I did not have ready when they uploaded them, so I've uploaded my own.

They're not handing out paper notes here, and so they put everything into electronic documents.

So I've put it up on, if you want to take your smart device, whatever you have, and put that in, you can get the notes for this presentation and I'll upload each 1 that we do in the series and I'll introduce the series to you in just a moment.

I want to start with a word of prayer and then the title of Our first session here is when evangelism doesn't work.

So I'm going to invite you to bow your heads with me.

I want to kneel and ask God to bless our time here this morning.

Father in heaven, I thank you so much for your love and your goodness to us, and the privilege we have of knowing you and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.

Father, a privilege that many don't have.

And so I pray here this morning, as we reflect upon the commission of Christ to us and how we can be more effective in sharing Him with others.

I pray you would bless our time in the name of Jesus and for His sake.

All right, now a little bit of an introduction here.

I want to talk briefly, introduce myself.

I am a pastor in the Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

In fact, my assistant pastor is in the back, Daniel Jean-Francois.

We also work together in our conferences training school called Emanuel Institute, which I'll mention in a moment.

Now personally, I grew up in the Seventh-day Adventist Church And I lived with my mother.

My mother and father were divorced fairly early in my life, about 6 years old.

My mother remarried and I lived with my mother and my stepfather.

They ended up leaving the Seventh-day Adventist Church during the Desmond Ford crisis.

Some of you may be old enough to remember it, others may have read about it somewhere.

But we left the church when I was about 14 years old.

And it wasn't until I was about 26 years old that the Lord, through a number of really miraculous circumstances, was able to reach me and bring me back to Himself and I praise His name for that.

And I was baptized at the age of 27 and that was nearly 24 years ago.

But I'm there and you'll be there too if you don't pay close attention to what we're talking about today.

As I mentioned, if you heard last night in my 30 seconds that they gave me, my generation has failed and subsequent generations or previous generations have failed in finishing the work that the Lord Jesus gave us to do.

And we've been told in inspiration that we shouldn't still be here on this planet.

I know that gives a little bit of a quandary for some people.

They're like, well, if we wouldn't have been here and if we would have gone back, you know, going to heaven shortly after 1844, I might never have been born.

But the reality is, this is the generation that can see the Lord Jesus come.

But we're not going to see the Lord Jesus come unless we each play our part.

And that's what we're going to be talking about in this seminar.

Now it was 24 years ago that I was baptized.

I've been in pastoral ministry and evangelism for 16 years at the Emanuel Institute.

In fact we're going to give you a little card for some of the programs we offer on your way out.

In addition to that, Audio Verse Advance, we've been working with Audio Verse Advance, maybe some of you have seen that, to do an online training program that is a little more extensive than what we're doing here.

And The pastors that we have working with us, Pastor Cameron DeVasier is right down the hall and we work together at Emmanuel and we work together in our conference and I'll touch on that in just a moment.

Pastor Wes Peppers, probably you're familiar with Pastor Wes, maybe not.

We've worked together in evangelism and in training.

Daniel Jean-Francois works with me, my brother Jim Howard works with me in Emanuel Institute.

All of us are still pastors in the field.

And I don't say that to denigrate anybody, but I want to say this.

There's a lot of theories that you're going to hear when you get to talking about evangelism and evangelistic methods.

And I'm going to tell you, I hear and read about a lot of theories from people who haven't been in the work a long time, if ever.

Sometimes it seems the people who have the most to say about evangelism are the people who are least active in it.

Now, I'm just going to tell you that what I'm sharing with you is what is working for us in our ministry and has been for 16 years of my ministry and the other pastors that I work with.

I'm not saying it's the only thing, but the tips that I give you today are not going to be just theory.

Now, Emanuel Institute, as I mentioned, is a training school for the Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

Our focus is on training lay people, that is, the church members, because we're told in inspiration that this work will never be finished by the pastors.

And there's a lot of clamoring today about how we need more pastors in the church.

We need more active lay people who know how to win souls or are willing, let me put it this way, because if I say I know how to win souls you may say well that's not me, who are willing to labor for souls for Christ.

And I work, 1 of the things that I do with Emmanuel Institute and with our conferences, we have a team that we've dubbed the Training Center Church Team.

And 1 of the resources we put out that you may have seen, it was distributed last year at the GYC, is the Discipleship Handbook.

How many of you have seen the Discipleship Handbook or know what I'm talking about?

I should have brought 1 with me this morning.

We're going to have some available here at GYC.

This is 1 of the best resources on discipleship in the church.

And I know that sounds biased, but I'm going to tell you there's nothing like it.

There's a lot of things on discipleship, but not like this.

And I'll share that resource with you a little bit later.

But what we are working on in Training Center Churches is once again trying to figure how to get our churches revived.

Not just an individual here and there, but how to see the work move forward because we want to see Jesus come in this generation.

I think I'm pretty confident that we share that desire.

And so with that introduction I want to tell you about this seminar.

This is not 6 unrelated messages, but the seminar is entitled Soul Winning 201, the next level, And what I mean by that is, I've been in training, as I mentioned, for 16 years.

I've trained other people who have come to Emanuel Institute.

And I know a lot of people who have done some witnessing.

And 1 of their frustrations is, in all their witnessing, they never personally have seen somebody that they worked with led to Christ.

I don't want to change that, but the Lord can change that.

I believe what I said on the platform last night.

There is no reason every single 1 of you can't win a soul to Christ this year.

There's a statement, I'm trying to remember the exact wording, it's in Desire of Ages and it's in the chapter Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled.

And it goes something like this, The Lord did not design that His, and she doesn't use the word design, that the plan of redemption would achieve only insignificant results.

So if we are seeing insignificant results, and that means me too, It's not what the Lord intended.

The Lord can do more and will do more through us if we go forward in faith.

2. How to Get a Bible Study

♪♪ Okay, everyone, we're going to go ahead and get started.

The title of this presentation is how to get a Bible study.

Now if you're in here for the last session, you already heard me say that most of you can have a Bible study before you leave GYC with somebody you've been wanting to study with.

It won't at the end of this presentation, how to get a Bible study.

And before we get into it, I'm going to go ahead and ask God's blessing on our time together.

Father in heaven, Father again, we are so thankful for the gospel of Jesus Christ that has made us new creatures and it is your intention that this whole world would experience the salvation that comes through Him.

And Father, You intend to do it through our work as we go forward and share Christ with others.

We pray, Lord, as we spend this time together to know how to do that more effectively, Your Holy Spirit would be with us now and afterward to help us be more effective laborers for you for we ask and pray in Jesus' name.

Now I should have read, I had this quote in my last presentation.

I put a link on the screen in our last session for you to be able to download the notes and apparently that wasn't working.

So if it isn't working now, did you check that and see if that, okay good, it's working this time.

So you'll have 2 presentations in there right now.

I'll put 1 up each time I'm doing 1 of these.

So I'll put the third 1 up before the next session.

But if you go to that link you can download the notes.

And I apologize that we didn't have them in the first session I intended to.

In the last session we talked about when evangelism doesn't work and the summary of that was when we don't work.

Of course there was a lot more to it than that.

But I just want you to understand that the Gospel commission was given us by Christ and Jesus knew what was going to work through the end of time.

His primary goal was that his people would be the means of sharing Christ with others and preparing for a second coming and his people include me and you.

Now I want to start out today, we're talking about how to get a Bible study with a statement found in the book Christian Service.

It's on page 69 And it says, let ministers, that would be me, teach church members, now some of you may be ministers, I'm not sure, but some of you are church members, all of you are church members, we're all church members, right?

Let ministers teach church members that in order to grow in spirituality they must carry the burden that the Lord has laid upon them.

The burden of leading souls into the truth.

Now I want to spend a little bit more time on that.

This statement from the pen of Ellen White addresses a great need in our church today.

Again, I'm starting again with a quote, let ministers teach church members that in order to grow in spirituality, so I'm gonna pause there for a minute.

I wanna tell you that, and I've kinda alluded to this in our last session, the word evangelism has become a byword in a lot of churches today in the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

We talk about evangelism, we think about, oh, 1 of those big public meetings with all these prophecies things and scary beasts and all that, that doesn't win people and yada, yada, yada.

And I've heard this because I've been in evangelism for years about how it's ineffective and what have you.

And every strain of it, the idea of a church focusing on evangelism.

I've had church after church, pastor churches say, Pastor, I'm glad that you're talking about outreach but we can't just focus on outreach we also need to focus on in reach now I'm not going to ask if you've heard that because maybe you've said that before and it's not necessarily a bad thing to say except for to understand this.

None of our churches are suffering because we're doing so much outreach.

Okay, some people are telling me, Pastor we need to do more.

Hey I'm okay with inreach, but a heart that has a passion for souls is not going to distinguish whether that soul is a church member or not a church member.

Jesus, you didn't have to tell Jesus, now be careful Jesus, not to focus too much on the people on the outside.

When you have a heart for souls, you're going to love all souls.

I'm not going to say that some churches may not have been imbalanced, but by and large, the problem in our churches today is not that we're doing so much evangelistic outreach.

But having said that, I still have people say, Pastor, we need to do more in-reach.

And then the word, this is the word that's brought up.

We need, you can't just do evangelism, people need nurture.

And we talked about that in our last session a little bit.

When we talk about nurturing, outside of evangelism, what kind of things do people nurture?

What did we talk about in the last session?

And those are usually the first 2 things people bring up.

When you're talking about nurturing, you nurture babies.

This isn't some book I got from the ABC or some church growth guru.

This is the prophet of God speaking to his people so that we don't get sidetracked here and there and the other.

Let ministers teach church members that in order to grow in spirituality, you call that nurture right?

Then in order to grow in spirituality, they must carry the burden that the Lord has laid upon them, the burden of leading souls into the truth.

Now we may have a lot of ideas about how we're going to grow, but this is what God says to us.

You want to grow spiritually, You've got to share the truth with somebody.

That's going to make you grow more than anything else.

In fact, I wish I had the statement right here in Testimonies to Ministers.

Ellen White says, if I can remember the wording of it, That if church members would go out, I'm loosely paraphrasing here, and labor for souls, they would gain...

No, no, no, she says that church members won't gain 1 tithe of the strength, a tenth, won't gain 1 tithe of the strength that they would receive if they would go out and labor for perishing souls.

In fact, there's more to this, there's a better statement than that, but the first part says something like, ministers constantly devoting attention to those members, and she says that they would they would gain more they won't gain 1 tithe of the strength if the ministers constantly trying to help them grow then they would gain if they would just get out and share with others.

The point is this the Lord didn't just give the gospel commission to us for the people we're going to, He gave it to us for us.

How many of you have ever had to teach a lesson, a Sabbath school lesson, or give a study?

Some of you here have given Bible studies, right?

Do you learn the most from sitting in the lesson or from having to teach the lesson?

3. Which Study Should I Use?

OK, well, we may have some stragglers from the lunch crowd, but we're going to go ahead and get started.

Our topic this afternoon is Which study should I use?

I'll talk more about that as we get started after prayer.

So I'm going to ask if you bow your heads with me, and I want to kneel and ask God to bless our time together.

Father in heaven, I just pray at this time after lunch, as we've been fed physically, Lord, may our minds now be moved and stirred by the Holy Spirit.

Lord, we want to be more than just hearers of the Word, but we really want to be active disciples of Christ.

And Father, we need your strength and your power and your guidance to do so.

I pray that you'd be present with us here in this seminar this afternoon.

And Father, we pray that you would give us the ability and the motivation to share Christ with those around us and lead souls into the truth.

Now, perhaps some of you are just joining us and in the prayer I referred to a statement I read in the last session from the book Christian Service.

It's page 69 and the statement says this, it says, let ministers teach church members that in order to grow in spirituality they must carry the burden that the Lord has laid upon them, the burden of leading souls into the truth.

And we unpack that a little bit and I want to just do that by way of review briefly.

The statement is an interesting 1 because it first of all identifies a burden that the Lord has laid on us, not that the ministers or the church or the conference or anybody else has laid on us.

And the word burden, I mean, we don't necessarily like to go with the word burden so much today.

I don't know if the companion word is going to be as desirable, but if we were to say something other than burden, the burden the Lord has laid upon us, what other word might we use?

The responsibility the Lord has laid upon us, which I said isn't that much more pleasing necessarily.

But I think it's important for us to know from the pen of inspiration that God has laid a responsibility on us.

And that responsibility is, in the words of Ellen White, leading souls into the truth.

And I shared in the last session that that's not just giving a glow track.

That's not just saying God loves you, and those things are fine, but you need to do more than that to lead somebody into the truth.

The implication is that you're going to work with somebody and labor with somebody and walk them into understanding and practicing the truth that we believe is Seventh-day Adventist.

Now, I'm going to talk more about that in our next session, which is how to give a really good Bible study.

And a really good Bible study is 1 where people make decisions.

I was talking with my friend Cameron DeVasier.

What I'm doing on maybe a personal level from the standpoint of sharing your faith, he's doing on a more corporate level from what it looks like in the church to have total member involvement.

And he and I have done a lot of seminars in different places.

So we were just talking about, And we've spoken on a lot of different topics, and it's unfortunate but a reality that we both shared that when you talk on evangelism, everybody wants to go hear media, everybody wants to go hear relationships, everybody wants to hear everything else.

And I talked in the last session we had, and I'm not down on any of that but I'm going to tell you this, a lot of times we feed ourselves, feed ourselves, feed ourselves and get spiritually fat and never have a way of sharing.

And we give all these excuses, I don't know enough and we come to seminar after seminar and GYC and ASI and everything else and we keep feeding ourselves and yet we don't know enough, we don't know enough, we don't know enough.

I'm going to tell you the best way to know enough is to put into practice that which you've learned.

The best way to do that is share it with those who don't know.

And this is a burden that the Lord has laid upon us, and again in that statement, the burden the Lord has laid upon us is that burden which, and it says the ministers are to teach the members this, that that's what makes us grow in spirituality.

I had somebody ask me afterwards, in fact I'll comment on that in a minute.

The notes I'm using can be found at this link.

If you have a device on you and you want to type that in, you can get the notes.

I had hoped to have slides, but that's 1 of the disadvantages sometimes of being in full-time pastoral ministry and also extracurricular ministries is you don't always get everything done you wanted to.

So I have the handout you can look along in, but when I'm talking this afternoon, especially on a topic like this, when you come to, I know how it is at GYC, people come up and like, which 1 should I go to?

This is probably a title that most people are not going to choose unless you're very deliberate about giving a Bible study.

And I may have even titled it better from this standpoint.

I'm going to talk about some lessons this afternoon, but what I'm going to address in this session is much more a prevalent...

I don't want to say a philosophy, but there's been a discussion recently about getting away from the old doctrinal Bible studies that we've done for years and years in the past, and getting into something more fresh and more Christ-centered and more relational.

I didn't introduce myself for this session, but in addition to being a pastor in the Michigan conference, I also am the director of their evangelism training school.

In addition to being the director of our evangelism training school in Michigan, I've worked with and taught at AFCO, and I've taught at Life, and I've taught at Arise, and I've taught at Mission College of Evangelism.

So I have a lot of experience, Mission College of Evangelism.

So I have a lot of experience with evangelism and giving Bible studies and soul winning.

And so people ask me a lot, well, you know, what study should I use?

Because I'm wanting to give a Bible study to somebody and I'm hearing that, you know, this study here is too doctrinal, it's all facts and figures and it doesn't help people to build a relationship with Jesus.

So that is going to be the subject matter for what we're talking about in this session.

I'm going to talk about some studies to recommend, But if you have even looked into giving Bible studies with a pre-printed lesson set, I can't count the number of lesson sets available to you.

You go to the Adventist Book Center and you're going to find innumerable lessons that are all very good.

I want to make a point here in the beginning of this session that you need to understand when it comes to sharing your faith with others.

And I kind of closed on this in our last session.

The Seventh-day Adventist message is unique.

Series

Soulwinning 201: The Next Level

1. When Evangelism Doesn’t Work

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

End Time Soul Winners

49m

Present Truth or Cunningly Devised Fables

Higher Ground

1h 13m

Plenary

Wake-Up Call

1h

The Future of Adventism: Will Our Biblical Foundation Give Way to Culture?

5. The Future of Adventist Evangelism

1h 20m

Bob Folkenberg, Jr. - Evangeliving: The Great Commission in Action

What is Evangelism, Really?

1h

Talking Points 2nd Quarter 2025: Allusions, Images, Symbols: How to Study Bible Prophecy

08 In the Psalms, Part 1

32m

Bryan Choi Weekend

02 Appropriating the Righteousness of Christ

52m

The Three Angels' Message

07 The Fourth Angel’s Message

1h

Identity Crisis

42m

Talking Points 4th Quarter 2023: God's Mission My Mission

13 The End of God’s Mission

30m

Emmanuel Core Workout

Second Coming Part 2a

59m

Sound Doctrine