One of the most member-empowering documents in the Seventh-day Adventist Church today is the church manual. This session will explore some of the hidden gems in the SDA Church Manual and encourage attendees not to re-invent the wheel, but to simply learn to drive the car we already have!

GYC 2016: When All Has Been Heard

<p>One of the most member-empowering documents in the Seventh-day Adventist Church today is the church manual. This session will explore some of the hidden gems in the SDA Church Manual and encourage attendees not to re-invent the wheel, but to simply learn to drive the car we already have!</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>

Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Total Member Involvement

Ted N.C. Wilson

1. Total Member Involvement

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.

Were you blessed this morning with devotional thoughts?

Hopefully your blood has been stirred a bit and you're ready to learn, to listen, and to go out and do something for the Lord.

Well, my name is Pastor Cameron DeVasier, and I am a co-presenter in this seminar session with Elder Ted Wilson, who is the President of the General Conference and was mentioned last night, my father-in-law.

I have no problem saying he is my favorite father-in-law.

I'm sure he implied favorite, but we won't get into it.

But as president of the General Conference, obviously there is an initiative going on right now called the Total Member Involvement Program, and we're blessed to have Elder Wilson here out of his busy schedule to be able to present some of where this initiative came from, what its aims and objectives are, and more importantly for our purposes, how we as young people, and I say we, I'm identifying with you still, as young people, whether we're in full-time ministry or just supporting lay ministry can be part of that total member involvement revolution that needs to happen in the Seventh-Davenist Church.

So the format of this morning's session will be very simple.

I'm introducing right now, getting the ball rolling, and we're going to have a word of prayer, and then I'm going to turn the time over to Elder Wilson and let him speak to you about the General Conference's Total Member Involvement Initiative.

The next session is going to be our Q&A, where we're going to have more dialogue-based kind of a presentation, and then the rest of the time we're going to be looking at practical ways that people can be involved in their local church.

We're going to look at what does involvement mean, what are some very practical ways that you can be a part of this movement that is the Seventh-Davenist Church.

So before we do any further discussions, Let's just bow our heads briefly for a word of prayer, and then we'll be off to the races.

Dear Heavenly Father, I thank you so, so much for another day of life at all.

I thank you for the opportunity to be together at this GYC convention.

What a blessing it has already been and we're just getting started.

And now Lord, in this particular seminar series and in this specific session, I would ask that you would speak to us today.

Bless Elder Wilson as he gives us not only information but hopefully inspiration that we can each have a part in your work.

We know that the time is coming soon when Jesus will come, but Lord, by your grace and our humble efforts, let soon be sooner.

Elder Wilson, if you would please come and share with us about total member involvement.

What a privilege it is to be here with you and to share some thoughts about a very important aspect of church life.

This morning our worship really focused in on God's power in our lives.

That very impressive text, which is 1 of my favorites in the book of Jude, which only has 1 chapter, that powerful 24th and 25th verse really brings to light the power of Christ's righteousness in His justifying and sanctifying power.

And that was a real blessing this morning to hear those words.

Total member involvement comes out of a relationship that you have with Jesus.

If it doesn't, you really have no basis upon which to share anything.

Now in essence, God has always wanted his people to witness.

As you look back in the Old Testament, even from the very beginning, Enoch, Enoch was mentioned this morning as Pastor Skeet was sharing about the genealogy.

Enoch, we are told, went into the cities to witness and then went from the cities, out of the cities, back into a rural environment to recharge his batteries.

God has an intention for all of us to do something for Him in witnessing to His mighty power.

Now what we're going to do this morning for the next 30 minutes, 35 minutes, 40 minutes will be simply to look at some of the experiences of the church and how things are developing with total member involvement, TMI, and then listen to a personal testimony of a good friend of mine who comes from Alaska and who will be sharing what a simple outreach activity has done to touch the lives of hundreds of people.

And then Cameron and I will just chat a little bit, maybe some questions about what are practical things he's going to be talking the rest of the week.

I hope you're going to be here to listen and to interact on some of these wonderful aspects of what does it mean to be totally involved for God.

And if you have any questions or comments or suggestions, we'll close out our 1 hour that we have.

We need to end at about 10.15, which is now about 50 minutes or so from now.

When we think about how God used the Israelites in the past, they were to be placed and were placed at the very crossroads of the geographical setting of the then known world.

And Let no 1 ever tell you that the people in the Middle East, by and large, are all terrorists.

They are lovely, wonderful people just like you are.

The Middle East in that day was the crossroads and essentially the world itself.

Israel was placed right at the very point where they would have an opportunity to witness in an incredible way.

Unfortunately, as you know, and as I know, as we look at Scripture, we understand they failed miserably.

At certain times they were able to share, but most of the time they failed because they looked inwardly.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church has been given an unusual mandate to proclaim the 3 angels' messages in particular, and the fourth angel of Revelation 18, come out of her, my people, join God's remnant church, turn back to the true worship of God, a unique message which has been given to the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

But as we learned this morning, things around us tend to create a false impression as to what reality really is and many Seventh-day Adventists today hardly even want to mention their name.

In fact, some churches within our system give themselves other names.

We want to be friendly to people, they say.

We want to not in any way prejudice someone.

You need to be diplomatic, you need to be loving, you need to be kind.

But even in the very choice of the name, Ellen White realized this would be a tremendous sermon in itself.

So you don't hide who you are, you are to say, I'm a Seventh-day Adventist and let me tell you about it.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church is in the same potential state of ancient Israel, and if we are not careful, we will be looking inwardly rather than looking out and proclaiming.

When you start to look inward, you will stop growing." So the Israelites failed in what God had intended.

Joel chapter 2, Acts chapter 2, Old Testament, New Testament, wonderful examples of what God intended and intends to do in His church.

Where young men, young women, all people, old people, young people, children, doesn't matter who you are, are to proclaim God's Word.

It has nothing to do with being an ordained minister to the gospel.

Now, as we're gonna find out, and as you're gonna find out over the course of the next 2, 3 days, and Cameron's gonna explain to you how it is that only in the last few years has he really understood what it means for him as a pastor to be involved with church members in helping them to truly understand what their role is.

In the same way, God intends for all of us to understand, that there never was to be a professional group of people who did all the professional kinds of work that are church related and then there are the members.

And let me tell you, it is not the attitude in many parts of the world, but in some parts, mostly the affluent parts, where church membership, and I'm not condemning you or implying that you have that same thought, but many places say, okay, I'm a professional, I went to school, I made my way.

All of us are joined together, and in a few moments I will share with you a powerful quotation from Volume 7 that gives us our marching orders on that.

Romans chapter 10, verses 13 to 15, very familiar to many of you, does not mean only professional preachers, and in fact it doesn't even have to be a professional public speaker.

Paul's saying whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

How will they call if they haven't believed?

How are they going to believe if they haven't heard?

How are they going to hear without a preacher?

And how shall they preach unless they are sent?" All of us within the Adventist Church are sent.

And If you refuse to accept that commission to be sent, you will wither.

Not long ago, Nancy and I had the privilege of visiting the Dead Sea.

And you can sit in the Dead Sea, you can read a newspaper, a book, if you can get it into your hands without getting it wet, because it is a little bit slimy and muddy around the Dead Sea, but you can sit in the Dead Sea and you can read a newspaper and not move a muscle and you will not sink.

Kameron DeVasher

2. Ask the President! (Q & A with Elder Ted Wilson)

For those of you just joining us, this is the second session of the Total Member Involvement Seminar track, and this is the 1 entitled, if I'm not mistaken, Q&A, Talking with Elder Ted Wilson, Questions and Answers.

I want to just give you a brief introduction and format before we go forward.

The questions that are going to be asked today cover a wide range of topics.

Now the last presentation was all about total member involvement and it was a blessing, amen.

These will probably have some questions along those lines, but it will branch out into a much wider, broader range of topics.

And these questions have been submitted almost entirely from Seventh-Day Adventist young people.

Sometimes you hear Q&A, and you think there's going to be a couple of mics and a long line of people.

We're not going to be doing that just because we've already gotten the questions ahead of time from the young people through GYC, through social media, and that kind of thing.

But we, for the sake of time and clarity and organization, it's going to be better to streamline it this way.

So as the moderator of this session, I have reviewed the questions to organize them into general categories, and in some cases have rewarded them for, you know, clarity or brevity, but to keep the format conversational, and to provide further insight, I may at times explore a particular topic further with follow-up questions.

So we're gonna have a relatively dialogue-based Q&A session here.

However, we must remain mindful, as I'm trying to do right now, of our time limitations.

It's very easy for time to slide away and here we are at 1037, So we must redeem the time already.

And we don't want to get bogged down at any 1...

Now I know that there are certain particular topics that might be your zealous piece of interest.

And you might say, we need to spend more time on this.

And we can all say amen, but we have to move on to other things, okay?

So we'll do our best to cover as many things in a timely manner as possible.

But I can tell you this, that going over the questions that have been submitted, it is clear once again that a great many Seventh-day Adventist young people truly love this church.

That view, they view it as more than merely a rather denominational option amongst other Christian flavors, but they understand that the Seventh-day Adventist Church is a God-inspired last-day movement raised up to have a unique message at this end of time.

And the zeal that you see in the questions is not 1 of correction or ridicule, but it's 1 of support and coming from a position of, we want this to be great.

We have the highest ideals and the best standards and we want to see God's work be done His way.

And so whenever these questions have come in, some seem questioning or critical even sometimes of church.

That's fine, but it's coming from a spirit of wanting to see the church be its best for God's glory.

So, what I'm gonna do now is just offer a word of prayer and they're gonna invite Elder Wilson to come up and we're gonna launch into our Q&A session at this time.

So if you would, please bow your heads with me.

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much again for this day of life at all, and thank you that we can be here at this time in this place and have the unique opportunity to fellowship together in this format and ask questions of our church leadership.

But Lord, we know that the true leader of the church is none other than Jesus Christ himself.

And help each 1 of us as members or workers, whatever part we play in this work, to have firm root in Christ directly and in his word alone.

But as we seek to work together Lord give us a spirit of camaraderie that the Holy Spirit inspires a a weaving together of our common interests And let the world see witness that God is real, He is alive, and He's moving in His people today.

So Lord, as we ask these questions and get answers, Lord, I ask that Your Spirit would be here today.

Elder Wilson, if you would please come and join me here.

You can have the, we have a very large room with a very small stage, so we're gonna do our best to, you know, have elbow room and breathing space.

But before we dive into some of the thornier issues, which Believe it or not, there are some thorny issues from time to time.

Let's start with some questions that have been directed just to you as a person.

Now, everyone knows you as Elder or Pastor or Dr.

These questions seem to me more along the lines of church member Ted.

And I, of course, will continue to regard you as Elder Wilson, as you are my boss.

But 1 question that has come in, I assume more than once, and has risen to the top is just a simple question.

Why are you, Ted Wilson, a Seventh-day Adventist?

Well, let me thank all of you for being here and Hopefully you can hear.

Those of you who were in the session just prior to this, when we were talking about total member involvement, and I'm really excited about the commitment that so many of you have, I mentioned to you that Pastor Dwayne McKee and his wife Kathy would be here.

I thought maybe they would be coming tomorrow, but they are here today, even this morning.

Dwayne and Kathy, just stand up for a minute so people know who you are.

Dwayne is our Sabbath School Personal Ministries Director and Assistant to my office for total member involvement.

And Kathy is working with us in our presidential office, the area of social media, and very dynamically in evangelism outreach.

And they're gonna be sharing more about total member involvement.

Well, I had the wonderful privilege of growing up in a wonderful Seventh-day Adventist home.

Not everybody has that opportunity, and those who don't, and who come from a different background have unique experiences that I can learn from.

So no 1 is disadvantaged in the sense that, well, I didn't grow up in an Adventist home and I just don't have those advantages.

I think 1 of the things that I was not privileged to see in clarity until later in life was the clear distinction between what the world is and what God's church is.

And those of you who have come out of the world and into God's church, it's so dynamic for you that you have to move on to something else within your growing experience.

As I learned to appreciate God's precious Holy Word and the spirit of prophecy and realize that we are living in such a critical time, and Jesus is going to be coming very soon, I just have to ask, what else would you be than a Sabbath day Adventist?

When it becomes personal, and when you really understand what it means to have this connection with Jesus on a daily basis, and let me tell you, sometimes it's a little bit tough with all the travel and everything else to keep feeding on the word.

Each of us has to stay connected with the Lord and then that experience helps you to understand the time in which we're living.

That experience to me is probably the most dynamic thing.

As I look around, as I listen to news, and as I access news, and I really keep up to date by God's grace on a lot of things happening, I just realize we're at the very end of time.

We're living in the very last tips of those toes of Daniel chapter 2, and the Lord's gonna come.

So it just is so enthusiastically and dynamically pointed out to me by everything that's happening around that I just want to be part of God's remnant people and share with others.

Now I'll let you in on a little tiny vignette, and I don't have time to tell the whole story.

My great-grandfather came from Ireland, and his wife did too, my great-grandmother.

They got married, settled in Philadelphia area I think, then they went to Canada, then they finally ended up in Northern California, around Healdsburg.

My grandfather, great-grandfather, noticed some tents, and originally, he thought perhaps the circus had come to town, but he learned that these were Seventh-day Adventist meetings Now those of you who know Northern California, you know that Adventism was established quite strongly in the Healdsburg area.

My great-grandmother somehow, and I haven't pinpointed how it happened, but she became a Seventh-day Adventist, but not my great-grandfather.

He did orchard farming and whatnot, had a store and all that kind of thing.

So he was a prosperous, helpful person in the community, but he was not particularly a religious man.

My great-grandmother, and this is really total member involvement, she invited my great-grandfather to come to the meetings in those tents.

When he came She didn't know what to expect, but the speaker was so pointed in helping to paint a picture of a loving Jesus, who wanted to save my great-grandfather, that when an appeal was made, my great-grandmother was absolutely amazed, couldn't believe it.

Here her husband stood up and went forward in response to the appeal.

And from there on out, he became absolutely a committed Seventh-day Adventist.

He became the head elder of the Healdsburg Church.

He was noted for helping people in so many ways.

The speaker at that camp meeting who invited my great grandfather to become a Seventh-day Adventist was Ellen White.

We trace our connection in the Wilson family to that wonderful, practical ministry of the servant of the Lord.

3. It’s Time To Eat Grandpa

I'm just talking to the people in the room.

First of all to check the mic and to confirm that it's very loud.

The other thing is we don't, apparently we live in a paperless society now.

I had handouts for you to be physically handheld, and we are not doing that.

The GYC app has all the resources on it right now.

So I'm gonna do the weirdest thing, and that is encourage you to pull out your smartphones.

If you have not already gotten the GYC app go ahead and get that and you can go to the session the seminar series total member involvement and go to this session is time to eat grandpa click on that and it'll say view session resource, and it'll have all the notes for what we're about to present right there in your hand.

So I wanna make sure that you know, because I'm gonna go through a whole lot of quotes, and we're not gonna slow down and say like, where's that from, can I write it down?

If you're still using paper, apparently you're old-fashioned and soon to be outdated.

But where we are now is all about the digital revolution.

So if you are unfortunate enough not to have a smartphone, I really don't know what to do for you because the whole thing is predicated on you're all gonna bring your smartphones, right?

Which I'm sure there's a disconnect there because we encourage people to be off of social media and to disconnect from the digital age, but at the same time, in order to be a part of the seminar, you have to have your smartphone out.

So take that up with somebody else of higher authority within me.

And to be clear, they did make a room switch, and for whoever's doing the recording of this, this is not on the recording right now.

We're just talking in a room, not for publication, right?

But they did make a room switch, so this 371 is the new 361, all right?

If you're expecting someone else besides me, I'm sorry, but they are somewhere else now.

My name is Cameron DeVazier and that's me.

If you're looking for a seminar on music or relationships or something else, I'm sure we can talk about that, but I haven't prepared a thing in regards to that.

I'm here for total member involvement and that's it.

So the session we're going to be doing is It's Time to Eat Grandpa.

And speaking of time, I see that it's 2.47 for a seminar that starts at 2.45.

So I don't know if everybody else is roaming the hall or if there is no everybody else, but this is it.

But with that, I'm going to just be my own sound guy here too for just a second.

I feel like I'm holding back because I usually project more and I don't want to hurt you.

And if it's bad, make a gesture or something.

So with all that preliminary out of the way, and these are being filmed, yes?

If you want to check out and just set it on a pedestal, that's fine, but I'm probably going to move around.

I'm going to be just generally roaming up here-ish.

Okay, I think we have all of the introductory detritus out of the way and we're ready to go to the actual meat and potatoes of our session.

So let's begin the recording and say good afternoon everyone.

Continuing the seminar series, Total Member Involvement, Elder Wilson was our primary speaker earlier in the session talking about the General Conference's Total Member Involvement Initiative, where it came from, and taking some questions and answers from our GYC young people.

But now We're going to get more rolling up the sleeves and the nuts and bolts of some of the principles he addressed in passing we're going to dive into and study more exhaustively.

We have a limited amount of time and a lot of material, so I'm going to ask that we will do this very simply as I've already mentioned.

If you have your GYC app, you can open it up, go to total member involvement, and this session is It's Time to Eat Grandpa.

And if you would click on that, it will tell you, there's a little line that says view seminar resource.

You can click that on, and it's got all the notes that we're gonna be covering now.

So don't worry about having to write down anything, or remember, take fastidious notes.

It's already taken down there for you, and you can look it up later and build on it and share however you'd like.

So with all of that being said, we're just going to bow our heads, and then we're going to open our eyes and go to work.

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this absolutely beautiful day that you've given us.

Thank you for the occasion of GYC and thank you for this particular topic about total member involvement and everyone in the room wants to be involved.

Help us to understand what involvement even means.

Help us to understand what our part as either a lay member or a pastor or worker, administrator, whatever our responsibility is, Lord, help us to understand what it is and to do it through your strength for your glory.

Alright, I want to start, the title itself is a little bit odd, and I kind of designed it that way because I like it.

There's a big difference, you know, between it's time to eat grandpa and, well for instance, you could leave every word of that sentence exactly as it is and change its meaning drastically by simply adding 1 piece of punctuation.

And that comma is the difference between it's time to eat, grandpa, versus it's time to eat, grandpa.

Every word is exactly the same, but that comma makes a big difference.

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Series

Total Member Involvement

5. Mining The Manual

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Parts

1. Total Member Involvement

59m

2. Ask the President! (Q & A with Elder Ted Wilson)

1h

3. It’s Time To Eat Grandpa

1h

4. The Ministry That Died And Nobody Noticed

1h

5. Mining The Manual

1h 21m

6. Moving The Ship

1h

Sound Doctrine