Michigan Camp Meeting 2016: The Harvest is Great

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training

Royce Snyman

Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training- Part 1

Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training- Part 2

Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training- Part 3

Again, Father, we are grateful to be servants of yours.

As we've studied in this class, Jesus was first servant, and he illustrated for us how to be servants as well.

We pray that you will help us as we talk about servant ministry today, as we talk about serving you as faithful disciples, that your Holy Spirit will be in this class, that you will speak through me, it's not my words but yours, that will help us to serve you better in Jesus name, Amen.

If anybody happens to notice that thing stop running, be sure to tell me.

There are some numbers that move there and that red record at the top would stop.

All right, take your books here and I'd like to...

First time in the class, this is quite common.

Make sure you sign your name, because that way I just...

I want to make sure you get all the materials that we give, and it's nice for me to know who's gone through the training, and so on, so I can send you a lot of spam emails, and that kind of thing.

All right, today here's what we want to talk about.

Again this is the advanced course of Deacons and Deaconesses.

Some of you participated in our basic course and we just hit the highlights, skimmed the top, identified job description, and a few other key elements and ingredients.

The purpose of the advanced class is for us to 0 in on some more important areas and get down into the depths of them and how they apply to you and how they work in ministry.

If you go to chapter 8, which we've talked about before, but I want to go back to it again for a moment, it's talking about deacons and deaconesses as teachers of God's Word.

And for those of you who are new, I've given out 3 books here, actually 4 to be exact.

I don't have the fourth book right now, I'm hoping to get some more and we're gonna see if that all works out.

At any rate, the 3 books are this textbook, which is our main source of direction for our class, a workbook that goes with it, which is a workbook size.

We're not looking at the workbook, that's for you to go back and as you study this on your own more in detail, it'll help to guide you through.

And then I've also given you a copy of the handbook, the Deacon and Deaconess' Handbook, produced by the Ministerial Department of the General Conference.

And this Deacon and Deaconess' Handbook was not available last camp meeting.

And so I'm providing it to you and there's resources.

It's my way of doing 2 things, saying thank you for attending the class and God bless you with all the work you got in front of you and you're gonna need the book to know what you're going to be doing, right?

And I want you to be able to have that and to be a benefit to you.

There are a lot of good little pointers in there, direction as you're thinking about this ministry and it expands the ministry.

These books and that book are very closely connected with each other in terms of content.

This particular author comes from his background and his perspective, and I will mention that the culture that he comes from tends to be much more formal in a church service environment, and typically the deacons and deaconesses in the church that he grew up in and that he was pastoring, You'll see them dressed in white shirts and black skirts and black pants and white gloves.

Not everybody feels great about it, but I love it.

I think it's great because I think it's a great way to identify who the deacons and deaconesses are, who the leaders in the church are, and on Sabbath morning they're there to serve, and they've got their name tags on and all that.

I think the rest of us would do a good job to do that as well.

At any rate, my point is that we all have some differences in relationship to that, but the bottom line is there's some basic principles we all work off of and all deal with.

All right, I want to talk to you today about deacons and deaconesses as teachers of God's Word.

I know that you may have thought that being a deacon or a deaconess excluded you from having to be a teacher of the Bible, from giving Bible studies, from being involved in soul learning.

That you've heard me say this so many times, but I have to say it, you know, for those that are new so that they get a sense of the feel here.

So those of you who've heard me say it 4 times already, you'll forgive me and you'll recognize they're new people here today.

Besides, repetition is a good teacher, right?

Deacons and deaconesses are not appointed just to take up the offering, to get people to their seats, to manage the people when they're getting baptized and helping them get in and out, making sure the baptistry is filled, caring for the plumbing and all that kind of thing.

That's not just what deacons are all about.

And 1 of the things we've learned in our study, both from the Word of God and from this book that's helping to focus that, is that the deacons were first appointed not to fix the plumbing.

Deacons were first appointed to care for the needs of people, the physical needs of people, but also the spiritual needs of people.

But what we have said up to this point is the reason some of the other things weren't pointed out in the job description of an elder or a deacon is because the other things that we don't do as deacons and deaconesses today were assumed to be done by the people because they were Christians.

God transported him to the, led him to the Ethiopian unit and then physically transported him back to where he wanted him to be, but he'd send him there to preach the gospel message.

It wasn't Paul, it wasn't Peter, it wasn't James, it wasn't any of those people, It was Philip the deacon.

Who was the first martyr for preaching the Word of God to the Sanhedrin?

Because these people were first Christians.

They were first committed Christians given their lives to Jesus Christ and because of what Jesus Christ had done in their lives, they had accepted the call to be disciples and they taught the message any way God gave them opportunity to do it and that included with the Mount.

So you and I are first deacons and deaconesses, we are first disciples and then deacons and deaconesses, right?

And so that's the platform I'm building on.

I'll come back to that here in just a moment.

But the author here does talk a little bit about this work and gives a little bit of the history of how people were involved in this process.

Go to page 51 And I want to point out something here just to reconnect us to the book and where we're going today.

Actually go to page 50 at the bottom of the page.

And it says, he says there, Rosalind Brown, although an Anglican, writes from a wider Christian tradition.

She states that proclaiming the gospel is 1 of 3 strands that makes up the diaconal ministry.

Okay, the work of deacons and deaconesses.

Even though preaching during the main worship service is not necessarily the role of deacons, Brown says that it is appropriate that they be trained to preach.

This training prepares them to present God's Word within the varying context of their ministry.

Series

Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training

Deacons & Deaconesses Advanced Training- Part 2

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

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