This training is for new deacons and deaconesses. The class will provide a job description and discussion about the history and basic work of deacons and deaconesses, and how to manage regular Sabbath morning duties.

Michigan Camp Meeting 2018: As a Witness, Matthew 24:14

<p>This training is for new deacons and deaconesses. The class will provide a job description and discussion about the history and basic work of deacons and deaconesses, and how to manage regular Sabbath morning duties.</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>

Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Elder, Deacon, Deaconess Basic Training

Royce Snyman

Elders Basic Training- Part 1

Father in Heaven, as we begin our class for elders today, we invite your Holy Spirit to bless us and to guide our conversation, our study, and may it be such that it helps us to do our work better for you, and that we might be able to serve you and honor you by our responsibilities that we carry out.

We pray that your Holy Spirit will be in charge of what I say and what we hear, and we thank you in Jesus' name.

How many of you are brand new elders, never been an elder before and you're just starting out?

How many of you are elders and never have taken even whether you're new or not, but never taken any training of any kind in terms of being an elder.

Some of you are kind of getting into it and figuring it all out and we're glad for that and our purpose today is to be able to give you some of the basics of being an elder.

Now I want to warn you that when I teach this class at first it starts out very low-key and it doesn't seem like it's much of an issue but once we get into this class, especially 2 days worth, suddenly we realize that there's an awful lot to being an elder.

And I don't want you to go away discouraged and thinking, I didn't realize I signed up for that.

This is an opportunity for you as an individual to grow in your understanding.

It's not unusual for the nominating committee to call somebody and say, we need you to be an elder, and you say, what's an elder?

And they say, all you got to do is be on the platform once a month and call for the offering or something like that and then okay I can do that and so now you're an elder and you get ordained to take a call up call for the offering on Sabbath morning or to have a morning prayer and nobody ever tells you what the job is, nobody describes it to you, maybe your pastor never gives you any training and you're an elder for years.

That's what you understood was an elder And then 1 day you come to camp meeting and somebody stands up in a class like this and opens up the church manual to you and opens up some basic information to you about what an elder is and you say, whoa I can't do all of that.

Nobody on earth has time to do all of that.

Take 1 step at a time and realize that this is a very special calling and that God does have a purpose for you.

You might have your horizon expanded a little bit, but don't worry, God is able to fill the vacuum in the space and help you as you're trying to meet all of those particular needs and issues that arise in your church that you are responsible for carrying out.

I'd like you to look at your notebook that I've given to you here, your folder, so you know what's in it.

We will have a deacons and deaconesses training on Wednesday and Thursday.

If you are able to be a part of that, I would like to encourage you to do that because part of your work as an elder is leading your congregation and leading your leaders.

And a lot of people have no idea, especially our elders, have no idea what deacons and deaconesses are supposed to do, and we do the same thing there that we do here.

I'm good, but Shelley, I could use some of my materials, like I forgot the elders' handbooks, some of those kinds of things I forgot to bring in here, okay?

I'd encourage you to do it so that you know what deacons and deaconesses do And the Friday class is on managing theological conflict.

I say first of all, welcome to the last days that we knew were coming, but are here.

And welcome is not quite the word I want to use, but I used it a little tongue-in-cheek.

We are in the last days, folks, and we are encountering more and more theological conflict in the church.

And some of it is over minor things that are frankly in times not relevant, Other times they are over things that are very relevant and separating people from 1 another, dividing the church and creating problems.

Our churches are facing it in these days.

We have churches that are dividing and members that are having to be asked to surrender their church membership because of this happening in the state of Michigan and around the country, and there are some issues.

We'll talk about that on Friday, but not today.

In this notebook folder you have a class evaluation which I'd like you to complete tomorrow after our last class.

If for some reason you're only able to come to the class today and you have to be in Hong Kong tomorrow and that may seem strange but we had a fellow that was here for the weekend, Jim Howard, and that's where he is today in China, not Hong Kong, but at least I don't think he's in Hong Kong.

So it could happen, I don't know, it might happen to you.

But would you complete this and then turn it in?

Behind it is some blank paper that you can use for taking notes if you would like.

If you happen to need more let me know and we'll be happy to get that for you.

Today I have a handout for you, it looks like this.

You're gonna notice that it looks an awful lot like what's on the screen.

And the reason for that is because it is the slides, because I know that sometimes people wanna take notes of what's on the screen, and that means that it's here for you.

And there's space next to it that will also be helpful for you in taking notes.

So you should have plenty of space for that.

Anybody need something to write with and not have anything to write with?

So my wonderful secretary, this is Shelly Ringstaff for you, those of you who don't know her.

I think that's all I needed, yeah, thanks.

If you'd bring some pens in that would be great.

I will give you a copy of the Elder's Handbook that looks like this.

If you have 1 already, keep it and take it, take this 1 and give it to 1 of your other elders that may not have it.

If you don't have 1, of course, it's yours and there's a price on the back and that's not for you.

That's only if you're buying it from the ABC.

Our study material today is out of the handbook and is what we'll be sharing with you, so there'll be some pieces along the way.

I won't give that to you right now to save a little bit of time.

All right, I think I've taken care of some of the housekeeping items, so I'd like to get us started.

I'd like to start by talking about the elder's call and qualification.

So let's talk a little bit about what God's expectation of is for you.

First of all, to be an elder is not calling you just for the task of reading the scripture on Sabbath morning.

You are called to be an elder by God for a purpose.

1 would call it the highest office in the local church.

Now we don't like to think of offices as higher and lower and all of that, but you have the most significant leadership responsibility in the local church, especially from a spiritual perspective.

Elders who realize that their calling comes first from God will most appreciate the importance and the seriousness of their leadership responsibility.

This is not just the nominating committee calling you, asking you to do something once a month.

This is God calling you for a leadership task in the church that involves serious spiritual responsibility for which God will hold you responsible for what you do or what you don't do.

It is akin to being called to being a pastor.

The difference is you're not called to full-time paid ministry, go anywhere in the world that God might call you to do as an ordained minister, but you are called to serve God in the local church as the spiritual leader in that local church.

That means doing what Paul told Timothy he needed to do, what Paul was told the Scriptures were there to do, and what Timothy was told he was supposed to do in leading the people of the church, correcting them, encouraging them, teaching them, guiding them, being the spiritual leaders that God needs you to be in that congregation.

We're going to talk about the job description more specifically in a moment, but right now we're talking about the calling.

Calling of an elder starts with God calling you.

But the church also needs to recognize that calling.

I have had situations and even have today, situations where people in the church, men who believe that they are called to be elders, who are pushing, pushing, pushing all the time for the church to put them in as elders.

The church has to elect you to be an elder.

The church should recognize your calling.

If the church does not recognize your calling, it is not your job to force them to recognize what you believe to be the calling of God, that job of God Himself to do.

Usually the least qualified individual to be an elder is the 1 who insists on being 1.

Because if God's calling you, he will take care of the placement.

When God's ready for you, he will make that clear.

Elders should not be elected because they already hold some position of importance in the community or because they have been successful in business or are wealthy.

People that are leaders in the church are called to be elders because of their spiritual leadership.

They may also have other leadership skills, But they should not be called to leadership just because they have those skills.

A lot of individuals don't realize this about being elected to being an elder, but an elder is elected, yes, by the congregation, but has no authority in the congregation until number 1, they are ordained and number 2, they are or or called to by the organized church in which they are called to serve.

An elder when they are ordained to be an elder in the local church are ordained for life.

That means that if you were ordained Fred in Michigan you don't have to be ordained in Alabama.

But in order to serve as an elder in Alabama, if you were called to be an elder in the Cedar Lake Church and you were ordained in the Cedar Lake Church, when you go to Alabama you have no authority in that church and your ordination only means that you don't have to be ordained again but that you do have to be elected by that congregation before you have any authority in that congregation.

Let's talk about the job description of an elder for a moment.

Deacons and Deaconesses Basic Training- Part 1

Father in heaven, thank you for a new morning and for this opportunity to meet together in this class.

We pray that you will bless our purpose here and that you will guide our thinking and that your Holy Spirit will help us to understand the responsibilities that come with an assignment that a church gives to us.

I pray that you will direct what I say and what we hear today, and we thank you in Jesus' name, amen.

We want to first start out by looking at, in this book, the first chapter deals with Jesus, the model of servant ministry.

A deacon or a deaconess or an elder or a personal ministries leader or a pastor, we're all servants.

But especially is the deacon and the deaconess ministry a ministry of servanthood.

When you look at the scriptures, you find that in Isaiah 61, verses 1 and 2, that Jesus looking at that identified his ministry as a servant to the meek, to the brokenhearted, and to captives and those that mourn." We live in a broken society, correct?

Our society is broken and it's getting more and more broken as the days go by.

As a Matter of fact, Ellen White, looking at the future from her time, said that things like mental illness would be even more prevalent in the day in which we live.

And that mental illness and that brokenness and I'm not here to tell you that you are now counselors to the mentally ill and all that but that we all need to find ways of caring for people is my point.

But the brokenness of this world is showing up in a lot of awful ways today, and the violence that we see and almost now becoming used to, oh, it was another shooting of a mass, you know, mass shooting somewhere.

And it, I mean, that's almost the way you react when you look at your cell phone or hear the news or somebody tells you about it because you're ignoring the news, bless you for doing that.

It is just the way society is today And 1 of the reasons for that is because the Spirit of God is being withdrawn from this world.

It's very clear that it is, and the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy make it clear that that's exactly the way it would be in our world today.

And this is in the church and out of the church.

And deacons and deaconesses are servants of people, not just the church.

In Isaiah 53 verse 11, Isaiah spoke of Jesus as my righteous servant, looking to the future, recognizing that.

And Ellen White says in Ministry of Healing, pages 19 and 20, during his ministry Jesus devoted more time to healing the sick than to preaching.

His miracles testified to the truth of his words and he came not to destroy but to save.

The Savior made each work of healing an occasion for implanting divine principles in the mind and in the soul.

He imparted earthly blessings that he might incline the hearts of men to receive the gospel of grace." The ministry of Christ was less preaching and more direct hands-on ministry and caring for people.

You and I are called to that same kind of ministry.

In our book here, and you see the abbreviation on the screen here, it says TTFCDD, it's an abbreviation of this title up here, alright, so it's referring to this book, but the author Vincent White said, Jesus taught his disciples that being a servant is more important than the power of demons.

Jesus wanted them to recognize, than power over demons, Jesus wanted them to recognize the self-destructive danger that comes with a love of power.

You and I are called to servanthood, not to authority.

Do you understand the difference of what I'm saying?

Going on, I want to share this with you, a desire of ages speaking of Christ, rejoice not, or speaking of power, she says, rejoice not in the possession of power lest you lose sight of your dependence upon God.

Be careful lest self-sufficiency come in and you work in your own strength rather than the spirit and strength of your master.

Self is ever ready to take the credit if any measure of success attends the work." And then Vincent White says, the concept that Jesus was trying to instill in his disciples that ministry is not about power, control, and greatness as viewed by worldly standards, but it is about service to God and humanity.

That is because the biblical concept of a deacon or a deaconess is the concept of rendering service to people.

In the Greek, to minister comes from the root which is derived from the word for deacon.

So the word for a deacon carries this connotation of ministry and servanthood.

It means 1 who renders service to another, an attendant servant.

So that is the foundation for what we need to talk about today.

I could give you a job description and you could say I don't want to do any of that or you might see that job description as being an opportunity for authority and power in your church, but God is calling you not to power and authority, God is calling you to servant ministry.

Servant ministry means selflessness, It means being willing to take time out of your schedule for the service of others.

That means making priority the work that needs to be done in the church.

It will make the difference between the success of your church in its ministry goal and purpose or failure thereof.

The success of the church is dependent upon the strength of its leadership.

Elders, deacons, and deaconesses provide the leadership structure for that church.

Where that church goes, where your church goes, is not dependent upon whether or not you have Dwight Nelson as your pastor.

It is dependent upon whether or not you have Dwight Nelson as your pastor, it is dependent upon whether or not you as elders, deacons, and deaconesses are fulfilling the purpose for which you were called, and you are called.

It is not a nominating committee calling you on the phone.

It is the God in heaven calling you to service.

You thought you were just getting an invitation from the nominating committee to take up the offering on Sabbath morning or to prepare communion bread.

No, that happens to be a task that might come on with the job description, but it is only 1 small tiny itsy-bitsy little piece of what it is God has called you to do.

It should take you on those duties no more than a few minutes on Sabbath morning and a little bit of time making the communion bread and that's all you would do.

Now you understand what I'm doing here right?

So let's understand what this means in terms of servanthood.

Ellen White says in Desire of Ages, page 550, among his disciples, Christ was in every sense a caretaker, a burden bearer.

He practiced self-denial on their account.

He went before them to smooth the more difficult places.

And soon he would consummate his work on earth by laying down his life.

The principle on which Christ acted is to actuate the members of the church which is his body." God is calling upon us to follow in the footsteps of Jesus in ministering to the needs of the congregation.

Ministering to the congregation is not just taking their money from them on Sabbath morning.

It means actually caring enough about them to go into their homes and talk to them and pray with them.

It means also sharing the gospel with people who don't know about the gospel.

I want to warn you that if you've not sat in 1 of these classes before, you will find that I'm going to share some things with you that will excite you just with the idea of the possibility of what can happen in ministry.

Or it will overwhelm you with, seriously, this is what I signed up for and then if you get to that point here's my suggestion to you don't get to that point understand that when we you start thinking that way that really it is an opportunity and that God simply wants you to take the next step.

You didn't start school in first grade and realize, you know, talk to some neurosurgeon somewhere and in first grade, wow, I've got to learn all of that by then and do all of that.

I'm going to quit now before I even have to." No, you start where you are and you take the steps along the way in order to be able to do the work that God has given you to do.

Vincent White again in this textbook said, therefore it is evident that Jesus' ministry as a servant provides the theological foundation for the ministry of deacon and deaconess.

As deacons and deaconesses follow Jesus example they are to enlist the members of the church into a life of service.

You see the truth is everyone from the pastor to the, that almost sounds right, from the from the members all the way down to the pastor, I like that better, Don't you like going that direction?

Not just so that ministers could be servants, not just so that elders can be servants, but that we could all be servants.

When we all serve others, the world's a better place.

Of course, Satan doesn't want it to be that way for sure.

By the way, there is a sign up sheet, couple of them coming around on clipboards, and I wanna make sure they get around to everyone, and so far they seem to be doing good.

I'm gonna have to come up with a reward for you of some sort, I don't know what it is.

Servant ministry, that's it, he's an example of servant ministry, there, that's it.

So I want to talk a little bit about the role of the deacons in the first century Christian church to begin to help us to understand what the role of a deacon is.

By the way, again, that was the first chapter in this book.

I put it up on the screen so that we can move ahead.

I encourage you to read this book and to look through it and see that.

I'm moving into chapter 2 now, the role of deacons in the first century Christian church.

I want to talk about this a little bit and be able to identify what the whole situation there is about.

Deacons and Deaconesses Basic Training - Part 2

Father in heaven, thank you for a beautiful, sunshiny morning.

And we're always grateful for life and health and the opportunity to serve you.

And sometimes Lord, we struggle with those health issues, but we're grateful that you still care about us and that you lead us moment by moment.

So Lord, as we meet together, may your Holy Spirit guide us and may we be drawn to service and to being able to learn how to serve you better.

All right, we left off yesterday and talking a little bit about caregivers and working for the care of the sick and needy.

And 1 of you came to me yesterday and indicated you'd had experience yourself on the receiving end of that.

And that's an interesting direction that we have to go.

I'll also mention a little bit about conflict.

We're gonna get into that a little bit later today.

The next chapter in your book is talking about business managers.

You may not have thought about it that way, but the responsibilities of deacons and deaconesses has in the more recent traditional experience of the deacons and deaconesses, has centered around the physical plant of the church.

In other words, the deacons are usually the ones that are assigned to make sure that the physical plant of the church is being taken care of.

And that is the 1 focal point that has carried itself into the responsibility of the deacons.

That means opening the church, closing the church, making sure it's locked, and maybe mowing the lawn, you know, arranging for janitors or being the janitor, I don't know, it depends on how that local church all works out.

And I say being the janitor, if you've got more than 1 deacon, you might share that load.

I don't, whatever it is to take care of God's house, to care for the physical plant, to maintain it when there are repairs that need to be done, and some of those kinds of things.

But 1 aspect that hasn't been thought of is the oversight of some of the management of the church.

As Elder Mitchell has become the president of our conference here in the last few months, I know 1 of the things that he said to some of the committees that he works with is that we don't, ministers, are not trained to be business people.

And I've had a lot of lay people over the years say, you pastors are not trained to be business people.

I don't know how they got to that conclusion.

There are some who have been trained and I've heard of pastors who've gone and got a Master's in Business Administration and some of those kinds of things, but 99% of pastors don't do that.

The real calling is to ministry, to be a pastoral minister and to care for the needs of the congregation, to spread the gospel message, to preach the truth, to share in Bible studies, and in evangelistic meetings, and all of that.

But if you really take all the tasks that church members sometimes think is on the docket for the pastor, there's about 5 full-time jobs in that list of material in there, and then church members say, well pastor you get paid to do that, how come you can't get it done?

And part of it is that's not really what God intended for the pastor to do.

And when pastors get into the mode where the church places the responsibility for everything on their shoulder, I'll tell you what begins to happen.

Ministers in North America, both Adventist and non-Adventist, about a third of pastors who start ministry don't finish ministry.

And many of them fail to stay in ministry after a relatively short period of time.

The stress is terrible in terms of what happens unless you have made a full commitment to the Lord and you recognize your call.

Now, some people get into ministry shouldn't be in ministry, All right?

And when they just walk in the door and say, I'd like to be a pastor.

Now we ordain them after 4 years because that gives time to prove their ministry as Ellen White says we should.

They should prove their ministry, and that is that they are recognized for accomplishing what God has called them to do.

All right, all of that to say that 1 of the areas that needs to be cared for for the church is the business management.

And I don't mean it's not a business that you're managing.

It is the financial structure of the church that needs to be cared for.

Now there's a little bit of history in here.

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Series

Elder, Deacon, Deaconess Basic Training

Deacons and Deaconesses Basic Training- Part 1

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Recorded

Parts

Elders Basic Training- Part 1

1h 10m

Deacons and Deaconesses Basic Training- Part 1

1h 8m

Deacons and Deaconesses Basic Training - Part 2

1h 16m

Managing Theological Conflict in the Local Church

1h 11m

Elders Basic Training - Part 2

1h 17m

Sound Doctrine