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Village SDA Church

Ron Kelly

Wrestle, Fight, and Pray — or Say Uncle

Thank you, Lord, for the blessings of this house to gather in your name.

Thank you for Jesus, who has brought the good news of who you are to us and bridged the gap through the cross between our rebel earth and our home in heaven.

And in the end, may peace be found at the foot of the cross in surrender.

Set a watch before my lips and a guard before the door of my mouth, and I pray for a holy boldness as well, Lord, to say everything I should and hold back nothing.

Now, Lord, I pray, send your spirit to annoy ears and hearts, especially mine.

I'm gonna start this sermon different than I did the last 1.

I'm gonna read you a few entries out of John Wesley's journal.

If you'd like some great reading, go to the Wesley Center online, Google the Wesley Center, and you can read John Wesley's diary.

The closing hymn today is written by John Wesley.

It comes directly from our scripture, Ephesians 6, and I want you to have a sense of what his life was like in the year he wrote the hymn, 1747.

And actually I want to jump back to these readings.

I walked at 5 in the evening to the shattered room in Marlborough Street where a few people were met who did not fear what men or devils could do to them.

Now, the longer we read, that's gonna make a whole lot more sense.

They did not fear what men or devils could do to them.

The Popish mob, encouraged and assisted by the Protestants, are insolent and outrageous, that whatever street we pass through, it is up in arms.

Just going to hear John Wesley preach, just John Wesley coming into town, created a mob experience, a riot.

The mayor would assist us, but he cannot.

The grand jury have had the plainest evidence of the riot laid before them, that a mixed rabble of papists and Protestants broke open our room at 4 and into the warehouse, stealing and destroying the goods to a considerable value.

They beat and wounded several with clubs, tore away the pulpit, the benches, the window, and the cases, burnt them openly before the gate, swearing they would murder us all.

Yet it is much doubted whether the grand jury will find the bill." In other words, whether or not anybody will get repaid.

And then he tells how he began his sermon.

We were therefore forced when it was dark to walk home another way without calling upon our Catholic friends.

Returning, we were insulted by a gathering mob.

When a Baptist came by and desired us to take shelter in his house, we stayed and breakfasted and left him quite happy in having protected us from the violence of the people.

In our return from intercession, the prayer meeting, we were stoned for the length of a street or 2.

Charles Perinat interposed his back to screen me.

Here I received the first blow since I came to Dublin.

At our lodgings, the mob took leave of us without hurting either.

And 1 more, I didn't realize this, for all the respect I have for Count Zinzendorf, this is not such a positive entry.

Miller's, the Lutheran minister who favored me with the sight of Count Zinzendorf's famous declaration against my brother and me.

In other words, Zinzendorf was warning everybody against Wesley, and likewise his translation of the New Testament, we looked for the Saint James Epistle, but he was not to be found, the count having thrust him out of the canon by his own authority." Interesting.

Now, the past week, I've had the opportunity to do a little reflecting on some statistical analysis regarding our denomination.

I have to admit that I really did not plan to do this, but I found myself looking at least 3, maybe 4 sets of statistics, and it troubled me greatly.

It troubled me to the point that we're here today with a message entitled, Wrestle, Fight, and Pray, or Say, Uncle.

Now, I don't have to tell you, you don't need to be social scientists, that there is an open war on against the traditional Christian church.

And if you think somehow the Seventh-day Adventists are left out of that, you better think again.

Because the real end goal of this is to castrate the Seventh-day Adventist Church and make them absolutely impotent at the time they are most needed and the message should go forward with power.

Now 1 of the songs we sang here in the praise time asked if culture was our friend.

I'm here to tell you today at this hour, you must know, every father must know, every mother must know, that the worldly culture around us, which is now in our pocket and hard to avoid, is absolutely not our friend.

It's an enemy of all of our souls, but some have found a way to keep it at bay.

So not too long ago I wrote to our education department in the Michigan Conference, and I asked for some statistics.

Now, it's important, since there are a number of visitors here today, to know that you will find no greater supporter of Adventist education in the room than me.

My very salvation was delivered at the hands of a Christian teacher.

I am standing here before you because of that school and the discipleship I received.

But just because I'm absolutely friend, supporter, strengthener of the hands of those who teach our children, does not mean that I can change the blatant, ugly, undesirable facts.

And it has really nothing to do with education.

You cannot have a vibrant living church school without a vibrant living church.

It is the discipleship of the parents first, the school second, and the church in cooperation with both that creates a community in which young people can actually grow up to become soldiers of Christ in an environment where society would like to make them perpetually addictive to a consumer mentality and a consumer desire level.

Now, I'm just here to tell you right at the very beginning that something will have to change in the hearts of Seventh-day Adventists and Seventh-day Adventism if we expect to have places to disciple our children a generation or 2 from now.

So I asked for 30 years of statistics on the enrollment for children in the Michigan Conference.

They had the last 10 years, they were willing to get me the 20 beyond that, which I really appreciated.

And both the educational superintendent and myself both noticed something.

And that is that about the turn of the millennium We begin to see a very precipitous fall off in the census of our schools In 1987 when I was finishing my college education, at the end of the next year, after my year of pastoral internship, there were 2, 769 students attending Seventh-day Adventist schools in the state of Michigan.

That number did not deviate an awful lot.

You get all the way down to the year 2002 and it's still at 2500.

But from there forward you see something happening which is startling.

From 2500 in 2002 down to the year 2019, 17 years, we see a loss of almost a thousand students.

That means every year on average, 1 church school the size of a 50 church school pupil educational center is closing.

The truth of the matter is, is that the census in all of our schools just keeps shrinking.

Now, when I look at the statistics for the North American division, they're not a whole lot different.

Unfortunately, in 1999, there were 50, 152 elementary students in Seventh-day Adventist schools.

At the end of 2011, which is as far as this statistical sheet takes me, it had already dropped to 38, 999.

I wish I could say that it's different even locally.

I'm holding in my hands now the statistics for the entire state of Michigan for this year.

And I'm looking at it, and I see the exact same thing in almost every single school.

Now that is grades 5 through 8, have about 15 to 20 percent more students in them.

As a matter of fact, there are 448 students enrolled in grades 1 to 4 in the Michigan Conference.

And so what you can expect to see in our Michigan schools, which is what you can expect to see in your Maryland school, in your Iowa school, and your Texas school, and your California school, is that over the next several years, the census is gonna drop by an average of about 3% a year, and eventually, you'll have to cut teachers.

As a matter of fact, I just found out yesterday of a school in Indiana where I pastored for 25 years, a school was closing.

Well, I'm gonna take your Bibles out and open them up to the book of Ephesians chapter 6.

I'm here to tell you there's an all-on war out against traditional Christianity.

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Wrestle, Fight, and Pray — or Say Uncle

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