If your church were to close its doors permanently, would your community even know or care? This seminar looks at keys four and five and how the church is called to be a change agent in the community.

Michigan Conference Campmeeting 2021: How Much More?

If your church were to close its doors permanently, would your community even know or care? This seminar looks at keys four and five and how the church is called to be a change agent in the community.

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.

Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Seven Keys to Effective Evangelism and Church Growth

Chris Holland

01 Rediscovering the Original Plan

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2021 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

Heavenly Father, as we have gathered here for this time in the seminar, Lord, we are thankful for this time.

I'm thankful for those who have gathered here in person.

I'm also thankful for those viewing the live stream or who will view this sometime later as an archived program.

And Lord, as we journey together in this study of Your Word, I pray that You would lead us.

I pray that You would help me, Lord, to speak on Your behalf, to be articulate, Lord.

And I pray that those who are here are able to understand.

And may we all, Lord, at the end of this seminar, sense the high calling that You have placed upon each of us as individuals.

So just so you are aware, this morning I do not have any slides.

But if you have your Bibles, that's a very good thing because we're going to be in the Bible.

And the subject matter is Christ's method alone rediscovering the original plan.

Now, let us begin with that Christ's method alone.

It is probably 1 of the most quoted paragraphs from the Spirit of Prophecy in Ministry of Healing, page 143.

Will give true success in reaching the people.

The Savior mingled with men as 1 who desired their good.

He showed His sympathy to them, ministered to their needs, and won their confidence, and then what did he do?

Probably at least 10 years ago, if not longer, I began asking questions about this passage, and we will come back to this passage, because I believe there's much more to this passage than the isolated paragraph that we quote.

But here's the journey I began and the journey was this.

If we believe that the spirit of prophecy is what the spirit of prophecy says she is, the little light pointing to the greater light, or the lesser light rather, pointing to the greater light, then this very, shall I call it, exclusive paragraph, Christ's method alone, and I know in our 21st century culture, exclusivity is not something that plays very well.

That means it is unaccompanied by any other method will give true success.

And if the spirit of prophecy articulates that and is the lesser light pointing to the greater light, then this is the question I began asking myself.

Is there anywhere in the Scriptures where Jesus articulates His method alone?

And that's the journey we're going to take this morning to rediscover the original plan.

I'd like for us to go to Matthew chapter 24.

And again, if you have your Bibles, I'm gonna encourage you to follow along.

Matthew chapter 24, when we talk about Matthew chapter 24, What is Matthew chapter 24 typically when we give a study?

What is the subject matter of Matthew 24?

And don't worry, I'm not going to tell you it's about something different.

But it's a bit fascinating that right in the midst of the signs of the times, Jesus says something, and please understand when I say what I'm about to say, I'm not questioning inspiration.

I'm simply telling you my thought processes that I was having.

There is a verse that seemingly comes out of place.

And that verse is Matthew chapter 24 and verse 14.

Matthew chapter 24 and verse 14, and this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all nations and then the end will come.

And so preceding that you have Christ's warnings about false prophets, false Christs, wars, rumors of war, and all of these things.

And then all of a sudden kind of in the midst of that Jesus says and this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all nations, and then the end will come.

And then Jesus goes back to the signs of the times talking about the abomination of desolation and these kinds of things.

And so now I have another question that I'm asking.

So I'm asking this question, does Jesus ever articulate His method alone in Scripture?

And by the way, what this is going to feel like is that we're going to leave a lot of loose ends, And then before the end, we're going to tie them all together.

And so I read this verse, which this verse is the most time particular of the second coming of Jesus.

When the gospel goes to the ends of the world, then the end will come.

Now we don't know when that will be, but it is very time specific.

The gospel will go to the ends of the earth, and then the end will come.

Would you say that that's an important thing to know?

Would you say that that's an important mission to participate in?

But when we're reading Matthew 24 14, and by the way, I want this to be very interactive and while we're in the auditorium and I want us to be interactive so don't be afraid even if you have a question don't be afraid to raise your hand.

When you look at Matthew 24, 14, and if I ever ask you a trick question, I will tell you in advance that it's a trick question.

Matthew 24, Verse 14, when you look at that passage, is there any word that stands out to you in that passage?

It's a small word, but it's a very important word in the passage.

All, all the world's a very important world.

You can preach on this verse for weeks on end.

But There's an even smaller word, because you talked about preach.

Now I want you to take note, and I fully believe in inspiration, and I believe when Matthew recorded these words of Jesus, under the power and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Matthew could have written a number of different words there.

He could have written the word the, he could have written a, but he did not.

Grammar wasn't my favorite lessons in school either.

It actually can, It does function as a pronoun.

And it could function as an adjective or a pronoun, but here it's functioning as a pronoun.

And some of you are saying, ok, I came to learn about God's original plan, not pronouns.

But the word this is absolutely vital in this passage.

Because, once again, Matthew is being particular.

Because later, what would Paul write in Galatians?

There are some that are preaching another Gospel, but it is not a gospel at all.

And so when Jesus spoke, Jesus wanted to make sure that his disciples understood this gospel.

This gospel of the kingdom will go to the ends of the earth and then the end will come.

So now we are raising an additional question.

You see, often when we have this discussion about the gospel, what is the gospel?

02 Personal Transformation

Heavenly Father, we have gathered here at the Michigan Conference Camp meeting.

And Lord, we are just thrilled to be able to be here.

And as we spend time in this session, Our hope and our prayer is that You would teach us something that it would not merely just be a file that we put in our brain somewhere, but rather, Lord, we would implement these things and apply them practically.

So as we begin our seminar, I will want to just clarify that word evangelism.

When I use the word evangelism, typically what most people will think of if I say evangelism, most people will think of 1 of 2 things.

So I say evangelism, and the picture that comes to mind for most people or for many people is Mark Finley, Sean Boonstra, Doug Batchelor, so on and so forth.

5 weeks in a hall somewhere doing a meeting.

When we talk about the word evangelism and understand evangelism in its truest sense, evangelism is the proclamation of the good news of victory.

And when I use the word evangelism, I want it to be understood that I'm using it in its broadest sense.

Everybody said yes, and that's a good answer.

If it's not, then we really need to begin to examine and ask some questions.

And when I use the word evangelistic, I don't necessarily mean that we are recruiting outside children to come into our Pathfinder Club, which I think is a good thing, but even for our own young people, it is evangelistic in nature.

Teaching them how to be a good citizen of heaven and a good citizen on this earth.

Both the children's and the adult divisions.

If it's not, then we need to ask some very serious questions.

There have been a number of different studies, and I will speak specifically to young people right now, there have been a number of different studies both by Barna and then Answers in Genesis which is the group that built the Creation Museum and the replication of Noah's Ark down in Kentucky.

That if we do not have young people that are fully committed by the fifth or sixth grade then we have lost them And how that then is analogized is that, think about cradle roll Sabbath school and how we depict the flood story, for example.

How is the flood story normally depicted?

There's a boat with a bunch of animals with all their heads stuck out of the boat all jammed in there.

And what are we when we use those pictures?

What are we doing at the earliest age when we do that and we present that?

We are presenting the story of the flood as a fairy tale and implanting that in the mind of a young child that This is not a true event that happened in history that teaches us a lesson about the love of God, but rather we're teaching it as some fictitious event that's like the rest of the cartoons that exist in the secular society.

And let me tell you a brief story of why that's so dangerous.

In 2012, if you recall, the big news was the doomsday prophecy of the Mayan tablets.

These Mayan discs, as they had been interpreted, people believed that the Mayans had predicted the end of the world because the disc which had the calendar ended in 2012.

In these days and age, I'll have audiences and I'll start talking and I'll talk about my 1982 Chevy Chevette and I look out and all these blank stares at me and I realize that everyone that I'm speaking to was not alive in 1982.

And in case you're wondering, I'm 47, because I don't want you to be thinking about that during the whole seminar.

So in 2012, I went to Illinois State University.

I had been invited by the Adventist Christian Fellowship to come and do some presentations on the 2012 Mayan doomsday prophecy.

And so I went there and my expectation was I was going to be speaking to a group of Adventist students and their Christian friends that they invited.

And on opening night, to my utter shock, half of the congregation that evening was from the secular and philosophy club on campus.

Needless to say, that night I had to do a lot of shifting of my presentation.

I'm telling you this story because there I met a young man by the name of Josh.

Josh grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist home.

He was homeschooled through every single grade.

And when he went to university, in his first philosophy class, he gave up his faith and hook, line, and sinker bought into secular philosophy.

And now he was leading the Secular and Philosophy Club on the campus of Illinois State University.

Friends, we need to be educating our young people and preparing them for a world that no longer fundamentally believes that the Bible is the basis of moral and right living.

We can use technical names like apologetics.

So Sabbath school has an evangelistic aspect to it to help our young people have a real experience with Jesus and become committed followers of Him.

Just to finish that story, because I know some of you are wondering, so what happened at Illinois State University?

On that opening night, at the end of my presentation, I stood and these secular and philosophy club members all came.

And we stood in a circle, and they are peppering me with questions.

I was praying the whole time because I knew it was likely that all of those young people were vastly smarter than I was.

And we were talking and talking, and finally, we stood there for 3 hours talking.

I stood there for 3 hours because they just kept asking questions.

Finally, the last question of the night is What's different about you?

And I said, well, that's an interesting kind of question, but what do you mean by that?

They said, we go to Christian events on this campus all the time.

And every other group kicks us out and doesn't allow us to stay.

Lord, help me to say something that means something.

I simply said, And I can't remember the young man's name at that young man's name.

And I said, you know, young man, here's what I would hope.

I respect what you think and what you believe.

And I would hope in the same way you would respect what I think and believe.

And that we could have a discussion that is a courteous and kind discussion.

Because at the end of the day, I think all of us have the same goal.

That night, I knew I was only going to have the opportunity to address these young people 1 more time.

And so I was praying, Lord, what do I do?

And I knew that it was very likely I would never see these young people ever again.

1 of the most exclusive statements of the entirety of the Bible.

I am God, and there is none like Me." How is it that we know that He is God and there is no other?

03 Corporate Transformation

Heavenly Father, as we've gathered here together in this place, and as those who have gathered that are on the live stream and will watch this sometime in the future, sitting from their home and watching YouTube.

I pray dear God that you would be with us, that your Holy Spirit would lead us into all truth Lord and may we be set free to do the work that you have called us to do.

So as we launch into the 7 keys, now 1 of the things I wanted to mention, as I talk about the 7 keys to effective evangelism, I wanna be very clear that I am not presenting something that is different or in opposition to the Michigan growth plan.

Many of you are familiar with GROW, talking about the cycle of evangelism.

This is just looking at it from a different angle, and as I am picturing it, and is to supplement what you already have from a Michigan Conference core.

And I would encourage you, if you are not familiar with the Grow cycle here in Michigan, to look at the Personal Ministries website and familiarize yourself with it.

Familiarize yourself with Cameron DeVasher and Mark Howard and I might even encourage you to make sure that you have your church in some kind of a training program with them because the principles I'm talking about are the same principles that they're advocating, just looking at it from a couple of different angles and views.

But as I start this morning, I want to reemphasize this whole issue of a misunderstanding of the Gospel Commission, and I talked about this the first day.

We will remember that we talked about the Gospel Commission in Matthew chapter 28.

And there in Matthew chapter 28, Jesus commits his church to this ragtag group of 11 men, and he tells them to go into all the world, to make disciples, to preach, to teach, to baptize, and we learned that of those what appear to be 4 commands, only 1 of them is an imperative command.

And that 1 imperative command is make disciples.

Go, teach, and baptize is how we make disciples.

When the entire emphasis of evangelism in church growth is on baptizing.

I believe baptisms are a measure of health in the church.

But we need to understand, If baptism is the ultimate goal and only baptism, we are not fulfilling the gospel commission.

The call of God is that we make disciples.

The challenge when baptizing is the ultimate plateau moment is that once we baptize someone, we then think we have no responsibility to them.

That would be the equivalent of saying, the ultimate experience for a mother is to deliver the baby.

And if we treated new members like, or if we treated new babies like we treat new members often, and that is we've baptized them, our work is done.

Then what we would have is mothers delivering babies and setting them in the maternity ward and hoping someday they'll grow up and they'll start eating regular food on their own and then eventually they'll walk out of the hospital healthy and well-to-do about living human life.

And some of you are smiling at me because you know that that's ridiculous, but that's what we do with new people in the church.

We baptize them and we kind of pat them on the back and say, hey, good luck, hope you survive.

Tom Rainer wrote a book and the book is entitled Simple Church.

I don't advocate everything in that book, but it would be a good book for you to read, and here's the reason why.

Tom Rader studies those churches that are growing the fastest around the United States.

This is churches, broadly speaking, not just Adventist churches, and this is what they found.

Those churches that are growing the fastest have the clearest path toward visiting the church to becoming a full disciple of Christ.

Meaning people know what it means to become a disciple.

Meaning that people walk in the doors and they understand clearly what the next steps are in becoming a member and then from becoming a member getting involved and becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ.

And he talks about the decisions that these churches make are very, very difficult decisions because they craft a model that does not allow for anything to be an impediment to the path of discipleship.

In fact, 1 of the statements in that book, which I have in a different presentation, is our churches are cluttered.

There are many obstacles to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ.

And by the way, that requires us to ask some very difficult questions, because that may require us to make some changes.

And let me be very, very clear when I use that because then people say, oh, where's this guy going?

We're not talking about changes to the 28 fundamental beliefs.

We're not talking about changes to the pure word of truth.

What I'm talking about is there are things that we do in our church that are not necessarily things that we should be doing or have to be doing, if that makes sense.

And I could expand upon that if you have a question you can come ask me.

Let me give you the simplest illustration.

Before, well even while, I was, when I first became an Adventist, I was working at McDonald's.

That's what I did before the Lord called me into ministry, is I managed restaurants.

By the way, I think it should be a requirement of life to work in fast food.

If you can deal with people and something as simple as food, you can deal with anything.

But I was working at McDonald's when McDonald's did something that was outside of their core business.

And I know, you know, and by talking about McDonald's I'm not advocating to go to McDonald's.

But what was McDonald's bread and butter, so to speak?

Okay, when I was working at McDonald's, from point of order to delivery of sandwich, 3 minutes and 35 seconds.

If you did not achieve it in less than that 3 minute time, then you were slow.

When I worked at McDonald's, McDonald's wanted to get into the gourmet sandwich business.

And so they came up with this sandwich called the Arch Deluxe.

The Arch Deluxe took more time to prepare, it was a more complicated sandwich, and it used ingredients that were different than the ingredients of all the rest of the sandwiches.

All the sandwiches at McDonald's are basically a manifestation of the same ingredients just in a different package.

The Arch Deluxe has been labeled when you look it up as 1 of the greatest corporate failures ever.

Because it was outside the core of what McDonald's is.

When people go to McDonald's, they are not expecting gourmet sandwiches.

When people go to McDonald's, they're expecting burgers, fries, shakes, fast.

And when fast food is no longer fast, then it's just food.

And people come to McDonald's for fast food that's cheap.

And the Arch Deluxe was neither fast Nor was it cheap.

Because in the church, Our business is to make disciples.

And if that is not what we are about, we will not have success.

All right, so with that, let's get into the 7 keys to church growth, 7 keys to evangelism.

Series

Seven Keys to Effective Evangelism and Church Growth

04 Would They Even Know?

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Preach the Word

01 Giving the Message

1h 1m

End-time Finance

05 Weeping Merchants: The Final Economic Collapse

58m

Preach the Word

04 Building the Message

59m

Prophetic Preaching and Persuasive Appeals for Decision

03 When to Preach Persuasive Appeals for Decision

58m

The Power of Unity: Reflecting Christ in Every Relationship

04 Conflict Resolution

55m

The Key to Finishing the Work

Taste and See

1h 8m

Reasons to Believe

05 The Resurrection of Jesus Christ

50m

End-Time Events & Religious Liberty Implications

The King of the North vs. The King of the South: Daniel 11

1h

Preach the Word

05 Delivering the Message

59m

Is It Time to Fast?

05 Is It Time to Fast

1h 2m

Soul Winning Hour

Soul Winning Hour - 2nd Sabbath

1h

Preparing Your Church for Evangelism

02 What is the Church? How Do I Fit In?, Part 02

1h 1m

Sound Doctrine