OCI NAD Convention 2022: Mission Revival

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Outpost Centers International

Jesse Zwiker

5 Strategies to Increase you Ministry Sustainability

You're used to being on stage, so you should have no problem.

So anyway, so I had an amazing experience, to be honest.

I got so excited about everything that I was studying all day long, trying to figure out the 2300-day prophecy in the evening, in the day, to be able to share it in the evening, and all these other things.

And so then I ended up preaching, I got so excited about it, I started making baptismal appeals and I was not even baptized, you know.

So I actually wanted to go in and jump in and get baptized with them, but then the pastor said, that would look weird if you got baptized with the people.

So I had to wait until Switzerland, go back to Switzerland to get baptized there.

Anyway, in January, yeah, in the middle of ice, we baptized in the Lake of Constance.

Anyway, it takes about 6 months for you to get baptized in Switzerland.

You know, like once you decide, it takes a while.

Anyway, so that was my initiation into ministry world.

And that initiation actually essentially destroyed my interest in going to study drumming, going to study.

Actually, just do a normal boring life like everybody else.

You know, I wanted to be a missionary for the rest of my life.

So I decided to go to a mission school to Norway and They had amazing teachers, all these missionaries from all over the world, sharing how they do ministry and how they are all crazy people, you know, but doing amazing things for the Lord.

So I'm like, I want to experience something like that.

And so from that, long story short, I'm gonna jump here a few couple of decades.

I became a missionary, we went to start a project in Honduras, Vida International, I don't know if you know it, with Jose.

That was a challenging experience for me.

Actually that was the experience that helped me really try to understand how to make a ministry sustainable.

Because I got there, a couple of months after I got there, Jose told me, Jose was the guy that called me to go and help him.

And I was you know, I just turned 19 or I was, well, I was almost turning 20 actually.

And he's telling me, hey, my mom told me I need to study full time.

So I'm going to leave the project up to you For the next 3 and a half years.

And I'm like, I don't even know the language.

And so anyway, but I ended up there and Jose would always help with everything on the weekends.

But it was like, okay, how do I make this thing sustainable?

That was my main question, because my problem was not to get missionaries.

Our problem, we would go and preach at, I would go and speak at all these churches in Tegucigalpa, in the capital, you know, and we would get all these missionaries from the city to come and help us.

But a couple of months later, people started asking, hey, I would like to do this long term, but I need to buy some deodorant.

I need to buy some, you know, I need to sustain myself.

Like, is there a way for you to sustain, you know, to pay us something, you know, not much.

I mean, just, you know, something, you know?

And so I'm like, You know, God will sustain us, you know, that was my answer.

It worked actually very well for about a year.

For about a year, God miraculously, We prayed, you know, we just said, we're going to do the Lord's work.

God is going to take care of the beans and rice.

And we just hoped that God would drop the beans from heaven into our mouths.

And he did, actually, for a whole year, he did.

But miraculously, we had donations come in, you know, for the exact amount that we needed to buy the food, to be able to sustain the 20 missionaries that were with us.

But After about a year, we started reading some quotes from Ellen White that said, really, all of our ministry should be, what was it?

But I thought this whole faith thing, you know, we just do God's work and God will take care of the self-support side.

Now, there is some truth to that, but it's not the full truth, right?

God wants us to learn how to grow our own beans.

And God will bless those beans so that we can harvest those beans and eat from them and be fully self-supporting.

I realized, ah, we can actually make this thing sustainable, self-sustainable.

And she says this, actually, not just for self-supporting work, but she's saying for the conference work, all of our schools, canvassing, hospitals, sanitariums, you name it, everything is supposed to be self-supporting, right?

They all are little kind of business entities essentially that generate their own income to be able to sustain themselves, even at a school, right?

Or you have industries that support, et cetera.

So it's everything is based on self, making the things self-supporting.

Actually, so self-supporting, and this is part of the challenge is, the larger institutions, he says, the established institutions should make so much money, so much profit, that they are able to do what?

Help start other ones, smaller ones, right?

So how profitable should our larger institutions be to be able to not just sustain themselves but help others.

So we need to rethink profitability because we are generally afraid of profit.

We think that profit is like we're charging too much, you know, like we're overcharging somebody, but we don't realize that it is the profitability aspect that helps us scale.

Imagine if every sanitarium out there was able to help start another sanitarium.

We will go from 1 to 2 to 4 to 8, 16, 32, 64, 128.

I mean within a couple of years we could go zoom, right?

But we don't have 1 sanitarium per country in the world.

Per country, not even, we're not talking about city, every city, we're supposed to be in every city, right?

So just imagine, So we need to be rethinking because profit actually helps us grow.

Not for the sake of ourselves, but for the sake of the work.

And that's what actually led me then into studying business, because I had studied theology, but theology didn't teach me how to sustain a ministry.

Actually theology didn't even teach me, I don't want to say this too loud, but it didn't even teach me how to reach people.

This is not in the presentation, but I'm going to just share it with you.

You know where I learned how to reach people?

Yeah, good and bad, you know, testing, you know.

But where I realized that there are some people studying this topic, how to reach people, and they've been doing it for hundreds of years, and they've written a whole bunch of books on it, how to reach people, how to reach people more effectively.

What the science is of how to reach people?

5 Strategies to Increase you Ministry Sustainability

Transcript

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