Collegedale Camp Meeting 2023: Expanding His Kingdom

Georgia-Cumberland Conference

Ministerial

Victor Maddox

Keeping the Mission Center

That's 1 of the best introductions I've had, to be honest with you.

You make me appear to be someone special and full of knowledge and wisdom.

But God is good, and I am so glad that he has called each and every 1 of you to be a part of this seminar presentation that involves reaching your neighbor for Jesus Christ.

Believe it or not, I personally think that in many cases, when it comes down to evangelism and sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, what kind of sort of believe sometimes we overcomplicate what Jesus made so simple and plain when it comes down to working with others, bringing others to a deeper knowledge of who he is.

And the reason why I throw that out is because probably the most essential, elemental thing that each 1 of us need in order to be witnesses to our neighbors.

Bible instructor training is great, is going to help you.

Praying is great, it will definitely help you.

Connecting will definitely help you, but this is the key thing.

It is your personal relationship with Jesus Christ that counts.

If you have a vibrant, growing, strong, regular relationship with Jesus Christ and you share that story, that message, what he means to you, nobody can take that away from you.

Nobody can challenge you on that fact because you are a walking, breathing example, a witness to the difference that Jesus can make in a person's life.

They want to see what Jesus is doing or has done in your life first.

And if they knew you from the past and then they if they knew you BC before Christ and now they are taking a look at you after you have had this encounter with Christ and they witness, they see the difference, that is the most powerful way of witnessing to your neighbors.

So I want to throw that out there because it's just that important.

If you're 1 who likes to get up in the morning and say, oh, I don't have time for worship.

If you don't have time for Jesus, it's going to be reflected in your life.

So take that time to connect with Jesus and be filled with his likeness to become more and more with him.

That's a little commercial and it's free of charge, but it's probably 1 of the most important things that you'll hear during this seminar these next couple of days.

So the title of this presentation is Keeping the Mission Center.

The Bible Coordinator and Leads program started, I think it's been about 5 years now, hasn't it?

It started out of a desire to see God's people become better equipped to share the good news of the gospel with others.

It wasn't a desire to try something new and spontaneous, but at its center, it was based upon the question, how can we do what we do more effectively?

Not more in a complicated way, but more effectively.

And we're going to talk a little bit more about some of those driving forces, those driving issues that caused us, that led us to this point.

Before I go any further, well, I'll do that as we go on.

The idea was to, as we talked, we thought about and talked about and prayed about ways to really take this step in making this process more effective.

If we could identify experienced Bible workers, I mean, people who are out there working with folk, people who are out there working with leads and giving Bible studies, if we could identify some good, experienced Bible workers who also had the ability to teach others what they know how to do by God's grace, then if we could do that, then we could we could utilize these people to train other people how to do the same, how to give Bible studies, how to follow up on leads.

And not only would this didactic process include the know-how information on how to do all this stuff, but these Bible instructors, which is what we entitled, what we call these teaching Bible workers, not only would they give the information, but they will also offer in-field training to those who they were teaching.

In other words, they weren't gonna just tell you how to do it, they were gonna actually go in the field and show you how to do it and allow you to actually do it while they're there accompanying you.

Now that's the process, that's what we talked about.

Nothing compares to receiving information and then actually putting the information into action.

And that's the key basis for the program.

About 100 years ago, I was a new convert to the Adventist Church, as you've heard, being a part of the U.S.

And when I came to Jesus Christ, the first, really the second church that I started attending was the Maranatha SDA church in Atlanta, Georgia.

And so every time the church doors were open, I was there because I wanted to know Jesus.

I was there for Wednesday night prayer meeting, Saturday night meetings, Sabbath morning meetings, Sabbath afternoon meetings.

I mean, if the church opened up 7 days a week, guess what?

I will be there because I was just that thirsty for biblical knowledge.

And so I began to ask people, because Sabbath school teachers were, I mean, Sabbath school, if you're a Sabbath school teacher, you're an awesome person because you're standing up in front of people and you're leading them through a lesson that in many cases are very relevant and spot-on when it comes down to understanding the Bible more.

As I would see these Bible, these Sabbath school teachers teaching the lessons.

I would sit in on these lessons on how to give Bible studies that was put on by Bible workers.

And I wanted to know more about how can I learn my Bible more?

And I kept throwing that question around to different members.

You know, what do I need to do to understand the Bible more?

They said, the best way to learn your Bible is to learn how to give Bible studies.

Now I'm green, I know my Bible a little bit.

I mean when I was first coming into the church, there was an 11 year old boy who was sitting next to me to show me which direction to go to find the different books of the Bible.

And so this kid was showing me how to find the books in the Old Testament and the New Testament and I'm just sitting there, I'm knucklehead because I can't remember.

And so he introduced me to this thing called an index in the front that would give me the pages where the books were located.

And so I decided that I was going to connect with a Bible worker.

And the Bible worker that I connected with, I remember her name, her name was Irene Smith.

She actually still does Bible work here in the US somewhere.

She was the 1 that introduced me to Bible work and back in those days Irene would carry this little, this little box, an index card box.

She had all these little index cards in there.

Those who've been in Bible work for a while?

And so we would meet together to pray and she would give me instructions.

And she would have already picked out a number of these little cards that we were going to go and connect with.

People who she was in the process of giving Bible studies and then other people who were new leads.

And so we'd get in the car and we would drive there and I would sit and I would just enjoy just seeing and hearing Irene share the good news with these many people, these various people, and calling for decisions and some people saying I want to be baptized and She's setting dates for the baptism.

Praying for people, praying that God will heal people, that God will be with their family members who had yet to receive Jesus Christ.

My knowledge of the Bible was increasing.

Well 1 day Irene decided to throw a curve my way and we were getting ready to walk into this house to give Bible studies and before she knocked she turned to me and she says, by the way you're going to be leading out in this Bible study tonight.

She says, you're going to be giving the Bible study And I said, I don't know enough to give a Bible study.

I mean I've been listening to you and I know some things but I don't know enough to give a Bible study.

Where her response was, well you know more than you know more than the people who we're going to be giving a Bible study to, so you'll do fine.

And she said, and by the way, I'm going to be there with you to assist you if you get stuck.

And so with those words, we went into this person's house, and I presented my first Bible study right there in the presence of Irene and I tell you that was a beautiful start to my journey of working with others, working with them, and leading them to a deeper understanding of Jesus and calling for appeals for people to give their heart to Jesus Christ.

This whole idea of being taught and then being mentored in the field and then being kind of pushed forward to actually engage while still having the support.

Well, those are some of the basic elements of this program that we now have here in the Georgia Convolution Conference.

And any of these Bible instructors, Bible workers here, can tell you that that's a process that they themselves have used for many, many years.

And so I value their experience, and I pray that you will also do the same.

At the time this idea of training members came to mind, I knew a few Bible workers who have bounced the idea of this process off of them and the ones that I shared this with, I think I shared with Karen also, they liked the idea, this idea of finding Bible workers who were experienced and who could teach members how to give Bible studies and follow up on leads.

Noah Banks

Roxana Ramont

How to Follow up on Leads and Use the Interest Tracker Leads Software

As any good public speaker knows, they get their energy from their crowd.

So it's very glad to see everyone here this afternoon.

As I already mentioned, my name is Noah Banks and I'm a traveling Bible work instructor for the Georgia Cumberland Conference.

I was hired about a little over a year ago now, starting on May 4th.

And so I'm very glad to be here with y'all.

I traveled all the way from the country of Paraguay so I could be here with y'all this afternoon.

It was no short trip, but I'm very glad to be with y'all this afternoon.

Before we get any further into our presentations, I'd like to just say for me and any of my coworkers here, if you are wanting to learn more about the Bible Work program, if you're wanting to learn how I can be involved, how can I go do Bible Work, then come and reach out to us?

We are scattered all over the Georgia Cumberland Conference, all over from Valdosta, Georgia, all the way to Kingsport, Tennessee.

And so no matter how small your church or how big it is, we have plenty of opportunities to get involved.

And so I'm going to introduce today what the Leeds Bible Work Program is.

Some people may not know what it is, and others may already be seasoned veterans of it.

How many of you already know about the LEADS program?

My co-workers aren't raising their hands, that's a problem.

But, so I want to do a quick introduction.

First I want to say is that the LEADS program, our goal is to help churches find people in their communities that are interested in Bible studies.

And so this whole program sprung out of a crisis in the Georgia Cumberland Conference.

Because as of 2020, and a little bit before that, the conference wanted to see how many Bible study interests were across the Georgia Cumberland Conference how many people were requesting Bible studies and they did this by looking at every single local churches pages and say how many churches Has some local bobsled contacts either by in person or they were looking at him from advertisements or from It Is Written, Amazing Facts, all these other programs.

And at the time, they found that there were over 20, 000 unfollowed Bible study requests going back over 5 years.

And that was a real shocker for most people, because I always equated to this.

Imagine if you picked up the phone to call 911, and no 1 picked up the phone.

This was what the same thing happened for over 20, 000 people.

They picked up the phone and said, I want to know more about Jesus, but nobody picked up the phone.

Nobody knew that these 20, 000 people existed.

And so what was the solution to this problem?

And so they created the Leeds Bible Work Program.

A number of my co-workers, I was not there at the founding of the program, but our goal of the program was how do we teach every single individual church and member to be involved in Bible work?

Because in the Georgia Cumberland we have tens of millions of people that aren't Adventist or even Christians or they know very little of the gospel.

So how do we reach every single individual person across the conference?

And so I am more than excited to say that as of these 20, 000 people who went unfollowed up, As of this beginning of this year, it was announced that there's over 14, 000 active Bible studies going on across the Georgia Cumberland Conference.

Many of the churches that you may come from may only have 10 or 20 members.

But could you imagine 14, 000 people coming to know Christ and wanting to be a part of your church?

Becoming active members in their community?

Even becoming Bible workers themselves to share exactly what they have to share with their neighbors.

So we went from people unfollowed up to now we have over 14, 000 active Bible studies and we have over 1, 600 Bible workers registered right now in the Georgia Cumberland.

These are all people who are going across the Georgia Cumberland giving out Bible studies and so we're still looking to get every community involved.

And I like to say that Bible work is still necessary.

People are still learning the gospel even 3 years later from 2020.

COVID did not destroy people's wish to know Jesus because as I have here on the screen, in 1 advertisement segment that we did online, this was an advertisement done through Facebook, 1 church here in the Georgia Cumberland received over 650 Bible study requests.

Could you imagine your local church receiving 650 people asking for Bible studies?

Would you be ready to accept that call and see how many you can work with?

In this 1 church, it has 5 active Bible workers for 650 individuals.

This is a total membership involvement ministry.

Every ministry, if they're not winning souls, is not a ministry.

I don't care if you're running a health ministry, a family ministry, children's ministry, if it's not winning souls for the kingdom, it's a social ministry.

And so this program is to be used in every single ministry output and so I want to go through a little bit how do we do that.

Something that we'll be talking about a little bit later on is an online tracking system for the Leeds Bible Work program called Interest Tracker.

Interest Tracker is used to say let's say we have a Bible study interest named John and Karen.

You know, these are such wonderful people and they've requested Bible studies and now you want to study with them, but you also want to record your information about them.

The Georgia government conference has already purchased this technology for every church to use and hopefully your local church is already using it.

Roxanna will be talking about that a little bit later.

But what I want to share with you is a great photo.

If you see the picture up on the screen, the 1 on your left is the state of Georgia and these are all the Bible study interests currently in Georgia.

That's nearly 14, 000 people and you can't even see the state of Georgia anymore because how many people have requested Bible studies.

On the other side of the screen is Chattanooga, Tennessee.

You can't see it because there's that many people requesting Bible studies still in the Georgia Cumberland and how wonderful that is.

And so if you're thinking, well they don't need me, I don't need to get involved, well all these red dots say otherwise.

Well the LEADS program offers multiple different things to help us to reach all those Bible study interests.

First we offer trainings, equipping, and support.

Training, equipping, our Bible work instructors have been well trained and we have a lot of great knowledge to pass on.

We're not here to just tell you what you should be doing but we're going to teach you and train you how to do it.

And most the time we're going to go out with you.

So when you go to a door to visit someone for the first time you'll have someone with all the experience in the world to go with you, but most importantly Jesus Christ himself will be going with us as well.

Because with Jesus going with us we can't possibly have issues and so we offer many different trainings but I put a few of the general ones up there.

Is that we will teach you how to follow up on leads, how to give Bible studies to your neighbors and your friends, and other many similar topics.

We offer support through training, supplies, experienced workers, online systems, and prayer.

And So we offer a lot of wonderful things.

If you want to learn more about the resourcing for the Leeds Bible Work Program, please reach out to Roxanna at the conference and she will be able to help you out.

The next 2 goals of the Leeds Bible Work Program is the adoption and discipleship.

And so with the adoption program, there are places here in our Georgia Cumberland Conference that has no churches.

There are multiple counties and areas in the Georgia Cumberland conference that have no churches or no 1 to follow them up.

There was an area down in southeast Georgia where over 350 people had requested Bible studies but no 1 to follow them up because there's no churches that lied within a two-hour drive of this large mission zone in Georgia.

And so let's say your local church has already worked its area very well, and you have some extra time, you have some extra resources and people.

We do encourage from the conference level that we encourage every church to look into getting a mission zone and to work in towns and counties and areas where people are requesting Bible studies but they have no 1 to follow them up.

This Bible work program is not just for people outside the church, but they're for inside the church as well.

We have become very comfortable in our churches sitting down and kind of relaxing.

But through discipleship, we are called to be active members, active parts of the body of Christ.

And so discipleship is, this is helping grow our membership.

This is helping grow people in their spiritual walk.

Karen Keaton

Wayne Walton

Always Be in Contact- The ABCs of Bible Work

I'm prayed up and I'm fired up and I'm ready to go and I hope that you are ready to go.

Now some of you may be familiar with a very well-used passage in the book Ministry of Healing.

You probably have already heard it once or twice and you you're probably going to hear it at least 10 times by the end of tomorrow.

But I want to tell you something about that quote that starts with, Christ's method alone.

See this is the thing, that quote has been used and it's been pulled in many cases out of context.

I want to challenge you to go to Ministry of Healing and go to the section that talks about medical missionary work and find the section that says teaching and healing and then find a section that says the work of the disciples.

So we want to find out what our work is we can go there.

So normally that that chapter starts on page 139 but that section called Christ's method alone is actually a solution or what Ellen White calls a remedy to the problems of the days at which we're living.

So I'm gonna jump right into that, I'm gonna read what she said.

Here I'm on page 142 in Ministry healing, it reads, when Christ sent forth the disciples with the gospel message, faith in God and his word had well nigh departed from the world.

Now we're saying we're living in the last days, but obviously something was going on back there.

She said faith in the Word of God had, in the disciples, they had departed from the world.

Among the Jewish people who profess to have the knowledge of the Jehovah, his word has been well nigh set aside for tradition.

Selfish ambition, love of ostination, greed of gain absorbed men's thoughts.

As reverence for God departed, so also departed the compassion toward men.

Selfishness was the ruling principle, and Satan worked his will in the misery and degradation of mankind.

Does that sound like the time of the disciples or does that sound like 2023?

Tell me this lady wasn't a prophet, come on now.

But look look at what else she says now, she moves forward now and she says, the world needs today what it needed 1, 900 years ago, a revelation of Christ, a work, a great work of reform is demanded and it is only through the grace of Christ that the work of restoration of physical, mental, and the spiritual can be accomplished.

Then after she makes that statement, that's when she says, Christ's method alone will give true success in reaching the people.

And that's the title of our presentation today.

It's called ABC, Always Be in Contact, the ABCs of Bible work.

Now here we got this statement, Christ's method alone will give true success in reaching the people.

So we have to ask ourself a question, why are we trying to reach people?

Are we trying to reach people to give a Bible study?

Are we trying to reach people in order to share with them the plan of salvation?

But if we left the people in that condition they would still be missing something.

We are trying to reach the people not just for Bible study, not just for salvation, We are trying to reach the people not just for Bible study, not just for salvation, we are trying to reach the people to make disciples of all nations.

See so many times we are baptizing people, we're bringing them into the church, but we never tell them that that's just the beginning of the work.

So last year I'm sitting over here on this side as a guest in these presentations And I learned about something so amazing, I thought I would fall out of my seat.

I learned about this amazing program called the Reach Your Neighbor Leads Program.

And when I found out as a Bible worker who was working in the Our Missouri Conference driving 7 hours 1 way on 3 weekends out of a month, when I found out that the Reach Your Neighbor program give you the leads to follow up, I knew that I had to become a part of this program.

I'm gonna say that again people, we give you the leads.

Come on somebody, I need an amen over here.

I don't know if they did it intentional or unintentional, but they had been discipling me.

As soon as I graduated from SAW, how did they disciple me?

They started inviting me to Zoom meetings.

They invited me to hang out on Bible studies with them and go to Bible studies with them.

Series

Ministerial

Keeping the Mission Center

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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