ASI 2011: Inspired to Finish Strong

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ASI 2011 Seminar: Nonprofit and Business

Steve Dickman

Incubating Ministries for Strength and Stability

All right, now if you have a question, what I'll do is I'll repeat your question so that it goes on to this because what's happened is these are being recorded, they'll be put up on the website and you can go back and look at them later or you can send somebody else to look at it if they need to.

So that's the reason we're doing all these microphones is so that we get the proper recording.

But we're doing ministry empowered by the Holy Spirit working together.

And when that happens, we will be able to reach the world.

We will be able to do God's business here in such a way that His work is finished, and we can go home to that heaven, the kingdom, right?

We're not doing ministry just to do ministry, but ministry in order that there may be souls in the kingdom and that we may complete the work that God has given us to do here on planet Earth.

And that's a big assignment because the world is a big place.

There's something else here that you want to think about when it comes to ministry.

If God has called you to some form of ministry, it may not agree with everybody else's idea of ministry.

You may be called to do something that no 1 else has been called to do.

She came, no she's not here, she had to leave.

But she came by the booth there and she told me she had a ministry, but she was trying to get started with it and she wanted some ideas about what to do, so we started talking a little bit.

And when I found out what her ministry was, I said, may God bless you in your ministry because this is so needed.

God is calling her to minister to people who are needing to come out of the homosexual lifestyle.

She was in the lifestyle for 20 years and she has come out of it.

God has delivered her from that and now she is beginning a ministry to help other people who are struggling with that situation.

Now you say, oh, well that's kind of weird.

This is an issue even within the Seventh-day Adventist church.

And God is calling her, through her experience now, to be used in helping someone else.

And I just wanted to encourage her to keep doing what she's doing and to follow God's leading.

I said, you need, have you formed your 501c3 yet?

She says, no I'm scared to do that because then the government has control.

And I says, okay, well, let's talk about some questions then.

If you don't form a 501c3 and you don't get yourself organized, who are you?

Do you want me to write you a check personally for your ministry and you just go put it in your own personal bank account?

Are you accountable in such a way that I could agree to do that?

I mean, that really wouldn't be accountability.

Well, so do you think God is leading you to start this ministry just so that you can do it while you're alive?

Or maybe he has a vision that this should be a ministry that should carry on after you're gone.

And how are you going to do that if you have no organized way to do this, if you're not kind of haven't gone through the process that you need to go through?

I said, well, what if you get to the point where you need a facility to do business?

Are you going to put that in your personal name?

Or are you going to have an organizational name to carry business and to do business like you need to?

And so there's a whole bunch of very practical things we'll talk about today.

And so we need to move forward or we won't get them all talked about.

But we have this objective that we need to reach the world, we need to reach out to the world with the good news of Jesus.

Well here's a little cycle that you might think about.

Well, you might be praying and God would suddenly give you that idea.

We're going to talk a little more about that.

But after your idea, you have to do something to carry forward the idea, right?

And you say, okay, God told me to go to Walmart and buy $50 worth of groceries and deliver it to that family.

Well, there was an action involved, wasn't there?

You had to get up out of your seat and you had to take your car and drive to Walmart and buy $50 worth of groceries and deliver them to that house.

So there was a little planning and organizing involved.

Well, while you're doing that you might see another family that has some needs and you say, well, I need another $50 worth of groceries.

Somebody else found out you did that and they said, hey, there's another family over there that needs some groceries.

And so you begin to function and to operate and grow.

And then there comes a point at which the ministry begins to take on a whole different idea.

And you're thinking, I'm not just doing this by myself now, I need help.

And so the ministry begins to take on this idea that we must mature the ministry.

You could just say, okay, God, every day when I get up, if you want me to go buy groceries for somebody, I will.

He takes something small and then he begins to add to it and add to it and tweak it this way.

And pretty soon something is growing and you're going, How did that happen?

Well, because God was helping you and guiding you along the way.

And then fifthly, associate and collaborate is an important part of ministry.

Coming to ASI is a part of keeping your ministry strong.

If you come to ASI and you rub shoulders with other people who are doing ministry, you'll go home with new ideas.

You won't go home with a blank slate, I guarantee it.

You come to ASI, you walk around, you talk to other people who are doing something similar, and you begin, your mind begins to go, wow, do you see how they're doing that?

Did you see what they're doing over there?

And you go home and you implement it and you're not stealing somebody's idea.

And you might even talk to them and they might help you to implement that idea in your ministry.

Collaboration would mean when I see something that somebody else is doing and I decide maybe God is leading me to do that, and I would talk to them and I say, well, why don't you just come over and do it at my place as well.

And you do it over there and do it over here for me because I don't have really the expertise to do that.

And so we begin to think broader now as we collaborate together and as we utilize our God-given talents and skills and we begin to look for ways that we can collaborate together.

So this is kind of the ministry development cycle, the roadmap that I've put together.

There's a need to mature the organization.

And there's a need to follow through with association with other organizations and collaboration with other people who are in ministry.

Okay, so let's take a look at, first of all, just talk for a few minutes here about this idea stage.

Conna Bond

Communicating to Inspire Thought and Action

I have invited 2 friends to help me today with this seminar.

Both of them will probably be familiar to many of you.

And we had talked about doing a panel discussion, but you know, sometimes the questions get in the way and people get on a tangent.

And what I really like is to sit and hear somebody tell from the bottom of their heart their best advice on a topic that is really near and dear to their hearts.

And so I have invited each of them to help me today in just sharing what they believe are the most important aspects of communication and their best advice on how to do it well from their point of expertise, from their experience.

The first 1 who's gonna be sharing with us today is Dick Dirksen.

Many of you know he is the storyteller, that is actually his official title, with Maranatha.

And he has been a communicator well known in the church for many, many years, probably since almost before I was born.

Yeah, well not before I was born, since 85.

Now, the other man who's going to be sharing with us today is Terry Benedict, and I have known him just for a few years, And I first heard of him when I saw a film that he produced, The Conscientious Objector, about Desmond Doss.

If you haven't seen it, go and find it and see it soon.

It was a wonderful film about a man who really had depth of character.

And Terry Benedict is good at telling a story in film and in speech, and he's going to share some more about that.

So we're going to go ahead and begin with Dick Dirksen.

He's going to share from the hip his best advice, and then we'll go straight to Terry Benedict, and then I'll wrap things up at the end.

Maranatha builds buildings all around the world.

And we do it as a responsive ministry, which means I love to build schools in Bali and Bora Bora.

And so we're busy building schools in other places far away from Bora Bora.

We only do what the church begs us to do.

And they call and say, we've got this huge need.

Well, a few months ago, the division in, yeah, thank you, it's probably off.

A few months ago, the division that includes Honduras gave us their list.

They came to us and they said, here's all the countries, Ecuador, Honduras, Colombia.

And 1 of our biggest needs is in Honduras.

And so we sent our people down, we talked to the union, we went to all of the places where they need churches and all the places where they need schools.

We went to a little town of Olanchito in Honduras.

When we arrived, the church said, We want you to renovate our school.

But it's dirty, the paint's peeling, the roof is falling in, there are bats in the belfry, and we need your help.

And so we looked at it and said, boy, that's for sure.

We figured we might be able to really fix those 6.

That same time, we got a phone call from the Camelback Church in Phoenix, Arizona.

And the pastor, Charlie White, said, we want to do a mission trip.

We want to go to Central America because of the costs of air flights.

And we want to build a school or help with a school.

Well, right now, we have 3 other school campuses that we're building around Honduras.

We're just getting ready to start in Northern Columbia.

We've got 12 campuses that we need to start in Nicaragua.

And so we said, why don't you send a couple guys from Camelback and come down and meet Darrell Hardy, who is the Maranatha man on the ground in Olanchito, and let's talk about the school.

Here's what needs to be done in renovation.

The reason I tell you this story is what happened next.

The guys from Camelback went to Olanchito with plans in their pockets for what they were going to do.

They had sat down with us, they had talked with Darrell Hardy and Country, they had talked with the pastor, they had figured out how much money they could raise, and so they were ready to go.

They figured they'd have 60 volunteers, and in 14 days, they could completely renovate the school and it'd be up for running.

When they arrived, they left the plans in their backpack.

There is nothing more important in communication than listening.

Not the words, not the pictures, not your plans.

The most important thing you can do is listen.

In listening, you get to know your audience.

And if you don't know your audience, you're going to say something that makes no sense.

You're going to do something that doesn't fit the need.

You're going to miss the target completely because you won't know where the target is.

1 of my old college teachers used to say, if you don't know where you're going, you're going to end up somewhere else.

I never figured out what that meant, but it made a lot of sense.

Because every once in a while in my life, I get all excited about doing something, and I rush off to do it without figuring out if it makes any sense to anybody.

I mean, 1 time I produced a magazine that nobody ever read.

And it took me a month to figure it out that that was stupid, throw it away, and start over and go the direction that really made sense to people and make that happen.

When they listened around the table in Olanchito, the school principal, the pastor, the conference education director, the principal of the closest school in La Ceiba.

The pastor said, what is your dream for this school?

The principal answered, Necesitamos una cancha.

Si tenemos una cancha podemos hacer milagros aqui.

And Charlie said, do it again in English.

What we need most is a football field so that the kids can play soccer.

Because if we had a football field, all the kids in town would come, would be where we are, and we would be able to do miracles in this community.

Well, nobody even talked about a football field.

And Maranatha is not an expert football field builder.

We do vertical things, not horizontal things.

They spent an hour talking about football in Olanchito.

And then when they had figured out the football field, where it could be, there wasn't room for it on the current school grounds.

But somebody had a friend who owned some land.

And then the principal said, and when the football field is ready, could you build us a school around it that would hold 200 children?

Because if we have a good football field, we will need room for 200 students.

Complete upside down flip of everything they had planned to do.

Ed Zinke

Business and Organizational Development and Management

I am Ed Zinke, and my history, my background is a little bit varied.

I started out in the ministry, then went to Andrews University for an MDiv degree, then to the General Conference, where I worked 14 years in biblical research.

I was also working on a PhD at Catholic University at the same time and have 4 years of graduate work there.

And then our lives kind of took a change and I went in full-time into the business that we had started.

When we got to the Washington area, we probably were a little bit naive as we were moving that direction.

We figured we could buy a house for 20, 000 bucks because all of our friends were doing that down in the South.

And we thought, well, maybe we'll have to add a little bit when we get to the Washington area.

Well, The realtor tried to help us out, and he showed us a home for $30, 000.

So we figured if we were afraid to go in the home, we didn't want to live in that house.

And so we realized that Ann would need to do some work if we were to stay in the Washington, D.C.

But we'd always planned that Anne would stay home.

We were hoping to make a couple thousand dollars a year so that she could stay home with the kids.

And then we moved out into business locations.

But the Lord blessed, and we continued that growth right up and until the point of sale.

So our motivation was to keep Anne at home.

We never thought in terms of a major business or anything like that, but we wanted to accommodate the family.

And I think a lot of business people have found that, and I think it's important for you to know that.

But often, an entrepreneur will go through several attempts before they're finally successful with the right 1, and that happened to us.

After we had tried several things unsuccessfully, my dad, who is a physician, had bought an almond ranch, hoping to have it paid off by retirement time.

And he was visiting us 1 day, and we were discussing our circumstances there in Washington, D.C.

And he said, well, why don't you try nuts?

Well, That was the business plan that took us for the next almost 35 years.

The GC of course knew how desperate we were.

So when we checked to see if Ann could sell some nuts during the noon hour outside the front door, they graciously said yes.

And she sold about $800 worth the first day.

And when she got home, of course, she doesn't, she didn't want to be an Amway lady or anything like that.

She didn't want anything to do with sales.

When we got home, calls started coming in.

And so finally, Ann said, you know, if they're going to come to me, I can do it.

I don't want to go to them, but if they're going to come to me, I'm going to do it.

So for 8 years we had the business in our home.

The last year we took all of our furniture off the first floor, moved it to the second floor, piled it up willy-nilly in our bedroom.

And the entire first floor, the entire basement, the entire garage was occupied with nuts.

Just a little humorous story and a point where government worked well.

1 day, right in the fall, which was our busiest season, Ann got a knock on the door.

And of course, a lot of people were coming to the house to pick up nuts.

And so she answered the door, and here was a government agent, a county agent, and said, somebody told me you're running a business here.

And of course, there was no way to deny it, because everything was jam-packed with nuts and dried fruit.

And she said, we're planning on, this was in the fall, she said, we're planning on terminating in May, because since we didn't have refrigeration, we had to end in May.

And then we're planning on going into a warehouse for the fall.

But you know, when I go back and report it, I don't have to put it on the top of my pile.

So it'll go on the bottom of my pile, and eventually it'll make its way to the top.

And when it makes its way to the top, then I have to write a letter to you.

And so you'll receive a letter from me and I'm sure you have a pile too, so it goes on the bottom of your pile.

And eventually it will work its way to the top and then you write a letter explaining what you're doing to me and it goes on the bottom of my pile.

And anyway, he graciously worked it out so that we had through mate to wipe out our inventory, to sell our inventory and make our move to the warehouse.

He came back several times when we had our new location.

Very proud of himself, as he should have been, for making it possible for us to run the business.

I'm sure he could have put us out of business had he wished to do so.

Our customers were individuals, and then we went to the school and had a table with nuts and dried fruit on it and when they had their citrus program and people could come and buy nuts and dried fruit and then co-ops at that time were popular, and they found out about us, and we started selling to co-ops.

When we made our move, we were relying very heavily on retail business, and we had a showroom, and people would be lined up at the door in the morning when we opened it and Friday evening it was, you know, obviously we closed before sundown but it was always a task to get that door closed because so many people were coming.

Series

ASI 2011 Seminar: Nonprofit and Business

Communicating to Inspire Thought and Action

Transcript

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