GYC Conference 2023: But If Not

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Biblical Leadership

Jay Gallimore

Biblical Leadership Part 1

Alright, well we're going to start right on time according to my watch, and my watch says it's that time.

So it's that time for everybody else, ready to get going?

Alright, let's bow our heads and we'll get started.

Gracious Father in Heaven, be our teacher, our real teacher, And I pray for your presence to be here.

I thank you for the angels that are unseen here, operating under the administration of the Lord Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

We pray, heavenly fathers, we work together and think together that you will be our real true leader.

All right, this leadership seminar, and of course you know that I've spent most all my life in pastoral ministry or some kind of ministry in God's church.

So I kind of come from that direction, but the principles that I'm going to be sharing with you, you can apply them anywhere and anytime.

Now somebody asked me earlier this morning, and I'm doing what I am told to do, This is sequential, so it's not a repetitive.

It'll be part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 kind of a thing.

I was listening to all those seminars, and I thought, wow, I'd like to be here and just be able to go to those seminars.

And my favorite book outside of scripture is the book, Desire of Ages.

And I have read it over and over and over again.

In fact, right now I have it laying beside my bed.

And I'm getting ready to read the chapter on Judas again.

But 1 thing that I have learned from that are the methods of Jesus.

And I've been able, by the grace of God, to apply those methods.

I don't know why they got me here to teach this.

In fact, I tried to get somebody else that was younger.

Because I'm just not as young as I used to be.

And I think there are a lot of other people far better leaders than I am.

So I don't hold myself up as anything, but I have learned a few things through the years.

And so I'll try to share them with you as we go along here.

And this is interactive, so if you have a question or comment, I'd like to hear that.

I don't want this to be a preaching session, I want it to be a learning session.

And anybody that wants my slides or notes, I'll be glad to share them with you.

I'm not, I don't have priority on them, that kind of a thing.

So, and you can plagiarize them too, so you got my permission, what you want to do.

Just, I do quote from other people, so you have to give them the credit of course, but anyway, want to do that kind of thing.

All right, let's talk about Jesus and leadership from that perspective.

And so the first thing I want to ask is, think about what Jesus accomplished.

What is the, I know, outside of accomplishing our salvation, which is off the charts.

Okay, speak right up, so, and I'm gonna repeat what I hear.

He took 12 people from extremely different backgrounds that didn't get along with people.

Walked up and grabbed 12 guys, part of them were fishermen, some from here and there, and they didn't always get along, and they certainly didn't have hearts that were ready for this, and Jesus transformed them into people, 12 people that set, turned the world upside down.

Pretty incredible, isn't it, from a leadership standpoint?

I always want to study the best, don't you?

So we want to think about what he accomplished.

Anybody want to take a stab at that real quick?

What is he accomplishing right this very moment?

Well I'll tell you what he's accomplishing, which is off the charts, it will blow your mind, it blows my mind, that when he's done, he's going to have a universe that's both free and sinless.

He's accomplishing that right now and I want to be part of that.

Okay, think even the sinful secular sinful world has been influenced by Jesus.

What can you think, if you look at the secular world around us, how has Jesus influenced that?

Well, you're living in a country with a constitution that's been influenced by Jesus.

The Bill of Rights wouldn't exist without Jesus.

And that Bill of Rights and those concepts have been around the world and everywhere you go people today believe they should have individual freedom.

And there was a time when people didn't believe that at all.

By the way, as John Maxwell said once, and he's right, that leadership is influence.

I'm gonna say it again because I want you to get it.

All right, we often think of Jesus just in spiritual terms, but Jesus created all kinds of human talents to meet all kinds of human needs.

So you don't need just ministers or teachers, praise God for them, but we also need people that are, that can run businesses, that can lay flooring, the kinds of people that can do medical work.

And I'll tell you, these leadership principles affect that.

So whether you're running your own business or running an institution or anything like that, these principles will help you there.

Okay, this is a great leadership statement that backs that up.

And I'll come back to that before the seminar is done.

It's Christ Object Lessons 146 called Asking to Give.

She says, you need not go to the ends of the earth for wisdom.

You cannot lead without being smart about what you're doing.

It is not the capabilities that you now possess or ever will have that will give you success.

If you put me in charge of something, I want success out of that.

Now that switches this whole issue of leadership.

Some years ago I went and listened to John Maxwell and I thought, wow, This is really pretty incredible stuff that I'm listening to.

But you know, John Maxwell, you could take a very bad person and use his 21 points of leadership, and they could become a very powerful leader.

And I said, there's no spiritual component here, there's something missing here, and he must have heard my thinking, because then he came out with some more leadership thing that really focused on character.

So it's not just these principles of leadership that you can get and those 21 principles of leadership are very good but you need something far bigger than that and that's exactly what this is saying.

So this moves leadership to a spiritual component and I don't care if you're running a business or what kind of leadership you're in, or whether you're a father in your home, or whether you're a mother in your home, you're gonna need these principles.

Biblical Leadership Part 2

Fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, is wisdom.

Let's get back into this, and we'll go right on with this.

So the kind of leaders that Jesus was looking for.

Oh, yeah, why did Jesus pass by the schools of the rabbis when choosing leaders?

I want to focus on this just a little bit because the mark of a good leader is to be able to choose leaders.

I usually tell people, I said the most important thing you do as a pastor or certainly the most important thing you do as a head principal or president of a conference or whatever is the kind of people you choose.

If you don't choose the right people, you're going to be in trouble.

And so We'll get into how to choose the right kinds of people as we go along here.

All right, so they were humble, unlearned men, but he, Christ, was abundantly able to qualify them for the position.

Now that qualification, did they need qualification?

And the answer is they did need qualification.

And of course we need qualifications too.

And much of the education, forgive me, but there's a huge amount of discussion about secular education in America today because people are getting degrees and they get them in positions and they can't do the work.

And so people say, oh I got a degree, but what does that mean?

Well, it should mean something, it should mean something that not just that you, it should mean something that you're qualified for.

We became Seventh-day Adventists when I was 6 years old.

And some of you heard me say this before.

And I just, my parents moved to that particular neighborhood because the school was like 2 blocks away could just walk to school and into the door but praise God they became Seventh-day Adventist and never spent a day in public school.

Instead I went 5 miles downtown Greensboro to a one-room school with 8 grades and 1 teacher.

And so I praise God for all that he's done for me.

I called my mother 1 day and I said, so where's dad?

Oh, he's out raising money for the church school.

When controlled, notice this, by the love of God and devoted to his service, controlled by the God's love, devoted to his service, intellectual culture is a blessing.

But if you remove those 2 things, it becomes a curse.

But he passed by the wise men of his time because they were so self-confident they could not sympathize with suffering humanity and became co-labors and become co-labors with man.

Can you imagine the Pharisees trying to be a disciple of Jesus?

Or the Sadducees who believed if you weren't rich it was because you were bad.

In their bigotry they scorned to be taught by Christ, and we could put scorned to be taught by sympathizing Jesus.

All right, the kind of leaders that Jesus is looking for, he wants the cooperation of those who will become unobstructed channels.

Unobstructed channels for communication of His grace.

And I don't care if you're running a business or what you're...

You know, if you own your own business, you should say, why do I own my own business?

Well, the natural response in the world that we have today is what?

I own this for my own self-pleasure to make money.

But as a Christian business owner, what would be a different reason for that?

Is there anything wrong with making money?

I want to use that business to be a blessing to the world around me, right?

And I want it to be a blessing to my employees, and I want them to understand and find out what Jesus is really like.

I want my customers to get a taste of what Jesus is really like.

I want my employees to get a taste of what Jesus is really like.

Yes, I need it to feed my family and make money, that's fine, but that's not the ultimate purpose, because that money is going to burn.

You can build the biggest corporation in the world, it's all coming to an end.

All right, the first thing to be learned by all who would become workers together with God is the lessons of self-distrust.

Because we have to have confidence to be a leader, so how do we fit the self-distrust in there?

It's not self-distrust that I'm distrusting myself around everybody else, it's my self-distrust between me and Jesus that I trust His wisdom more than I trust my wisdom.

And once I know His wisdom, I have all the confidence in the world to move.

That's the reason I love the spirit of prophecy and the Bible.

Now again, I'm talking from my standpoint, and there's plenty of information in there for people that run their own business or in any other kind of leadership position, but the thing I would, when I would walk into a church for the first time and I get a look around and so forth, I would ask myself is what is it that Jesus wants to accomplish here?

And where do I get those marching orders?

I mean, I've sat down with pastors and I said, so what is it you want to accomplish here?

Well, you know, we want to have a good service and they didn't say it quite like this, but have enough baptisms to keep my job.

And I was telling somebody during the break, there are many people that just live from paycheck to paycheck.

There are many churches and pastors that just live from 1 Sabbath to another.

They have no vision of where you're going to go.

I always got my vision from Scripture and spirit of prophecy.

I'm not making fun, forgive me if it sounds that way, but we went through a thing in the North American Division at 1 point some years ago, And they said, okay, what you guys need to do is you need to get everybody in a circle and you need to work through your mission statement and you need to work through your vision and you've got to build this vision for what this looks like.

By the way, the General Conference has a mission statement.

Why does the Michigan Conference need to reinvent the mission statement when the General Conference already has a mission statement based on Matthew 28?

Why does the local church need to have a vision?

Because they were having churches and people were spending boo-coos of time trying to figure out what their mission was, trying to figure out what their vision was.

The Spirit of Prophecy is very clear about what we should be doing, is it not?

Biblical Leadership Part 3

All right, let's bow our heads and we will plunge in.

Gracious Father in heaven, how often we've come to you in prayer and asked for your presence.

We want the presence of the Holy Spirit here.

We want Him to be our teacher and our helper.

And I thank you for all that you're doing for us in every way and thank you for just being here with us and be our real teacher in Jesus name Amen.

Okay we left off back here yeah here we are okay good So this is where servant leadership means giving up your personal rights for service.

So sometimes, leaders will just do what they have to do to lead and not be afraid to do that, and Self-sacrificing is part of that.

Jesus knew that he's never gonna get these 12 men to turn the world upside down unless he changed their attitude and their concepts about leadership.

Because for them, they had the king and the power center and all that kind of stuff, and it was contrary to the kingdom of Christ.

Think of what it's going to be to have Jesus as your king of kings.

So, why does suffering often precede leadership?

Now, I'm not a person that likes suffering.

I don't want to have people, you know, I will go out of my way, you will too, I'm sure, to relieve suffering.

But why does suffering precede leadership?

Why does Jesus and why does Hebrews insist that Jesus could not become our high priest leader until he went through suffering.

Why do you think suffering is part of the preparation for leadership?

Yeah, it's nice for a leader to at least know what people are going through, Am I right?

And I think we do suffer sometimes in leading churches.

You suffer sometimes in leading conferences.

And suffering is not fun, but suffering helps prepare you for what God has in store for you.

So servant leaders are called to obey, and sometimes that obedience entails suffering, before they command.

Leadership, servant leadership is not for the faint of heart if you're a true leader.

And a lot of people don't like to take risks.

Now I said earlier, I said that I'm a cautious person and I am up to a point, but people that are around me know that I will take risk.

We had, we were in a Michigan conference some years ago.

We had decided to do a statewide evangelistic meeting.

Now you may think, well, everybody's done that.

There's been a lot of resistance to that in North America.

If you go back to Mission 72, that's the first time and about the last time we tried it for decades.

But we had been hit with 9-11 and I told everybody around me I said look we cannot just let this go we have to respond.

Now I think I've strained my voice a little bit, so I'm going to try to talk a little softer and hope that the mic picks up for it.

This is an event that we need to try to respond to.

It's going to take you time to ramp up for it.

So it took us about a year to ramp up for it.

And we were pouring a lot of money into that as a conference.

So you were getting everybody on board, you're getting the pastors on board, you're getting the churches on board, you're getting, we wanted billboard advertising, hand-billed advertising, media advertising.

We wanted to get all of that together, and we were spending a very pretty penny to do that.

Now, I'd gone to the lay advisory in Michigan, we have a thing called the lay advisory, it's a wonderful, it meets once a year, and so I spread this out before them, they were all behind it, executive committee was all behind it, the pastors about probably 85% of them were behind it.

So we had a really, and most of the churches were behind it.

And it meant not just having 1 personality do the preaching, we were going to have people all from all over the conference because I've learned that people make decisions based on 2 things, truth and relationships.

Truth and trust, the 2 T's, truth and trust.

So they may be convicted about the truth, but if they don't have trust, they will not make a decision.

So we wanted all of our ministers doing the preaching and teaching, or some talented lay people to doing it, and we had never, ever done it before.

And so, I'm getting to my little story here about risk.

Everybody's watching you spend all that money, put all that effort, and they wanna know if you're gonna get results.

I'm, you know, at the end of the day, It's me because I'm the guy that's been pushing it.

So here we are getting ready for the last minute and the last minute details and everything is about ready to go and we're getting ready to do press releases.

And our union at that time had decided that they would get involved.

So other conferences were following our lead and getting involved, not everybody, but several of the other conferences.

And the communications department of the union was getting involved.

And I got a, somebody gave me a heads up that The union was getting ready to do the press releases to the public media, and when I looked at it, it said, sponsored by the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

So I got a hold of the communications person.

I don't want sponsored by the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

I don't want that blasted all over everywhere.

And he says, you know, he got a little bit, what's the right word here?

Got a little bit righteous, maybe I'll put it that way.

Well, you know, we're not gonna hide behind, you know, we're gonna be honest and that kind of stuff.

And if you put Seventh-day Adventists on there, you build a mountain for a lot of people to try to crawl over before they come.

A lot of the churches have rented halls for this and everything else, and the handbills are going out, and so you put that and you blast that out everywhere.

Biblical Leadership Part 4

Principle number 6 is that, and maybe I've talked about this already, secure leaders empower and share power and responsibility.

I think this is very fascinating, that the first thing that God does with his new creation, he shares it with Adam.

Now that's scary because if you're successful as a leader and you're all of a sudden confronted with having to share power, you don't want to do that.

I mean, there's a natural inclination not to share power.

Now, I'm not saying share power foolishly, But we need to share power.

Series

Biblical Leadership

Biblical Leadership Part 5

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

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Plenary

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