Leading evangelistically effective small groups

GYC 2011: Fill Me

<p>Leading evangelistically effective small groups</p>

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

GYC 2011 totalChurch

Holly Smith

Total Church: Signs and Wonders

This message was presented at the GYC 2011 conference.

For other resources like this, visit us online at gycweb.org.

Well while both of you are here, while we're waiting, if I could just ask you guys, how many of you are a medical professional?

And how many of you are like a health evangelist?

And you've gone to like a Uchi Pines, Weimar, a Wildwood, or somewhere like that.

And if you're not, it's still absolutely wonderful.

Because what we're going to learn today is things that anyone can do anywhere.

And I wish I had said that from the front because I really, I think that people don't realize that.

You don't have to be, really all of us should be health evangelists, especially at Seventh Day Adventist.

We have an amazing health message that God wants us to share.

Today is going to be extremely practical.

And I'm just going to teach you guys about the things that I've learned.

And I went to Uchee Pines, which is 1 of our medical missionary training schools about 4 or 5 years ago.

And after that, I did Bible work for a while and tried to incorporate Bible work and the health message together.

And I found it very challenging, but very rewarding at the same time.

And now I've run all kinds of different health things, all kinds of places.

If you've been to GYC before, has anyone been to a GYC where we had a health fair?

And I'm going to teach you, I was going to say, I'm going to teach you how you can do that at your local church.

And I'm a big fan of a health fair because it's just a broad, open way to get people, you know, to come in for that.

And right now I'm currently in nursing school.

And my prayer is, and you guys can all pray for me, I'm just sharing with you guys in general, you can all pray for me, is I really want to open a lifestyle center or come up with a blueprint of how we can people, whether they are medical professionals or not, can gather in medical professionals and something, anyways, to hold many outpatient natural remedies workshops at their churches where people know, like, oh, that church has this facility.

I wish that's what I was teaching you today, but I haven't done it.

But something like that, so that It's like a mini lifestyle center right in our neighborhoods where people can come and they won't necessarily stay, but maybe then it could grow into something else.

And actually, just to share with you guys while we're waiting, a little bit of a testimony is about, well, in 2000, OK, well, I don't remember the time.

But when I, I think it was about 2006 or so, or 2004, I was in debate about what I should be doing with my life.

I was a student at Southwestern Adventist University and I was taking social work and the way I came to take social work was not by any means prayer and great deliberation to see what God wanted me to do with my life.

So I decided to start praying about it And some people came to that school, which I never saw people at the school as long as I had been there, from a self-supporting ministry.

I had never heard of self-supporting ministries, and I thought, I've been Seventh-day Adventist all my life.

You know, it can't be Seventh-day Adventist, because I've never heard of it.

And so I started looking into these ministries and I started praying about going to 1.

I wanted to do Bible work and I ended up at Uchi Pines Institute, which is a health evangelism place.

And prior to that, when I was at Southwestern, my friend and I, I started reading Spirit of Prophecy almost really kind of for the first time in my life.

And my friend and I decided to start following Council on Diets and Foods.

How many of you have read Council on Diets and Foods?

And we started on campus what was called the Ellen White Diet.

And so a lot of people want to get fit at that time.

And we started following those principles.

And that was kind of my first introduction in getting into the health message.

Not only did I get a lot, I was not very healthy at the time at all, but not only did I get healthier but my spiritual life was just transformed and that was when I really really dedicated my life to God a hundred percent to follow Jesus.

So anyhow, that was just to let you guys know that.

So I went to Uchee Pines and after that I did Bible work for GYC actually.

I used to work for GYC for a while and some other ministries.

And then I married a wonderful man who's a pastor.

That's like a job all in itself, by the way.

I think that they should have classes on how to be a pastor's wife.

So if no 1 else starts 1, I'm going to think about trying to help someone to start 1.

And I do a lot of health evangelism, and I'm in nursing school now.

And so I'm almost done with that, thank God, and I'm praying about what would God have me to do.

When I was leaving Southwestern, I was trying to decide what God wanted me to do with my life, and I had this huge interest in health.

That's why I was telling you we started the Ellen White diet.

And I was praying, and I made a plan, like a two-year plan, five-year plan, ten-year plan.

And my ten-year goal was to have a lifestyle center.

And I forgot all about that until about 3 months ago.

And so I started praying about it more and more, and I made a proposal, and I don't know what's going to happen but I really believe that God wants me to start a lifestyle center and I'm just praying that God would open those doors and I live in Oklahoma City so when that happens I'll let you guys know if the Lord sees fit.

It is 310, and we have a pretty good crowd here.

For people who just walked in, was there a lot of people out there in the halls walking around looking like, oh, I'm looking for Holly's seminar?

Well, I just want to introduce you guys to some people who will be helping me today.

And then we're going to start with a word of prayer.

Ladies, if you don't mind just coming up here, I have here with me Laura and Joella.

And they are both medical missionaries, evangelists.

And they're going to be helping me today.

We're going to talk about how you can hold a natural remedies workshop at your church and so I'm pretty much just going to have them do that for me.

Lisa is going to share with us about a program that you can go to at Eden Valley Institute so you could get trained to be a medical evangelist.

So if you guys don't mind, if you'll just bow your heads with me, we're going to start with a word of prayer.

Our gracious Heavenly Father, Lord, how blessed we are to be able to be called to do this work and to have this health message, Lord.

And there's so many people who don't know, so many people who are sick, and so many people who are waiting and seeking and hoping for something better.

Lord, we just pray that you would be with us here now, that whatever we need to learn that you would teach us.

Bee See

Total Church: Breaking Bread, Part 1

Father, we just want to thank you so much for your Sabbath day.

And Lord I thank you for all these enthusiastic young people that have come together to want to know more about you.

And Lord as we reflect on how you teach us to befriend other people and to start small group ministries in our home churches that you would impress us with a sense of your love and that as we interact with other people that we may portray this love in our characters and be living witnesses for you so we pray all these things in Jesus name Amen all right well welcome everyone if I can just encourage you to make your way to the center if that's okay because we still have a couple of people joining us at the side and if you just walked in you are in the breaking bread seminar this is not singing hymns seminar we were just doing that just as people were coming in so for those that missed the introduction my name is Bernice I'm here with my brother Darryl who is standing by the door we are from melbourne australia We are from Gateway Adventist Centre and that's the name of our church.

And today we'll be sharing about how to start friendship evangelism in your home church in the context of small group ministry.

So it's a very condensed version of the three-part, three-module rather, seminar series that we just ran on Thursday and Friday.

So for those of you that attended our seminar series, this is very, very similar.

However, you're more than welcome to stay and we will be having some practical components where we'll get you guys to participate and there are some pretty cool prizes involved.

So for all of those that came to this workshop, I trust you will be blessed.

Just as a means of introduction, this is a map of the world.

And we are way, way down in the corner of the southern hemisphere.

And Melbourne is actually the second largest city in Australia.

So we have a population of about 4 million people.

And altogether in Australia, you may have heard us say that we have 52, 000 Adventists.

So we are a small representation of Adventists and our church is located right in the CBD, or just about a kilometer out of the CBD of Melbourne.

For those that attended our seminar series, you would be familiar with the 5 principles of a soul winning church that runs small group ministry and why it's important and these are all biblically based.

Now we don't have the time today unfortunately to go through all this in detail.

So if you are interested in the details, you can look up the seminar series that we just ran on AudioVerse.

And there will be written materials as well on the GYC website as they put them up.

So as we go into care groups, some of you, sorry, small groups, some of you may be asking, well, what is it all about?

And this will give you a very brief snapshot.

So the first principle is that true spiritual revival is by the word.

Why is it important when we're talking about small group ministry to have revival.

Well, the reason is because essentially we are the ones that are doing the small group ministry and your small group is not going to be effective unless you as the members and the leaders of that small group are revived by the word of God.

So the first thing, if you wanna start a small group ministry in your church, is to make sure that you get your core team together, make sure that you are revived by the Bible and the Bible alone.

Alright, so true revival by the word leads to a clear SDA identity, meaning that you know why you're a Seventh-day Adventist and you know what that means.

And so then when you're sharing that with non-Seventh-day Adventists, at least you know what you're trying to say.

And it also means that you understand the urgency of the prophetic message of hope and that gives you a motivation to start these ministries and to reach out to people.

Just a few short quotes, homes are more often more successful, the presentation of Christ in the family and in small gatherings in private homes is often more successful in winning souls to Jesus than our sermons in halls or churches.

So this is a map of the care groups that we have in our church.

Now we first started our first church plant in the middle of Melbourne in the city and that's the 1 in the green and that's why it has the most care groups at the moment.

Our second church plant we planted in 2008 and that's in the east and we have a few more care groups there and we're going to launch our third church plant in the west of the city next year, which is tomorrow, next year and that's why it has the fewest care groups there.

But you'll always notice that where we have a church, we have care groups.

In our church we call our small group ministries care groups and we'll explain what that means a little bit later.

And we start our church based on the context, contacts rather, and based on the success of the care group that we've established earlier in those areas.

Okay, I want to share with you a little story which is really cool and it illustrates the power of friendship.

Now in John 1 verse 41 to 42 we read, He first findeth his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, We have found the Messiah, which is being interpreted the Christ, and he brought him to Jesus.

The spirit of small group ministry is all about your connections with other people and you bring them to Jesus by your friendship.

The man in the picture here is called Erwin and He actually attended our church before we planted our church in 2003.

So he was part of the core team that helped to plant the church.

He is Indonesian and right now he lives in Indonesia with his young family.

Now Erwin was baptized and he actually for many years asked us to pray And he prayed as well for his sister, Yuli.

And both of them together prayed very hard for Yuli's husband, Iwan, who resisted for many years.

And by God's grace, to cut a long story short, he was baptized as well.

And the 3 of them together prayed for Arnoldy.

Arnoldy was invited to the care groups and to the church he was converted and he was baptized.

Now Arnoldy before he came to the church he was engaged to be married and so his wife myrna was and they as a group of 4 people prayed for myrna and myrna came through the church she and liked what she saw she went through bible studies and she was baptized too now going back to erwin or rather sorry let's go back to anody first anody also has a cousin and her name is gabby And Gabby was invited to the church and to the care groups and the small groups that we run, and she was baptized in our church as well.

Now going back to Owen, Owen has a younger sister as well as Yuli and for many years we would pray as a church and a youth group for Elsa who is Owen's younger sister and after a period of I think we prayed for Elsa for about 7 years before she came to care groups and to church consistently.

She is now 1 of the leaders of our church and she has led the small groups herself and given many Bible studies and led other people to Christ.

And Melissa has now returned back to Bali with her husband and she is active in ministry there.

Now the amazing thing is that this chain of friendship started with 1 person.

And the prayers of 1 person can multiply to so many different areas of your life that you may not even imagine possible.

What God has done in each of these lives is even more amazing, because we see that every single individual here is now in a different part of the world.

Yuli and Iwan are very active in the family ministry in our church, and they help out there.

Arnoldi and his wife, Myrna, are helping out in our West Church plant next year.

Gabby has moved to London to study further and she is active in the ministry there.

As I said, Melissa is in Bali and Elsa has actually taken a year off to serve as a volunteer and she'll be teaching English and Bible in South Korea next year in 1 of our Seventh Day Adventist schools.

So they take what they've learned and the experiences and the blessings that God has given them and they are sharing them all over the world wherever they go.

Some of our other church members and our old friends from our church have also returned home after their studies in university And they've brought the concept of care groups and small groups with them wherever they go.

We have care groups in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia.

We have 6 in Mauritius that have just started.

I think we have 7 or 8 that have started in the US as a result of the members that have come from our church.

Now, it's really important when you consider small group ministry to realize that it is not a substitute for church.

You don't invite people to small groups and you convert them and you keep them within that clique of a care group system.

The small group system is meant to be an avenue to bring people into the Seventh-day Adventist church, and it's very important to thus integrate your small group ministry very closely with the personal ministry system in your local church.

And we'll talk a little bit more about what that means practically in terms of activities and Bible studies and how that works.

So therefore, when you're talking about who comes and attends your care group or your small group and how that fits in with your church, there are some things that we as a church consider for the non-believers that come to our care group.

The first thing is that we consider the number of attendees that come to our church worship services that are also attending care groups.

We also look at the number of care groups we have and the ratio of seekers to members in the care groups.

Now there's a few terms in there that I know might be a little bit confusing.

Just to help us to clarify who is who when we're talking about care groups, we say that the Seventh-day Adventist people that run the care groups are the members, and the non-believers and our new friends that we invite are the seekers.

And we also look at the number of trained leaders available to lead care groups in the future because ultimately we want this to be a replicable model.

We want it to be something that people can take home and do themselves and it shouldn't be too hard.

You know, it should be something that every single 1 of you, when you walk out today, is fully equipped to do in your home church.

So, when we're talking about people that come to our care groups, at any 1 time you're most probably going to have people on different levels.

For anyone that attends care group, we run our care groups on a Friday night.

So for anyone that comes to care group, comes to church on Saturday as well, and has one-to-one studies, we call them gold seekers.

Silver seekers are anyone that is having personal Bible studies and goes to care group or church and not both.

And bronze seekers are the ones that only come to care groups.

So care groups or small groups are always our entering point into the church and into personal Bible study.

This is a brief summary of the cycle of evangelism on which the principle of small groups is based and basically if we start in the bottom or the middle right-hand side you will see that there is a free salvation of Christ text box there basically what that means is that someone coming into the church for the first time the first thing that they're introduced to and the first step that they take is to accept and to learn about the free salvation of Christ so you come in and you accept salvation basically, and in gratitude to God's grace and his mercy, we are led to repentance, and there I turn you to Romans 2.4, if you have time look it up later and you'll see the bible reference for that, From repentance we are given a new heart.

Create in me a clean heart O God and renew a right spirit within me.

Linda Krause

Total Church: As Any Had Needed

Thank you for joining us here at our session.

There are several of us here from Harbor of Hope, you've met 4 of our young people.

David, Pastor David, Andrew my son, who's 16.

After I'm done with the, giving a little bit of a talk on the history of Harbor of Hope, We're going to just allow you guys to ask questions to our other leaders here so we can share with you about our experiences.

Heavenly Father, Lord we thank you for this privilege that you've given us Lord to be here and to share what we've learned so far and our experiences.

Lord I pray that you put fire into the hearts of our young people and everyone that's here Lord to serve if they are being called into the inner city ministry Lord and to equip them and we pray that you will bless us and bless me especially Lord to help me present in a concise clear way we pray this in your name Amen.

Okay I just want to first start out with a little bit of the history of Harbor of Hope.

We are located in Benton Harbor, Michigan.

I don't know how many of you are familiar with Michigan, but we're about 20, 25 minutes away from Berrien Springs, Andrews University.

Pastor Dwight, you guys met him earlier, right?

You all met him earlier when he did the sermon, the afternoon sermon.

He preached a sermon in 1997 and 1998 about things that break the heart of God, and they should break our hearts.

And 1 thing he mentioned, among others, was serving in Benton Harbor, an inner city just about 20-25 minutes up the road from Pioneer Memorial Church.

We have a lot of kids and not mentioning the families that they come from, they come to our church.

They like being at church, which is amazing to me.

A lot of these kids get to church before we do sometimes.

When we show up on Sabbath morning, some of us at 8, some of us at 9, the kids would be outside waiting for us.

Same thing on Wednesday for our Wednesday night program.

Hallelujah, Jesus, brings the peace, glory.

What would you like to pray about Pastor Skip?

We want to pray for Teacher Angela that she has a good day and that she has a good day at her job.

We want to pray for God and Jesus and our families who love us.

We are thankful that Pastor Skip is here because he's a good person and we love him.

And the devil never controls us, never destroys us.

He doesn't want people to be angry at him.

Okay, he first starts out talking about murder.

You said something like, what did you say?

You'll be like, you'll be sent to the fire department.

We were there from 9 50 to 11 30 just walking on the beach, on the pier.

I started going to New Plain because, well actually it was because my auntie took me.

She took me there and I started going and going and that's how I started going.

I started coming to New Plant because my cousin told me it was a good church and that I should go So I went.

I think it's pretty, I think New Plains is really good because I like the people who go there.

I like the activities we do and when we go to the chapel of the service.

I started going to New Plains because it was like the best church I've been to ever since I've been to Harvard because there's more people there and you learn more about Jesus and God and stuff.

When I first went to New Plant, I loved it.

Well, there was this pastor there at New Plant named Pastor Tim, and the way he preached, I loved it a lot.

The teachers at the church do really care about us.

Actually what it started out was New Plant.

And when Pastor Dwight did his sermon, there was a few students that really took this message to heart.

And they went out door to door praying with people.

Series

GYC 2011 totalChurch

Total Church: Breaking Bread, Part 1

Transcript

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