Michigan Camp Meeting 2025: He Must Increase

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Mentorship Matters

Micheal Goetz

Craig Harris

Gisela Knowlton

Gary Knowlton

Rich Sutton

01 Mentoring Young Families

You're about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2025 Michigan Conference Camping, held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

And as we come before your throne room right now, we just ask you to bless us.

Bless us as a small group, But Lord, you always have these small beginnings.

Give you a little history of who and what we do as far as Mexico missions and and beyond.

I was, I had a service station, a Texaco gas station in Holly, Michigan.

I don't know if you know what Holly is, but it's kind of different.

Now, I wasn't raised the Seventh-day Adventist.

I went to public school and there were some different kind of people at Holly, Michigan.

Do you have a clue how weird you guys are?

And so this coal porter, can I stand over here, that'd be okay, I'm gonna kind of be with this, you guys can come over here if you want, there was a coal porter, his car kept breaking down all the time?

And I kept fixing his car and fixing his car.

And then he started dropping little hints about the Bible and things.

I was raised a Catholic and my wife was raised a Baptist.

So we were a great mix, and we didn't talk religion at all.

But he started Bible studies with us, and lo and behold, I became 1 of you grass eaters, amen?

My mom hated the guy that gave me the Bible studies.

She did not like the guy because it split up our home.

I have 6 brothers and we were all kind of evolving around Holly, Michigan.

We moved to a town called Big Rapids, Pam and I.

And then this Cole Porter guy came to my church, and he recruited me.

I knew he was coming, so I was sick that day.

But lo and behold, he came to my house, and I canvassed.

7 years I canvassed and they made me a district leader and everything was going well, almost.

Now when you're a canvasser and when you're a district leader, you spend a lot of time in the evenings in the homes, and I was teaching.

My wife comes up to me 1 day, and she says, Rich, you're winning the whole world, but you're losing your own kids.

I called the conference and I said I'm going to resign.

I'm going to pick up my toolbox and go back to work.

And the conference says, I'll move you anywhere.

So that's what you're getting from me today.

This is personal, it's real, and it's on my heart.

I had a youth group then of 30 kids in my youth group.

I moved from Big Rapids, we went to Cadillac, Michigan, and I was in charge of 7 churches.

But I had 30 kids, 30, they were just beautiful kids.

And I was understanding that 15 of those 30 would leave the church.

So I developed ideas and things and plans on how I was going to keep those kids in the church.

I have a saying, and this is really wild, but whatever you break, I can fix.

When you're laying blocks, hey, we can fix it.

And so that was always my attitude with my boys, with my girls.

Pam would make the reads, but she would go sell them.

It made her responsible for Mexico missions, amen?

We need to put our kids in a position of responsibility.

They hang out, they're gonna go out the back door.

And then, so we're doing Mexico missions.

02 Mentoring Kids in Elementary-Middle School

You're about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2025 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

Thank you for the blessings we have here at Camp Meeting.

Thank you for the blessings you give us as being members of this worldwide remnant Church.

Thank you for Christian mentors along the way that has helped us come to this very day and to this very place.

We're thankful for your love and pray that we might reflect that love to others And we ask this in Jesus' name.

My name is Gisela, and as long as you keep this information here, I'll tell you that I'm 75 years old.

But as far as all the kids are concerned that I talk to, I'm 102, and I've been 102 forever.

That's because I lied about it so much, I could never remember until I went to the doctor's office, and then I had to really count it up.

At least a part of my speech is about being honest.

I started teaching Sabbath school when I was just 18 and I've never gotten out of Sabbath school.

A mentor is just someone who is there, someone who is willing to listen and willing to give an ear and possibly even advise when kids need some advice.

But a mentor is someone that has to develop that relationship with a child.

You have to develop a relationship with that child before they will ever give you any kind of secrets and trust me they've given me all kinds of secrets.

It right now in my in our Sabbath school class What we do to just break the ice on Sabbath mornings is we have a table set up, and I go to the Ionia Church, our Sabbath school is not real big, and we sit around the table and we play with Play-Doh.

And playing with Play-Doh is just a way of just relaxing and getting started with Sabbath school.

They play with Play-Doh and we can talk to them.

And when you talk to them In a setting like that, they're much more willing to be open and to share.

Another thing that you must do as a mentor is have eye contact.

You can't talk to them and talk to everyone else in the room.

You've got to give them the attention that they need.

And if they can see that you are giving them the attention that they think that they need, they're willing to share with you.

But you also want to mentor a child to succeed later on in life.

But so there have to be some creative ways of doing that as well.

And 1 of the things we do in our Sabbath school class is get kids to memorize their memory verses.

If you're, none of you guys are as old as I am.

When you're as old as I am, learning memory verses is not easy anymore.

Learning anything from memory is not easy anymore.

But when you're a child, it just goes in and they're like a sponge.

And so what we have done for the last many years is if a kid can memorize all 13 of the quarter's memory verses, and not just week by week, but the whole 13 at the end of the quarter, I will have them get up front, usually between Sabbath school and church, because they don't want to do it in front of a big congregation, but they've got to get up there and prove to me that they know it.

I will start them out with a word or 2, and then they finish it.

If they can do that for the whole 13 weeks, they get something special from me.

We've, yes, I've had sleepovers at my house.

And, you know, the possibilities are endless.

And when I used to have, like, a group of 5 or 6 girls, there weren't any boys, it was all girls, they just wanted to come to my house.

And they would spend the night at my house and play.

And it was enough of a reward for them to be able to do that without their parents, and come and just really play that they wanted every quarter to be able to learn those memory verses.

Now, I don't have very many kids, And only this last quarter, I only had 1 little boy who did all of his memory verses.

And Sharon, who's my assistant sitting there, suggested, Well, why don't we take him to Drummond Island?

Another 1 that, another older kid, another older kid of mine who, she lived on Drummond Island.

She had a house there, but then they moved to Arkansas, she's working for whatever that conference is in Arkansas.

And so she was there that Sabbath visiting us and said, Well, why don't you take them to Drummond Island?

And nobody had memorized any of their memory verses yet.

OK, I'm sure I don't have to go to Drummond Island.

And he was thrilled to be able to go to Drummond Island.

Well, his parents weren't going to send him by himself with us, so his parents came along too.

The Lord was good to us and gave us a nice weather and it was just a wonderful time.

Now besides Sabbath school, I'm also a piano teacher and I had a few of these people in piano lessons And to me, for me to be able to really teach piano to these kids, I have to get to know them.

I have to know who they are and what their goals are and what their, and so we have a half hour lesson, but I always make it, excuse me, always make it into a 45 minute lesson because we'd spend the first 10, 15 minutes just talking.

And So these kids not only get to know me, I get to know them.

And it just makes it so much easier to be their piano teacher.

And I had a recital this May and I've had several new students.

Nobody knew I was an Adventist until recital and I had the recital in our school and this was the first time some of these people knew where I went to church.

And I'm sure that there were some conversations that were going on when on their way home.

Because 1 of the kids that I went to that following week.

We were sitting there talking and he said, why do you go to church on Saturday?

And he said, you know, he kind of looked at me really funny And I said, I keep all 10 of the commandments.

Well, I know he's a churchgoer because on his coffee table, there was a Bible there.

So I opened it up and showed him where the 10 commandments were and showed him the fourth commandment.

Well, I'm not going to say anything more to him, but I know the seed has been planted.

And I'm sure that when I left, he took that information to his parents.

But a mentor is someone that a child can come and talk to and because they know you and because you know them, you've spent time with them, you've spent quality time with them.

03 Mentoring Young Adults

You're about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2025 Michigan Conference Camp held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

Thank you, dear Lord, for this day that you've given to us and for the opportunity that we have today to talk about mentoring.

Certainly your son, Jesus, was the greatest mentor of all.

And help us as we, as we wrestle with this idea that the fact that Jesus is our model that we wouldn't forget that in your name I pray amen.

So this little handout I gave you did everybody get 1?

Everybody that came in, I don't think anybody else has come in since.

You can go online and actually I could have artificial intelligence or AI, write this seminar if I wanted to.

I could just say, give me a five-point seminar that's going to last me 1 hour and it would in 3 seconds give me a pretty good deal.

So I went online and I just did a definition of discipleship and there was all kinds of them out there and I went to a resource that is 1 of my favorite resources and that's in John Maxwell.

He's a Christian leadership kind of guru kind of guy.

If there's sometimes you just, you can just read a book and you go, oh man, that's it.

And then you just, and you underline and you just, and then you end up underlining the whole book, right?

It says, mentoring is rooted in the concept of discipleship where 1 person seeks to follow another's example and learn from their life and teaching.

So we all have got people that, that's kind of what I want to be like.

Or you say, I am not going to follow that example.

So mentoring, this whole concept that we, I don't know if you've been to the other, I don't know what the other people have been speaking about.

But today we're just going to be talking about mentoring is taking, you see somebody that you admire, you like what they do and you want to follow them in any way.

So that's kind of what we're going to do there.

And then there's a technical description.

We're not going to be technical at all, but this description is actually pretty sound.

And all of the components that we're talking about today kind of fit this.

And my baseball coach used to play professional baseball.

So he was a great mentor if you wanted to be a really good ballplayer.

So coaching and mentorship are kind of close.

We use coaching in the business world and we use mentorship in the Christian world, right?

Or we use another word called discipleship.

Jesus' disciples, they tried to model after Jesus.

So here's the idea of, as the technical description, is imitating, right, imitate.

I remember my dad would teach Sabbath school and when I came home, my dad was not a loud presenter, he talked just very just kind of casually, just talked.

And so I would just, I had a monkey named Jocko and you could pull its string.

I didn't have any other stuffed animals, I just had this monkey named Jocko, and I'd come back on a Sabbath afternoon and I'd put him in front of me and I would teach him.

What my dad was practicing on Friday night or Thursday or whatever, I was imitating my dad, right?

And so I liked what he did, and so I started to imitate.

So that's what a mentee, if someone comes to you and say, well we're gonna get to that, okay.

We're gonna be having some, we're gonna be working together as some little small group stuff here in this seminar, but an instructor is different from a mentor.

But when you have a mentor, you do instruct, you teach.

My baseball coach, he would show us exactly how to take a grounder and be able to be in position to throw the ball over to first base like a pro does.

And so he would model it for us and then we would imitate him and he would coach us and he'd instruct us, he says no do this and I'll pass this pass this to you guys.

So there's the the modeling is there, and then also the last thing is encouragement and support.

A good mentor, a good coach, always gives encouragement and support, right?

So let's take a look in the Bible, Proverbs 27, 17.

Is there somebody that would like to read that nice and loud?

I'm gonna give you the microphone because it's being taped.

Anybody, you can just read it right from the handout.

As iron sharpens iron, so 1 person sharpens another.

But, so, if you want to be good at something, you find somebody who's better at it than you that can kind of sharpen, you know, if you rub iron together, that's how you sharpen both edges.

Pastor Chad Bernard is my boss, and he always is the 1, he sharpens me as we throw ideas back and forth.

And believe it or not, I don't know how that's possible, I actually sharpen him, right?

So we, you know, sometimes we can be in a meeting, we'll get to this a little bit later, we can, Sometimes we can get to a meeting and we'll disagree on something.

And he has the right to say, I think that's a really bad idea.

And if you're not in a position to want to learn, you could be offended by that, especially if it's my idea.

If I come up with an idea and Chad says, man, I don't see that 1 working at all.

Well, I trust him and he has earned the right to be able to say to me, I mean, I don't think that's gonna work.

Does Chad have the best interests of me in mind?

I know that and I may even say, well I think you're washed up.

So we can talk back and forth and then by the time it's all done, 1 of us, we may not always agree And I may decide to do it in my armor as opposed to in his armor, but the idea that we can sharpen 1 another with that process is really, really helpful.

And so as iron sharpens iron, so 1 person sharpens another.

Would you be able to pass that out for me?

Mark 10 45 says this, and this is our marching order.

For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.

I love the idea that Jesus came to serve, not to be served.

Would he have been, was it his right to be served?

Of course, he's the King of Kings, Lord of Lords, right?

But he came to serve as opposed to to be served, which goes into our very next point.

Again, back to my favorite book mentor is John Maxwell.

And this is, I have this written on my desk at home.

It says this, believe in others, once you say it with me, right, it's in the red part there, read it out loud with me, believe in others before they believe in you.

You think that's a good, I think that's a really, really good point, believing in others before they believe in you.

You think that's a good, I think that's a really, really good point.

04 Mentoring Other Adults

Father in heaven, Lord, I do want to thank you so much for the privilege that we have of working together.

Lord, each person brings expertise and wisdom.

Each person you've put special abilities and talents into.

And Lord, together we make this beautiful, complete whole, that beautiful machinery for the cause of Christ.

We become more like you and we learn from each other.

And Lord, as we talk about mentoring today, I just pray that you'd bless Pastor Goetz as he shares.

Lord, that our hearts would be inspired and encouraged.

Lord, that we can walk in unity with 1 another and advance your cause, that we can be ready for the kingdom, we can be ready for heaven, fit for the companionship of angels.

Lord, we want so much to bless each person we come into contact with, whether young or old.

We just pray that you'd bless this time together in Jesus' name, amen.

Our conversation is twofold, today and then reaching its climax tomorrow at the end of the week.

The goal is, for our conversation, will be today to have a personal appeal for the role of mentoring and living a life of mentorship.

And then tomorrow will be the more corporate look of what a church could look like or should look like or the kind of the posture of a church.

In short, it's this in the event that tomorrow you've got other plans, that if the church and by definition we're talking about people.

Series

Mentorship Matters

03 Mentoring Young Adults

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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