Michigan Camp Meeting 2025: He Must Increase

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Stewarding God's Gifts: Faithful Planning for Life & Legacy

Jermaine Jackson

01 Sow to Grow

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

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

Loving Father, we thank you for the beautiful sunshine and we thank you for the sunshine of your love in our hearts.

We thank you for the resources that you have given us to be stewards of.

I pray that you will bless brother Jermaine as he speaks to us, that you will speak through him and that you'll open our ears and hearts of listening so that we can accept your word to us today.

I know we might be small in number, but listen, we're still powerful and God is still in with us.

But thank you, you know, Gene and Joel for the invitation to be with you guys today.

The union, we're here to support and the union loves to be a part of camp meetings.

You know, I was just at Indiana camp meeting this past, or not this past weekend, but the weekend before.

And so everybody is kind of everywhere right now.

And then of course we have general conference, but our treasurer wanted me to tell everyone, hello.

And so we are just happy and delighted to be with you guys today.

So if other people come in, you know, they missed out on all the giveaways, the money, because the Lord is going to bless the few that's in number here today.

But just to give you a little bit of information about myself, again, my name is Jermaine Jackson, as Gina stated.

I am the Associate Treasurer for the Union and the Stewardship Director.

I also oversee the Director for the Lake Union Revolving Fund that we will talk about here in the very end.

Just to give you a little bit of my credentials from previous, I used to be the Allegheny West Treasurer prior to coming to the Union a few years ago.

I was the Treasurer there And then before then I was a CFO for Adventist Risk Management for a number of years.

So the Lord has allowed me to be a part of different ministries in this great Adventist's work.

And so it's truly a delight to be here in Michigan where it's a little cooler than most places that I've served before.

So here today, we're going to talk about tithe and offering.

Again, it's something that I'm pretty sure we have some information about.

We know a little bit about, but I want to try to go a little in depth just in case you're not familiar with the structure and some of the things that have been taking place and that was something that was asked of us to share with you today and then again at the very end we'll talk about the great things that are going on with the revolving fund.

Just to ask real quick, Do you guys are aware of the Revolving Fund?

So we might spend a little more time on that 1 as well.

All right, so let's go ahead and get started.

And I'm gonna try to keep pace with the time here.

Real quick, tell me everyone's name since we're small in number.

Pat Lowe, just to let you guys know, Pat was the first 1 here, so she won the million dollar prize.

Alrighty, so Lord is already blessing her.

And these great people work in the treasury, stewardship, plan giving, and everything else dealing with numbers.

So we all have a great working relationship with 1 another.

All right, so let me just go through this again.

We're going to talk about soul to grow, understanding tithe and offering for today.

Now I want to talk about this, just picture a little bit, what does it mean to sow to grow?

Now, 1 of the things that you'll know about me, I'm very interactive, I look for feedback and questions and comments and so I will ask you to provide some of your feedback and answers to questions and things of that nature.

And you have to clear out the weeds and you have to till it 3 times to get it nice and- Right, Because the weeds will grow, right?

And so, you know, you prepare ahead of time.

And then put your seed in, and you have to do a lot of weeding even after that.

And so as soon as you put the seed in, Does it grow immediately?

See, so sometimes when we're talking about sowing, sowing is not an immediate process.

Sometimes sowing takes some time and through that process you're going to have to weed out some of the stuff.

So we'll talk a little bit about that because that's kind of what tied an offering is as well.

If you can see, I know we're a little far away.

What do you see that's different, interesting about the picture?

Does that mean it just started off earlier?

You think that was the first person, like 2 people gave funds?

Or that's usually how our offering plate looks?

Now sometimes we'll say that, hey, it's because of Cash App now and we have Adventist giving so people give online, but sometimes that's how our offering plate looks, right?

Now, you may not be able to see it, but this dollar is real crumpled, you know?

That means that it's been sitting in somebody's pocket for a little while, they crumpled it up, and then it's just like, you know what, let's just give this dollar in the offering plate.

We give the little bit, but if we're gonna really truly sow to grow, we have to give more of what God has asked us to give than just the crumpled up dollar for our tithe and our offering.

So 1 of the things that definition, and I know these gentlemen have heard me talk about this, is when we talk about tithe and offering, tithe and offering is a bigger picture.

And everyone knows what stewardship is, right?

Stewardship, if you look at the definition in anywhere now, stewardship just talks about managing, the management of something that has been entrusted to you.

And so usually we deal with stewardship on all types of levels, not just with money.

Vern Alger

02 The Final Garage Sale

The title of today's program is the final garage sale.

Have you ever seen a hearse pulling a U-Haul?

All your stuff in the garage and in the basement and everywhere else, it's gonna go someplace or other.

So that's why we have procedures that happen after death to take care of assets and some other things.

Otherwise you're gonna be forgetting something and you may be sorry that you do.

But that's, I cannot overemphasize the checklist.

If you die with a will, you have said to have died testate.

If you die without a will, you have died in test state.

And the difference is, obviously, you have your estate laid out in a will.

And if you die without a will, the state has a layout, which is not all bad.

You know people sometimes think it's really bad the state's gonna take it all.

But they do have a way that it goes and we're gonna talk about some of that later on.

When you die, the property that is in your estate is only that in your sole name.

If you have a pay on death, it goes to that person.

If you have a survivorship of some sort, that probably goes to the survivor depending on how it's worded.

Insurance policies have beneficiaries, it goes to the beneficiary.

And so a trust, it is then, you know, all owned by the trust.

And the reason a trust avoids probate is you don't own your assets anymore.

You transfer all the assets into the trust, you don't own them so when you die there's nothing to probate.

And we're going to talk about trust secondly.

A lot of the things that have implications for wills also work with trusts.

And so we'll get into that a little bit later.

Probate is a procedure that validates wills and it identifies or accumulates your assets, it pays your debts and taxes, and distributes the assets.

Those are the functions of a probate process.

Michigan's very fortunate to have a very good type of probate availability.

There's the formal probate and that obviously is very formal.

If you have a big family feud going on, if there's a fight over some assets or whatever, you may want formal probate which has heavy involvement by the judge.

And there is informal probate which is a lesser standard.

And then there's 2 other elements that can be applied to either 1.

Is it supervised by a court, or is it unsupervised?

Well, since this statute was passed probably 20 years ago, I have never filed anything other than a request for informal non-supervised probate.

That way you don't have to go to a hearing in court and have somebody just get on the stand and say somebody died and here's who their heirs are.

In fact, that 1 1 client I had, we were in Detroit and she went to the witness stand to testify that yes, her husband died And here's who, you know, she was his wife, and here's who the children were.

And she went back to her row down in the courtroom where somebody had already stolen her purse.

So, You know, there's just reasons that, you know, you make.

That's just 1 of many reasons, but it's easier if you need your document signed, which you do, the clerk can sign them if it's unsupervised.

I have had no problems with that at all and Having having the clerks do it now it can vary from count county to county clerks are different from you know some of them 1 of them really gave great service.

I found out later that the attorneys who were getting the great service that I kind of envied, I gave her a television or something like that for Christmas, the clerk.

So that, you know, kind of wrecked the whole thing as far as I'm concerned, but that's a personal item that we're always going to have to face.

Michigan has something that has, it's fairly recent, It has not been used enough, but it's very effective.

And originally, it applied to the estate up to $15, 000 plus the cost of the funeral.

So if you had a funeral expense of $8, 000 plus 15, that's $23, 000.

Well the court still wanted to handle fewer cases.

So they increased that amount, inflation increased it, and it kept going and going and going, until now it's up to, you can use this transfer by affidavit, up to $51, 000.

Now that's starting to get you real money.

And it's easy to use, and it applies, here's what a transfer by affidavit applies to.

No real estate, If there's real estate in the estate that blows it.

And the value of the estate does not exceed $51, 000 now.

28 days have passed since the decedent's death and nobody has asked for or petitioned for probate.

So because you can't have both going on a non-probate function like the transfer and probate both, can't have them both.

And the person that wants the property is really legally entitled to it and the name of all the other people who might be in the same position where they could think they were entitled to it.

So if if you supply all those and they're all just described on this paper.

We have a bank in Berrien Springs, I've been into twice with 1 of these.

And the first time I had to tell them what it was, they'd never seen it before.

Joe and they they didn't know and so they called their attorneys in New York.

That's yeah you know that's perfectly legitimate and so I was able to just walk in with this affidavit and end up walking out with a check.

Well this is generally it's as long as nobody has petitioned under any, it could be you have a will, but absolutely no assets.

And so if nobody has petitioned for probate within 28 days of death, Go for it.

Then if the judge wants to change, that's up to the judge.

You also still have the small estate provisions where there's certain things you can do without a court hearing.

And that amount has been raised also from $15, 000 to 51, 000.

Here again the court is trying to get out of business as much as it can you know to save money to save judge time and everything else.

We do not have executors and administrators in Michigan.

It used to be that the, if you had somebody named to appoint to run your estate, that was an executor.

And if you didn't have a will, the person that ran your estate was an administrator.

Michigan said, we don't need that distinction.

Basically naming anybody is only a nomination and not an appointment because only the court judge or clerk can appoint people to handle that.

So it's just no use doing it and with nomination only there's no problem with it because the you know the personal representative does everything.

So a lot of times when you open up a state and I don't know for people from the department here have worked much with that with bonds.

You have to post bonds sometime if there's you know assets involved and maybe if there's a somebody that is going to be the representative that they haven't dealt with before or whatever.

There's a grandson out in California, got a call from the pastor, said, your grandmother died and you're the only heir that's left.

Jim Slater

03 Making Sense of Savings and Investments

I know Pastor Gene, oh by the way, before I say anything about myself, we have a phenomenal stewardship department here at the conference.

Folks like Pastor Gene and Pastor Joel also in the conference on the finance.

We've got Tom Waddy, I've had a chance to work a little bit with him.

Just some tremendous people that can be resources for us here in the conference.

And so any opportunity that you guys have to connect with our conference folks, I would definitely encourage you to do that.

Just run through again here a little bit of my background because people like to know.

It's not that I really feel like I have to tell you, but sometimes people are like, hey, someone's talking to me.

I wonder if they actually know what they're talking about.

So here's just a little bit about my background.

I spent a few years as a financial planner, A few years as an investment advisor, a few years as a corporate retirement plan administrator.

So I actually managed very large corporate 401k plans for some of the largest companies in West Michigan.

So a lot of times when Pastor Gene or Pastor Joel, someone has a question that it relates to the investment side, I know enough about what they're trying to do on the trust side to be able to be helpful and make those things work together.

And then Finally here for the last 13 years, Chief Investment Officer for a firm over in Grand Haven.

And my goal is because of what he has done for me that I can now share with you guys some insights that hopefully are helpful for you as you're taking a look at today's subject, which is really how do we look at savings and how do we look at investments?

And in particular, how do we look at that from a biblical perspective?

There is a ton of information out there on how to save and how to invest.

If you want to do some research, you can find all kinds of secular authors, secular speakers that will tell you this is how you need to invest, this is how you need to save.

So please don't think that because they're not specifically biblical that their advice is bad.

But my question is, there are times where that advice could be in conflict with what the Bible says.

So today we're not going to focus on what the world says we should do in terms of investing or savings, what we're going to do is we're going to focus on what the Bible says, because that's how we know that we won't go wrong.

If we take a look at penny saved is a penny earned.

And if you don't know, it's down at the bottom.

Now I realize in the back it might be hard to see.

Benjamin Franklin was a very intelligent person.

There's a lot of things I would respect about him.

But what I want to do, like I said before, is let's take a look at what does the Bible say?

What is God telling us through his holy word as it relates to investing and it relates to savings?

Now, 1 of the things that sometimes happens as Christians is we view savings and investments as somehow maybe that's evil.

If I have saved money or if I'm investing, maybe that implies that I don't have faith in God.

And what I'm gonna share with you is that the Bible gives us a principle that says it is very appropriate to be saving money.

So if you take a look at Proverbs 21 20, it says, precious treasure and oil are in a wise man's dwelling, but a foolish man devours it.

Now in Bible times, they didn't necessarily have credit cards or dollar bills or even coins.

And help me out here, was it Elijah or Elisha?

Said, you know, pour out the, you know, keep pouring into the buckets and go and sell it.

And she paid off all of her debt and had enough money to live.

So the Bible says in Proverbs, treasure and oil are in wise men's dwelling.

Wise people set things aside rather than just consume or devour it.

So savings is a very biblical process, a very biblical principle.

The question is, how much should we have in savings?

How much should we have sitting so that if we need to get to it, we should?

Now, every person is a little different, but here's where I'm going to start.

I'm just going to tell you, number 1, before we get into this, when we're talking about savings, I'm talking about a money that's put in a risk-free bank deposit account, or maybe a money market account, something that holds its value, has a stable store of value, as opposed to an investment that might fluctuate.

So how much should we have in some type of risk-free bank deposit that's available if we have an emergency.

I would tell you, and this is, by the way, I'm sure you can imagine, the Bible doesn't tell us for 2025 how much money we should have in savings.

But we can use some prudent principles and I would tell you number 1, everyone should have an emergency fund with at least a thousand dollars.

1 of the biggest problems that people get into with debt is an expense comes up.

We just had this not long ago with a deer family at our church, all of a sudden something happened to the car, everything just snowballs.

I had to try to fix the car, now I can't pay the bills, I can't pay the, What do I, and so the problems just get worse and worse.

Everyone should, number 1, have at least $1, 000 set in savings for an emergency fund.

Now, once you have that, the real goal is you should get to where you have somewhere between 3 and 6 months of expenses.

Now, I'm not talking about your income, I'm only talking about your expenses.

For most of us, we may make a certain amount of money each month, but keep in mind that we're paying, hopefully, our tithes and offerings, we're paying our taxes, maybe there's some money going into savings.

All we're really looking at is what are my expenses each month?

And the goal would be to have somewhere between 3 and 6 months.

That way, if something happens, the car breaks down, someone in the family loses a job for a few months, you have a buffer to get you through that so that you all of a sudden don't start accumulating debt that you don't want.

There is time, by the way, that debt is appropriate, I believe, and we're not going to get into debt today, But paying for groceries, fixing a broken car, going on a vacation, those are things that we should not be using debt for.

So establishing a good emergency fund is very, very critical.

The other thing is we wanna have money in our savings for known future expenses.

So for a lot of people, some of those expenses might be, hey, we've got periodic annual expenses such as, I know that every 6 months it's cheaper if I pay my auto insurance on a 6 month basis.

I get a nice discount, pay it all up front.

So if I can set money aside every month so that when that six-month happens, pay it all, now I save, you know, 10-15 percent.

So if we have known periodic annual expenses, we want to have savings for that.

Many of us here, I'm looking around the room, I'm guessing a lot of us here are homeowners.

Some of us, based on age, probably are aspiring to be a homeowner.

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Series

Stewarding God's Gifts: Faithful Planning for Life & Legacy

01 Sow to Grow

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

01 Sow to Grow

1h 3m

02 The Final Garage Sale

55m

03 Making Sense of Savings and Investments

58m

04 The Basics of Estate Planning

1h 2m

05 Funeral Pre-Planning and Options

43m

Sound Doctrine