Michigan Camp Meeting 2025: He Must Increase

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Decision - Discipleship - Destiny

Wes Peppers

01 From Decision to Discipleship

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.

Father in Heaven, we thank You for this great time together.

And thank You for those that have come, those that are continuing to come in.

I want to pray that You would bless each 1, that You would Give us Your heart this week, Lord.

Help us to see into Your heart and what is precious to You, and that may be precious to us, and we may act on it just like You acted.

Lord, You saw the world in a very dark, abysmal state, hopeless, without any chance of life, except through your intervention.

Jesus came to this earth and He walked it as a sinless man, yet as Almighty God.

And At the end of His life, He gave His life willingly to those who would take it.

And today, Lord, we are rejoicing in that and we're thankful for it, because outside of that we have no hope.

And so, Lord, be with us now and fill our hearts with your presence, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

I won't take too much time with this, but God is doing great things through It Is Written Around the World.

We appreciate your support and your prayers.

And it's amazing to me to see the lives that get transformed through what we're doing.

I want to share a few pictures with you about what happened there.

These are some of the brethren that were there.

And they were some of the workers that had been doing a lot of preparation.

We hired in January 100 Bible workers to work in 3 different locations.

And Pastor John Bradshaw preached a large evangelistic meeting.

I preached another 1 in another location.

You can hire a Bible worker for $50 a month in Ethiopia.

And these are some of the workers and organizers.

These guys fasted for an entire week before we came.

They had 1 small meal in the evening and then they fast all day and during their lunchtime, they would pray and study and claim God's promises that He would do great and mighty things.

We have started a new humanitarian project and that is we do water filters.

Now you wouldn't believe that there are a number of places today who still do not, cannot drink fresh water.

There are a number of places that are drinking water that looks like this, and I'm not joking with you.

These filters are, you're able to filter through them more than a million gallons of water through each individual filter.

And so we have people that have been donating to that.

I'm not trying to make a commercial out of this, but I'm never 1 to hinder the Lord's moving for those that would like to do that.

But we take these filters, and 1 filter will last a family 10 to 15 years, providing them with clean water.

And so, I'll just put this in there, some of the best pizza you've ever had is right there in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

There was an Ethiopian man who found his way to an Italian family, and they taught him how to make pizza, and he came back and opened his own shop.

And it's fantastic, as good as any in Italy.

Anyway, so we took these filters and we went to a place called Jinka.

Jinka is in the Oma Valley where there are a lot of primitive tribal people who still live very primitively.

And we met a group of tribal people, and you can see this is the way of life, very rural.

So we flew to this place, it's in southern Ethiopia, and When you fly there, you feel like you're in the middle of nowhere.

And then you get in a car and then you drive several more hours to even further places that you thought didn't exist.

And by the time you get to where you're going, there's still more to go.

And when you get there, you feel like you're on the edge of the earth.

Twelve-year-old girls being married off to tribal leaders and so forth.

So we came to an area, this is, I mean you can see this picture, it's kind of fitting there, a little church there and it also serves as a school and there was some kids waiting for us and precious little kids that, This all smiles.

This is the up-to-date contemporary housing for most of the people there.

You can see huts, mud huts with grass roofs.

And there were our buckets waiting for us.

So we went down to this area right here, and this is the community water source.

There's not this, and then, you know, they got a well at their house.

And what you'll see is people filling their jugs and children playing in the water.

And right across the way, there are cows.

Now those cows are not trained to restrain their toilet when they're in the water.

So while 1 is over here doing this, the other is contributing back probably about the same amount in other ways, you understand.

So you got children and cows and goats, and so that's the water that they're drinking.

Now we took these water filters for them, and the water filter gets attached to a bucket and you pour water in the bucket and then it filters through the filter.

And before it filters through the filter, you put a cloth over the bucket and that's kind of a first layer to get out the big chunks.

So we poured that water through that cloth and when we poured it through, there's little things flopping, parasites that are flopping.

And the local people, even the older people, they went like this.

They've been drinking that water all their life and had no idea they were drinking these parasites.

And I'm not saying this in any way, but it would be the same effect as if they saw us work a magic trick.

I mean, they were blown away to see that water become clear.

And they just kept looking at it like this.

This is supposed to be a video, but this man took this clean water and he's just looking at it like this and he drank it.

And his eyes were closed while he drank it.

Like you would have thought that He was drinking from the river of life in heaven.

And so we gave out 1, 000 of these filters.

02 Discipleship that Doesn’t Dumb or Dump

Father in heaven, we thank you for the time we've had together.

We want to ask your blessing to be with us, to open our hearts to you and help us to see how we can move our churches.

Really how you'll move our churches, but you want to use us to do it.

And so Lord, we pray Your special blessing today.

And we thank You for Your goodness and Your blessings.

And we ask You to open our eyes and open our ears to whatever it is You want to say to us.

How many of you remember our statement from yesterday?

So every church includes your church, and Christian workers includes you, yes?

So you should be a Christian worker who's getting trained, and the church is a training school.

The church is the place where you go, and you're the person that goes there, and training is what you receive.

Well, she also says in other places that The pastor is to be...

Actually, the Bible says that the pastor is a trainer and an equipper.

You know, I was just down in the Dominican Republic and I was talking with some of the pastors and they were talking to me about how much they work all the time.

And they said, well, if a member needs to go to the doctor, we take them.

We go help members if they need some wood chopped.

And I'm thinking to myself, guys, you're missing the point.

They hardly have any time with their families.

They might take 1 day off every 2 or 3 months.

Let me say this, there's a structure in the church, and that structure is not for the pastor to do every little thing for the members.

And in fact, I'm going to pull this up right here on the website.

So look, you go to this website, LetMyPastorsGo.com and you can buy this book in print I think on Amazon or even from this website.

But you can download it for free on this website, okay?

It's written by a friend of mine named Wes McDonald, but I want you to take a look at this, and I wanna just zoom in on this.

I want you to take a look at this picture Real closely.

This is 1 of the most brilliant pictures that you will ever see.

There's some people working out in the field.

Well, the pastor's wearing a skirt, which I think that's for illustration purposes.

He's looking at the people working in the field.

Now, if you notice, how much does it look like they've done?

There's a vast field of wheat to be harvested.

It says something very strongly, doesn't it?

That the way that our churches are set up today is that the pastor is basically a servant of the members.

Now, listen, I don't mean to sound nasty, but I used to have people who would go into the hospital and they would be going in for just some small thing, and they would almost resign their membership if they didn't get a visit from the pastor.

I had this 1 lady, she said to me 1 time she was in the hospital and I went to see her.

She said, well, thank goodness you've come to visit me.

I said, well, what do you mean no one's come to visit you?

She said, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they visited me.

And she had the mentality that no 1 had visited her unless who?

I'm going to say this, and when I say it, it's not with any meanness.

We get our feelings hurt if the pastor doesn't come and do his little ritual to us.

And it's like his prayers are more holy than some other prayers of an elder or a member.

And the original design of the pastor was much more of an evangelist than a settled pastor who took care of members.

So I'm going to show you some things this week that are going to be very interesting to you.

Now, when I say that, I'm not trying to say that a pastor should never visit the members.

But we have become so dependent upon pastors today in this day and age.

We've become so dependent upon their care that we have often become spiritually weakened through that.

03 Discipleship to Destiny

Father, we thank You for this time together, and Lord, we need to cover a lot of ground, so we pray that Your Spirit will help us.

And Lord, these principles are very vital today.

They were used in the early church, in the book of Acts.

They were used all throughout history when church growth took place.

And they're still effective today if we will utilize them.

And so Lord, We pray Your Spirit be with us today and open our eyes and our ears, and even more importantly, our hearts, to what You want to do through our lives and in our churches and in our communities.

So we pray this in Jesus' name And we say together, Amen.

Do you remember the first 3 principles for a training center church?

And the way that I would rephrase that just a little bit is I would say everything that we do in our church must filter through the understanding of the Great Commission culture.

Missional church structure, which we will endeavor to speak about today.

Number 3, making sure that we are much more what?

Territory focused rather than church maintenance focused, right?

And we remember that maintenance will never accomplish the mission.

Number 4, and that's where we're at today, is to have trained and equipped leaders now I asked you the other day and I'll ask you again.

What happens at the nominating committee?

We tell them how much of the job description Very little because we want them to say yes, And then we get upset when they do nothing.

And then at the end of the year when it's time to nominate again, we, we, what do we do?

And we're bothered with them because they didn't do anything.

And so likely, they just did the best that they could.

Even if that was nothing, because they might have been afraid they would mess it up.

I recommended a book the other day, do you remember what it was?

Another book that I want to highly recommend to you, even if you've read it 20 times, read it again, is the book Christian Service.

If you want to get stirred up for evangelism and soul winning, read the book Christian Service.

There was a gentleman in, and I don't even remember where it was.

It might have been China or some other place, some Asian country.

Non-Adventist fellow who was raising up numerous underground churches.

And those churches were growing by the hundreds every several months.

And they kind of interviewed him, and they said, what's the secret to your church growth?

He didn't even know who they were, but he held up 2 books, and he said, I found these books, I forget where he said he found them, in a box in a closet somewhere, and he said, I read these books and I actually started putting what it said into practice.

We did everything it said to the letter and our churches have been exploding ever since.

1 was Christian Service, and the other was Evangelism by Ellen G.

So in the book Christian Service, it says many would be willing to work if they were taught what?

Someone said to me yesterday, we have stood up and made announcement after announcement about outreach, about the help we need in this area of the church and that area of the church.

And it's very frustrating that when it's time to do the outreach, we have 3 people that show up.

You will never recruit people effectively by making announcements in church on Sabbath morning.

You ought to consider the announcement you make to be a final reminder.

Let me tell you a secret that I learned in my first pastoral district, and that is this, that Christ's method works equally inside the church as much as it does outside the church.

When Ellen White says, go to your neighbors 1 by 1, show them Christian kindness and love and concern, and then invite them to follow the Master.

The same principle works inside the church.

There are many people who are willing to work, but they're never just going to jump right out there and promote themselves.

It's no secret that there is the 80-20 rule in the churches, right?

And I found that the people who stay the most busy, busy themselves, and they get frustrated because they've made announcements and all these things, but to recruit workers in the church is as much a personal work as is recruiting souls in the community to follow Christ.

And so, what you need to do is you need to start going to people individually.

Now I'm trusting and believing, I'm assuming, that all of you are part of that 10 or 20% in your local church.

And in my church, in the Lansing church, it's a very large church.

You know, when I was there, we had anywhere from 300-400 people in attendance on Sabbath each week.

We had multiple departments and very few people had to lead more than 1 area because we had a lot of people.

We had like 20% of the people doing most of the work.

And I said to my departmental leaders, we'd have regular meetings, I said this year, I want you to do something different.

I don't want you to go only to the people you always rely upon, the people that you always recruit to do the work.

I want you to find somebody in the church that they attend church maybe regularly, maybe every week, maybe it's 2 or 3 times a month.

And I want you to go and visit with them and maybe invite them to some meal at your house or something, and I want you to personally interact with them and become friends with them, and then seek to recruit them to help you.

Not all of them did it, but many of them did it.

And guess what happened to our workforce?

04 Destiny and Deployment

Let's pray together and ask the Lord's blessing.

We want to ask that your Spirit be with us today and that your presence would be in our hearts, that you would open our eyes and ears even more to how you want your churches to operate so that we are fully functional and fully operational to be in your service.

And Lord, we're not just making up stuff here.

These are things, principles that you've laid out in your Word, in the spirit of prophecy, and now in our church manual, and even in other places.

So bless us now, we ask, and we come in Jesus' name, let's say together, Amen.

Alright, so I wanted to talk a little bit about church business meetings.

Someone asked me about this yesterday, about the church business meeting.

So, church business meetings are very important.

Every layer of the church needs to conduct church business.

They need to have plans, review plans, and they need to make decisions about certain things that need to happen in the church.

Now, we're about to, next month, have the general conference session for the world church, right?

And really, it's a beautiful thing because people from all over the world are selected delegates to come and represent their field at the World Church Session.

And you know, every 5 years in the Michigan Conference we have a constituency session where we elect officers, we conduct business, we vote on prominent issues, and what I love about it is that every church has a voice because every church sends delegates that they have selected.

And you know, sometimes people complain and they say, oh, we didn't know anything about that.

If there's something you don't know about in your local church, it's because you weren't probably listening.

Unless somebody's hiding something, which rarely happens.

And take that thing home with you every week and put it on your refrigerator.

That way you say, oh, I don't remember about that.

If your church produces a yearly calendar, put that thing on a place and read it.

And so we need to take the election of our delegates seriously for the constituency.

Sometimes we say, oh, nobody wants to go.

Let's send once again the newest person who's been baptized and send them down there.

Who wants to waste a Sunday going down there?

No, we ought to want to know what's going on in our church.

So the local conference, every church selects delegates based upon their membership.

And then for the general conference session, every union and conference selects delegates.

Usually, they only get a few and it's usually the conference president.

Series

Decision - Discipleship - Destiny

03 Discipleship to Destiny

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Decision - Discipleship - Destiny

02 Discipleship that Doesn’t Dumb or Dump

55m

Decision - Discipleship - Destiny

01 From Decision to Discipleship

1h 9m

Principles for Succesful Soul Winning

Elephant in the Room: 5 Keys to Church Growth

55m

The Doctrine of Personal Ministries

Part 4 - Doing the Wrong Job Well

1h 18m

Emmanuel Institute - Ignite Your Church

Ignite Your Church - Part 13: Disturbing our Monotony

1h 15m

Sabbath School and Personal Ministries: Getting the Most Out of BSO

05 From Click to Christ: Winning Souls with BSO

1h 9m

Emmanuel Institute - Ignite Your Church

Ignite Your Church - Part 7: Evaluating Your Church

1h 13m

Sharing the Three Angels’ Messages in 30 Seconds

03 Sharing the Three Angels’ Messages in 30 Seconds

1h 2m

Preparing Your Church for Evangelism

04 What are the Challenges?, Part 02

1h

Seven Keys to Effective Evangelism and Church Growth

03 Corporate Transformation

1h 3m

The Three Angels' Message

07 The Fourth Angel’s Message

1h

Presenting Persuasive Appeals During Keys to Revelation

05 Presenting Christ Centered Appeals with Confidence

1h 1m

Sound Doctrine