Michigan Camp Meeting 2025: He Must Increase

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Preparing Your Church for Evangelism

Chris Holland

01 What is the Church? How Do I Fit In?, Part 01

02 What is the Church? How Do I Fit In?, Part 02

03 What are the Challenges?, Part 01

04 What are the Challenges?, Part 02

05 Practical Solutions for Church Growth, Part 01

06 Practical Solutions for Church Growth, Part 02

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

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

Father in heaven, we thank you that we can be here and we thank you for the rain and the cool breeze that that has brought.

And as we continue to study about some of the challenges that your church is facing.

I just pray, Lord, that you would open our eyes that we might see the solutions that you have for us.

And Help us, Lord, to always be mindful that it's not a method that will save your church, but it is you who will save your church.

So let us be focused on you, I pray in Jesus' name, amen.

And with that, off of my prayer, I wanna share with you, Today we're gonna, so today the goal is we're gonna finish off some of the challenges and then I'm gonna share with you what I believe to be the biblical model of ministry and then tomorrow and Friday we'll practically apply that.

But what I want to begin with is something that I was mentioning in my prayer and something that we have read in several of the scriptures.

I shared with you very, very briefly, but the, All evangelism is exciting, but I led out in a campaign in Calgary, Alberta, and we brought together 14 churches, which that in itself was a miracle, because in our first meeting that we had together, half of the pastors didn't show up because there was just not this spirit of unity.

The Lord brought those churches together and on opening night, we had approximately a thousand people that showed up, many of them not Seventh-day Adventists.

And so then the second weekend we had 1, 100, the third weekend we had 1, 250, and then the fourth weekend we had over 1, 400 people.

We had to close the doors and we had to live stream it to the church down the street.

And the interesting thing about it was is we did the same things there that we've done every other place.

And I began to really think about what was the difference?

And our prayer ministry for that particular meeting was the most engaged and the most intense prayer ministry that I had ever participated in, in preparation for Evangelistic Series.

And to just illustrate that, there was a man that came to that series of meetings.

And when Ricky came in, Ricky is 1 of those people quite eccentric and he was a hugger.

You know, we'd see he'd hug you, even if he didn't know you.

And I met Ricky on that opening night and he hugged me and it was very evident from the aromas coming from him that Ricky had some very serious addiction issues.

I didn't know how serious those addiction issues were but it was very very evident And I'll be very vulnerable with you and admit to you, when I met Ricky and I got done talking to Ricky, I said, I'm probably not going to see Ricky again.

He's going to be 1 of those guys that doesn't come back.

And miraculously, Ricky came back night after night.

And in our Evangelistic series, on 1 of the nights where I make an appeal to give your life to Jesus, after that meeting we invite people to an addiction recovery session where I give some very basic and simple things.

Little did I know that behind the scenes, Ricky was dealing with an addiction, not only to drugs and alcohol, but Ricky was addicted to crack.

And if you know anything about drugs, crack is virtually impossible to come off of on your own.

But then what was really, really interesting, and 1 of you was asking me a question about, you have a family member and, what do you do about some of, some of the lifestyle issues in Adventism.

Well, Ricky was pierced in about every part of your body that you could pierce and probably in places that shouldn't be pierced.

Well, none of them should be, but nevertheless.

1 night, Ricky came and he said to 1 of the local pastors, he said, Listen, I think God spoke to me last night.

I'm not trying to be funny, but when somebody that's coming off of drugs says that to you, you get ready because you may get something very interesting.

But then Ricky said this, Ricky said, God spoke to me last night and he said, Ricky, you need to get rid of all your bling, which slang term for all your jewelry and adornment.

And then he looked at the pastor and he says, do you think that was really God speaking to me?

I'm going to say 2 things that I think, 1 a clarifier and the other a principle.

That doesn't mean that you don't talk about these issues, but realize it is the Holy Spirit that does the work of convicting.

And I shared with you that in that Calgary meeting we spent a significant amount of money and we baptized 47 people which if you just do raw numbers you would have said that was not a great investment.

But then I shared with you the other day, over the course of the next 6 to 9 months, they baptized another 120 people as a direct result of those meetings.

And then we went back a year later and 98% of those people were still there.

And we went back a year later and 98% of those people were still there.

Because we didn't twist anyone's arm to get them into the baptistry.

Unfortunately, in evangelism, sometimes we talk about technique.

And what we do is we try to take sales techniques and baptize them and say this is gospel ministry.

We need to allow the Holy Spirit to work with people.

We have to understand that when we do an evangelistic series, it's 5 weeks long.

And while that may seem like forever for many of us who have been to several evangelistic series, that's not that long.

And you're asking people to change their core beliefs, what they eat, what they wear, how they live, the day off they take, and fill in the blank.

So when we get to the end of a meeting and we don't baptize anybody, we only only baptize 1 person, don't walk away saying, oh this doesn't work.

No, it's not that it doesn't work, it's that God was working with that 1 person and they were ready then.

And this is another, and I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, but also you're going to connect with people at an evangelistic series.

And if we truly are people who care about other people, When the evangelistic series is over and they choose not to be baptized, maintain that friendship that you have developed because it actually demonstrates that you care.

When I was doing a series of meetings in Kelowna, British Columbia, Kelowna is a very interesting area.

It's where a lot of retirees are, and then there's this very up-and-coming, young, kind of yuppie crowd.

But it is an evangelistic series where I've never had more heroin addicts in attendance.

And there was this young lady attending that meeting.

She was riding her bike 28 miles 1 way to come to the evangelistic series.

Her father, who was not a Seventh-day Adventist, but got a brochure in the mail, told his daughter, who was addicted to heroin, I'll give you $500 if you attend at least 15 nights of this series of meetings.

Somebody, you know, and it was, and but here's what happened.

She connected with a couple of the members there and these members were giving her rides and she had a relapse in the midst of the meetings.

And praise the Lord that these members didn't just wash their hands of this heroin addict but continued to follow up, continued to visit with her.

And so Ellen White uses this big word disinterested benevolence.

I'm gonna be kind to you without any expectation that you will reciprocate that.

But when we have any sort of evangelism, cooking schools, an evangelistic meeting, a grief recovery program, a fill-in-the-blank, whatever you're doing, and we what we often are not, I mean, we're good examples of what I would call conditional love, conditional relationship.

As long as you keep coming, I'll stay connected with you.

And I just have news for you, people see through that like that.

We have to just it's not and even to say we have to it sounds we should want to genuinely care about people no matter what their particular denomination of choice happens to be.

And by the way that goes for people that fall away.

Okay So yesterday I talked about 1 of the challenges we face in the Adventist Church is missing members.

Do you know what the number 1 reason why we have missing members?

Okay, so that's interesting, that's interesting, That's certainly, it's on the list, but it's not the number 1 reason.

I'll tell you what, the number 1 reason is not.

The number 1 reason that people, Actually, the number 1 reason is, is that they slipped away and for 40% of them, no 1 ever called.

And I'll use the church that I currently pastor if I use those numbers Battle Creek Tabernacle right now has 800 people on the books and Because we have a zomi group the zomi group I'm gonna count them because they're all members of our church the zomi group have about a hundred in attendance and the Tabernacle has about 200 in attendance.

It's a group within the Burmese community.

That means we have 500 people that are not in attendance that are on the books.

Back to Menu

Series

Preparing Your Church for Evangelism

04 What are the Challenges?, Part 02

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Other Teachings in Series

01 What is the Church? How Do I Fit In?, Part 01

1h 4m

02 What is the Church? How Do I Fit In?, Part 02

1h 1m

03 What are the Challenges?, Part 01

1h

04 What are the Challenges?, Part 02

1h

05 Practical Solutions for Church Growth, Part 01

1h

06 Practical Solutions for Church Growth, Part 02

57m

Sound Doctrine