GYC SE 2012: Ultimate Purpose

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GYC Southeast

GYC SE 2012 Seminar: Education

Randy Siebold

End-time Education, Part 1

Father in heaven, I thank you for the opportunity to meet together here.

I pray Lord that as we spend a few moments looking at and talking about education, especially in these end times, Father, we pray for your spirit to be here and to teach us.

We know, Lord, that you are our teacher, and we pray that your wisdom would be the 1 to guide us, to give us the wisdom we need.

And Lord, that we ask that you live out through us.

Lord, please hide me in this presentation and may you speak.

May you gain honor and glory because of us being here today.

And Lord, I pray that the truth of where you want to see education in this world today will be delivered with a clarity that only you can deliver it, Lord.

To each heart, may we open our hearts to your Holy Spirit today.

Well, glad you're here and glad we got the technology working.

And I want to tell you just a little bit about my background and maybe that will help you understand why I'm in education.

Now, what I've learned through the years is that education is not 1 of the big hot topics.

When you go to a church, when someone, some big name speaker is coming to speak and everybody comes to hear it, they're likely not gonna be speaking on education.

Nedley and I went to 3ABN, we had 1 of those Thursday evening live programs.

And so it was gonna be half on education, half on health.

We had some conversation about health questions and then some conversation about education and then they open up the phone lines for everyone to call in.

And so all of the phone calls centered around 1 of the 2 topics, health or education.

When you're dealing with health, I have an issue, I need help now, please help me.

When we deal with education, we're dealing with a long-term solution to a problem that can't be fixed with short-term issues.

And so, I have, my assumption is there could be someone here saying, you know, why education?

Well, what I'll do is I'll start back just a little ways when I was a child.

And I was raised in what I would call an ex-Adventist home.

My parents were raised with Adventist mothers and non-Adventist fathers, both of my parents, and went through Adventist schools up and through high school.

And so I was raised in this Adventist home.

Now, they didn't always have the best experience in Adventist education.

And so they, for some reason, put me into a public grade school.

And so my parents weren't active in the church.

Anyway, this is how I was raised, and just to help you get an understanding of my brain.

By the way, My folks are now active Adventists, and I praise the Lord because of that.

By the way, they met through a school called Broadview Academy.

And so when I got and graduated eighth grade, My parents said, you're going to Broadview Academy.

They met in Academy, so they're going to send me to Academy.

Anyway, I met my wife at Adventist summer camp.

It's this summer camp romance now going on 30 years.

Alright, so we went to Broadview Academy.

When I got to Broadview Academy, they took away my mood ring.

I had this little ring that, and I'm like, what is that?

It's supposed to tell me what kind of mood I'm in or something.

And I was very, very fascinated by this God that they were picturing.

And I had went to Sabbath school a few times with my grandparents and a few times with the church, and my parents would occasionally go.

But Honestly, when I went to Broadview Academy, I stepped in the door and I had no desire for God in my life.

And at Broadview Academy, I came to recognize a Jesus that I had never known.

And praise the Lord, been vegetarian ever since.

Other than that piece of meat that my mom gave me before I told her.

I just, I thought my parents weren't gonna be happy about my decisions, which is, you know, as I look back now, it doesn't make any sense.

They send me to Broadview Academy, and I wanna be baptized, and they should be upset about that, but I thought they were.

I just, In my little world, I was like, oh no, my parents are not going to be happy with this.

I'm going to turn vegetarian, it's going to change the way they eat and stuff.

So what I recognize is that Adventist education profoundly changed my life.

It seriously made a change where I was going.

And I praise God for Adventist education.

Now I say that because I'm going to share some things over these next seminars that could make someone think that I don't like Adventist education, okay?

Because what I'm gonna do is I wanna hold up, I wanna hold up a standard that God has that we have not achieved yet.

Because I don't want to be confused that I'm not a supporter of Adventist education.

In fact, that's why I'm here, because I love Adventist education so much.

Because I want Adventist education to get better, and better and better.

Now, I didn't immediately think, I need to go around speaking about Adventist education.

Now that I'm a baptized freshman, 14 years old, I wasn't running around lecturing about Adventist education.

I ended up finishing college at Andrews University.

I got married and started to have children and bought some houses and sold some houses and life went on.

What was fascinating to me was when I had just finished my master's degree in art and I got a job offering at Andrews University to go back and teach.

When I was in college, my dream job was to go back to Andrews University and teach photography.

Go talking about photography, something you love to do, You know, sort of on the creative, I have a creative bent to me, even though I wear a suit and don't look like it.

But anyway, I have this, I love to do creative things.

And so I get this job And I thought, you know, I probably should start reading the book, Education.

End-time Education, Part 2

Lord, we want to lift up our hearts to you.

We want to thank you for the things that you have taught us from so many different ways, from our parents and our families, and for those that have taken much time and devoted their lives to Adventist education.

We wanna thank you for the ministry of so many.

And we pray, Lord, that what we would do today as we spend some time together is uplift your name.

We pray, Lord, that what we do would be pleasing to you.

And I pray, Lord, that your spirit would be here because there's no sign of selfishness.

Not that we don't have a tendency to that, Father, but because we have a deep desire right now, right here, to learn from the Almighty God of heaven.

We wanna open up our hearts, And we would love to hear you speak to our hearts, Lord Jesus.

We talked a little bit about the goals of education, clarifying this distinction between education, which is big and broad and covers a whole lifespan, and schooling, which can just touch a narrow part of what we truly are interested in being educated about.

And so, what we want to do then is take a look at what sort of methods will reach the goal.

Now, you remember just a little bit ago, maybe I could go back here and redraw this to show that the goal to be educated, and then we have a method of education, which is our common approach that we call schools.

And schools is clearly not meeting God's design to be truly educated.

And so we're seeing that disconnect there.

So the question would come to my mind, well, then what methods would work, right?

If education Or if to really truly be educated and we're doing schools and that's not working, well Lord please tell us what we do.

And then where would we go to get true success.

Now hopefully that brings a quote to your mind that Jesus is the 1 to really understand education.

Christ's method alone will give true success.

The Savior mingled with men as 1 who desired their good.

He showed sympathy for them, ministered to their needs, won their confidence.

Then he bade them, follow me." We should do as Christ did.

Christ's method of education, his method of schooling, his method of training, helped his disciples achieve a true, well-balanced education.

So if we were going to take a look at Christ's method of education, let's take a look at Matthew chapter 4.

Now, I'm gonna ask you a really easy question.

Matthew chapter 5, the Beatitudes, that's packaged within 5, 6, and 7 called the Sermon on the Mount.

And while you're looking up Matthew chapter 4, let's just take in your Bibles and look at Matthew chapter 5 and how many of you have red letters in your Bible?

You notice where the red letters start in verse 3, is that where it is in your Bible?

I'd like you to take a look at something really fascinating.

And this says, the verse before the red letters.

And he opened his mouth and began to do what?

When Mark records this in Holy Scripture, the Sermon on the Mount is actually called a what?

And if you take a look and the Sermon on the Mount ends at the end of what chapter?

So we'll go to the end of Matthew 7 and you'll look at all the red letters and it comes down to the end and the verse after the red letters says this, that's verse 28.

The result was that when Jesus had finished these words, the multitudes were amazed at his teaching.

Scripture bookends the Sermon on the Mount as a teaching.

Scripture doesn't leave any doubt that this is a teaching.

When we start to understand education, when we start to understand what Jesus really did when he was teaching, you can look right here.

All right, so let's get back to Matthew chapter 4.

And they immediately left the boat and their father and followed him.

Yes, James and John right after Peter and Andrew.

So now Jesus in his first school has his first students.

And so immediately, and we're gonna start in verse 23, he dives right into his educational process.

In Matthew chapter 4, verse 23, and Jesus went about all Galilee.

First thing he did is he started traveling.

So let's take a look, here's the Sea of Galilee and the section that in the back of my Bible shows something like Galilee here.

Now as I remember doing some calculations, it's about 25 miles area here.

Now those, I thank you for those who are doing bicycles, that gets some good education.

Now by the way, you know my name is Randy Sebold.

And I know about a program called New Start.

What is our first, what's the first part of the verse here?

He had his disciples, he's got his first students and the first thing they do is, amen.

Got my students, he said, follow me, because I'm going somewhere.

He went about Galilee and he was teaching in their synagogues.

He was preaching the gospel of the kingdom.

He was healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.

So now we have him out walking, and by the way, I've heard from the New Start folks that walking is a great exercise.

In fact, they tell me, don't jog too much.

I love to walk, even when I'm up here talking.

End-time Education, Part 3

Father in heaven, I thank you for the opportunity to meet together to speak about education.

And I pray for each person in this room, Lord.

I pray that your message will meet them right where their need is.

And Lord, I pray that your Holy Spirit would be welcomed in our hearts.

We wanna do that Lord, together collectively.

And we wanna recognize that you are our teacher.

And I pray, Lord, that what we do in this session will be exactly what you would have us talk about, and Lord, that you may be glorified in all that we do.

Well, I'll try to give a short summary of the first 2.

And I have a deep passion for Adventist education.

It was in academy that I came to know the Lord Jesus, was baptized and recognized Jesus as a friend instead of someone that wanted to get me.

And I have such a deep passion for education that I want to help change it to make it better and better and better.

So if I speak anything critical about where Adventist education is, it's because I'm speaking about me.

My name's Randy Sebald, and I'm excited to be at a place where the mission of the institution is to march closer and closer to God's ideals.

And I want to contextualize my position at Weimar and I hope this doesn't come to a surprise to anybody that works with me at Weimar, but my passion is not to make Weimar a great school.

I want all Adventist education to be great.

And so I think Adventist higher education could use some schools that implement the model, and I wanna help with 1 of those.

So that's why I'm at Weimar, and hopefully we do it in such a way that doesn't alienate other schools but actually helps them learn from the things that we've done.

So if I, I'm going to talk about Adventist education and so because I'm going to draw a distinct difference between where God wants us to be and where we are now, some people might interpret that as being critical of Seventh-day Adventist education.

And I just want you to know from just my innermost recesses of my heart, I want Adventist education to do great things.

I want it to reach the heights that God designed it.

And I believe that if I went out and talked with a bunch of Adventist leadership that it would be helpful.

But I believe if I talked with a bunch of young people, it would be even more helpful.

Because young people, you know 1 thing great about young people?

And if we need schools like this, and if I'm paying for Adventist education, then by the way, Mr.

Chancellor, you said you're doing Adventist education and here's Adventist education.

This is what she says, this is what we should be doing.

What if a bunch of young people got together and went up to their president and said, let's change what we're doing here because the Lord's servants said we need to be doing it differently.

If a bunch of Weimar College young people came up and said, listen, we need to be doing things differently because she says so.

So We want the barriers to be taken down.

We want the Lord's will to be done in our schools.

If we do that, we'll be recognized by the world as an amazing school, because they recognize they're having major problems.

So, we talked about how they're, we finished off the last presentation talking about some of the media that's been produced now talking about how Adventist education needs to, or public education needs to be changed.

And so, 1 thing that's been really fascinating is that there is a real live happening changes.

You know, when I first started, when I graduated from my doctoral program, it was in the year 2000.

And In the year 2000, the internet was out, but there wasn't a lot of online learning stuff.

And some of our colleges said, oh, we're behind on distance education.

And so I came back from my doctoral work and actually helped to start the distance education program at Andrews, and so that was 1 of my big jobs.

And so it was a recognition that I was looking for different programs.

And what's happened now 12 years later is we're in a massively different world in higher education.

For 1 thing, based on, they know they need to change.

You know, a higher education is losing funding.

They know they need to do things differently.

To run a college is a very expensive thing to do.

It must be very expensive because we're paying a lot of money, right?

We could buy a car every year and a very nice car every year or we could go to college.

So what I have recognized, at least for me, what used to be the future has now arrived.

You have this young guy trying to help out his nephews, I think, and does some online stuff.

He puts it on YouTube and a few teachers say it and they go, hey, this is pretty interesting.

And so, all of a sudden, there's a bunch of this content out there.

This 1 teacher who's kind of got a cute sense of humor, and he's a pretty smart guy, and he studies a lot of stuff, and he shares it in a really interesting way.

And so All of these, now there's teachers that are using it, and Bill Gates is given money to help him develop this, and so there's a whole back-end system for schools to use and teachers to track students' progress.

And I mean, it's revolutionizing what's being done in education.

Although I have to admit my daughter, who is, was 27 this summer, studying for MCAT kept going back to Khan Academy to learn about some of the stuff she's trying to study for, for the entrance into medical school.

So, you know, I mean, it's just not limited to K-12 education.

It's a program, and I don't wanna get into a lot of details about it, but it's a program that's designed to give online education or online classes.

And the strategy is that rather than take people all the way through degrees, they're taking them into these certificates, and then they're connecting the people who take these classes and do well with employers.

And so they've switched up their business model.

And so what they said is students are free, and if a business wants to connect with 1 of our students, we charge you.

So they're running a totally different business model on education.

So that means you go online, you can go through their classes free.

I mean, MIT and Harvard and Berkeley are taking content from their classes and putting it online.

You have college level content from multiple colleges, you can listen to it as if you're right there in the class.

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GYC SE 2012 Seminar: Education

End-time Education, Part 1

Transcript

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