Whatever your business or profession, it’s possible to harness the platform you already have to begin sharing Christ in the marketplace. Learn how in this informative, inspiring seminar by someone who has been doing it for decades in the largely secular Czech Republic. 

ASI 2013: It's Time... To Be About Our Father's Business

<p>Whatever your business or profession, it’s possible to harness the platform you already have to begin sharing Christ in the marketplace. Learn how in this informative, inspiring seminar by someone who has been doing it for decades in the largely secular Czech Republic. </p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

ASI 2013 Seminar: Business & Nonprofit

Barbara Taylor

Witnessing Made Simple

Well today I want to share with you some simple yet effective ways of sharing Christ in your marketplace, in your home, in your community, in your business, place of business, in your church, and through evangelism.

When I first joined ASI, it was approximately 21 years ago.

And when I first came to ASI, I was amazed as I walked through the exhibits and I saw all these unbelievable simple yet effective witnessing tools that all these booths had and I thought you know we need to do a book.

Now this was approximately 4 or 5 years ago when I finally got the idea we need to make a book of witnessing tools, simple fun witnessing tools that people can share in their church.

When they go back home they can take it to their person who's in charge of their evangelism in their church, and they can also share it with their friends in their church so that they will be excited about sharing Christ.

I've been in the business world all of my life.

My background is in sales and marketing, and I hope this morning I will be giving you a motivational talk, because in my background in sales and marketing, I used to go to various companies and various organizations, and I would get people excited about selling and telling about their merchandise and their products.

So, what I want you to know this morning is we want you to walk away being motivated and excited about sharing Christ.

Our witnessing and our working go hand in hand.

We don't go to work and we don't stop what we're doing and say, I guess it's time for me to be a witness.

We're breathing in and breathing out the good news of the gospel.

So every time when we share Christ, it's a continual sharing, whatever our lifestyle may be.

The great gospel commission says, go ye into all the world.

But my text that I like better is Mark 5, 19, where it says, go home and tell your friends what great things the Lord has done for you and I think that's where it all begins once we start sharing what great things God has done for us, we will become excited.

So before we begin, I would like you to bow your heads as we pray.

Our great, kind, heavenly Father, we thank you this morning for the opportunity that you give us to be a good witness, to be an excited witness, to be a joyful witness for you.

We pray that as I share these ideas and witnessing tools that you will help us through your Holy Spirit to become enthused and excited about the great opportunity of sharing the good news of the gospel.

I'm going to be correlating some of my business ideas and tie those in with our witnessing tools.

During my various business careers I developed a philosophy called simple.

Simple in our business is having strength, imagination, Motivation, perseverance, listening, and enthusiasm.

There's also great simple techniques in showing and sharing Christ.

The sooner we learn it, the easier it becomes.

Sharing Christ can be difficult, but the more we love Jesus, the more easier it is to share the good news of the gospel.

Then it's important for us to take time to meditate on God's Word.

And 1 of the most important things is our prayer, our prayer life.

And everything we do when we're witnessing.

The first thing when I wake up is I get on my knees and I talk to the Lord and I say, Lord, today you know the people that need to know you and need to hear the good news of the gospel.

Help me to be a good witness to those people I come in contact with.

The love of loving others and then encouragement.

We'll be discussing each 1 of these as we go throughout the program.

You're gonna have a few anecdotes this morning.

It says, God never asks about our ability or our inability, just our availability.

Do we make ourselves open to the Holy Spirit?

Do we show others that we are Christians by just what we do and say?

How many times do you feel that the Holy Spirit is impressing upon you to do something, to say something to someone?

A lot of times people will come into my life and they'll tell me something that's been a tragedy or something that's happened in their life and the Holy Spirit is saying, Barbara say a kind word to that person, say something to encourage that person.

And I'm busy, I'm working, I have a lot of things to do and I think, oh, 0 yeah, well, and sometimes I miss the most wonderful opportunities to share with others because I don't take the impression that the Holy Spirit has given me and share that with the people.

Now well-known Christian author Ellen White said, pass out our leaves of autumn, our literature like the leaves of autumn.

Now, how many of you, when you leave home, take a little witnessing tool in your briefcase, in your purse, in your business suit, or any way that you're going to share for that day.

I always tell myself when I get up, be sure to put my little witnessing tools.

Now I've asked Nelson to become a little side speaker here today.

But 1 of the things that I put in my purse every day is a little glow track.

The other thing I obviously have in my purse are my business cards.

Now you're going to see my business card up there in a minute, but on this side is my business card, and it says, Between You and Me Designs.

I have men's sportswear, wholesale to retail.

So I have Between You and Me Designs, Barbara Taylor, president.

And then on the back, I have this little amazing facts witnessing card that says bibleuniverse.com.

When I go to these different countries, the first thing people want to know is English.

Even in Hong Kong and anywhere that I go, China, anywhere, people want to learn English.

So they go to this little website and they think they're going to learn English.

Well, they're going to learn a lot more, aren't they?

So we want to tell people about the good news of the gospel.

But Sister White says, take these little leaves of autumn and leaves of witnessing and spread them like the leaves of autumn.

We can also have review and herald booklets.

This is by the way, this is the business card on the back of my business card put a little this spiritual message also on a business card that's another nice thing to put on it Bible info.com are you familiar with Bible info.com Bible info.com has wonderful CDs in 16 different languages which includes Bible software and a nice bookmark telling where you can find this information.

You can also take small books from the Voice of Prophecy or It Is Written.

You can have amazing facts, the quiet hour, and of course, glow tracks.

So let's talk a few places, where do we want to leave these leaves of autumn?

Now this is just a small example, but you can leave these in a doctor's, dentist's waiting room.

You can put them in an airport, trains, or bus terminals.

You can put them in stores, malls, laundromats, gyms.

When you check out of this hotel, be sure to put a witnessing tool.

And remember, do it in both English and Spanish because a tremendous amount of people that work in our service facilities speak other languages.

So it's important to take English and Spanish with you.

Beauty, barber shops, spas, gyms, company break rooms, and of course when you pay your waiter or waitress, be sure to leave a track with a nice, generous tip, because that's very, very important.

Now, I'm just going to ask Nelson to just take a few minutes.

I've asked him to speak for a few minutes and tell me a little bit.

I'll tell you, I've just been amazed when I hear all these wonderful ideas about the glow tracks and how the response has been.

So I want him to share some of the ideas he has with sharing the glow tracks, and then some of the testimonies of people.

And I don't know if you've already heard it, you may have heard it, but I want him to tell about the grill.

The grill, well, I'll tell you about the grill if he doesn't remember.

I think it was somebody from your association came and they had this track on hell.

Now this lady went into the store and she opened up an electric grill.

And what was sitting on top of the electric grill but myths about hell.

And she looked at that and she took it home and you know that she called Glo And she said, I had a son that just died.

And this was so important for me to hear the truth about hell.

Now this is a testimony that we just cannot believe how God works.

And she left that message on your message machine.

Now I don't know who told it but I heard it.

So I have to believe that that's 1 of the things.

So let's hear just a couple few minutes from Nelson about glow tracks.

You know that sounds like an amalgamation of 2 different stories put together, so I don't know.

If it is a story that I haven't heard, that'd be great.

Mike Hamblin

Top 10 Ways to Lose Your Tax Exempt Status

Our Father in heaven, I pray that you will bless our hearing this afternoon, bless our speaker that he will speak well, that we'll be able to hear what you are saying, particularly how it applies to our individual ministries.

Give us wisdom to hear what you're saying to us.

Thank you for this opportunity to learn and grow in your grace.

I practice law in Michigan, and I have a general business practice that includes helping nonprofits with various legal issues.

Today's topic is going to be 10 ways to lose your tax exempt status.

And this is a very important topic if you're working with non-profits or have a non-profit.

There are a number of different ways that you can sort of get tripped up when you're doing your administration work and wind up being in a position where you can lose your non-profit exemption, your federal tax exemption.

And a lot of these ways are much easier than you might think.

Some of them can just kind of arise from maybe being careless or not being totally informed about what the requirements are.

But once it happens, it puts you in a very difficult position.

And so that's why we're going to go over this and hopefully give you some good information.

The 1 thing that I want you to remember as we go through this, the point and my hope for this presentation is not that you're going to walk out of here and have, you know, the knowledge of tax law, which a lot of this is, to run your own non-profit from a tax standpoint, I'm going to just try to give you some basic issues to think about, some things to think about, so that when you go back to your place of work, you'll have some elementary knowledge that you can use to sort of confront these issues.

If you recognize any of these issues right now where you're sitting here and say, hey, that looks like something we're dealing with.

The last thing I would want you to do or ever advise is to try to handle it yourself.

If you recognize this either today or when you go back home, you say, oh, this reminds me of something we talked about in that seminar, The most important thing you can do is go get professional help.

These are not things that you want to try to handle on your own.

You want to find a tax professional, either a CPA or a tax attorney in your local jurisdiction.

If you're in California and you're having a non-profit issue, you need to hire somebody who is either a licensed CPA or a licensed attorney in California because a lot of these issues, as we'll see, have federal tax aspects to them, but they also have state law aspects to them, some of them, many of them do.

And so if you hire somebody that isn't licensed in your state where you live or do business, you could run the risk that you're not going to get the best advice, maybe they just don't know what your local requirements are, and then you're going to have even more problems.

So what I'd like to do is I'm hoping that you'll get enough information that you can take this, sort of spot issues, and then if you think that you have an issue, that you can go and hopefully use this to have an intelligent conversation with whoever is advising you to resolve what's going on.

And then the only other thing I'll say before I get into the presentation itself is we had a little bit of a snafu.

I had some outlines so that you could actually follow along with my PowerPoint presentation for whatever reason they haven't come through.

But if you would like to have a copy of my outline, I'll be happy to get it to you either by email or mail or whatever is most convenient for you.

So you can just let me know after the presentation.

I'll take down your contact info and send you an outline if you would like.

So what I think I would prefer to do is if you have a question, Maybe you could just note it, and then I'll try to leave some time at the end of the presentation to go over questions.

If we don't have enough time or there are too many questions, I'll commit to staying later and just, you know, having a word with you if that would work out.

But I think for the flow of the presentation, it's probably best if we just wait till the end and then have all the questions at that point.

Often what I'm asked when I talk about this is, why is this important?

I have a little non-profit, the IRS doesn't care about me, why am I worried about this?

And the answer is the IRS does care about you.

There's no non-profit that's too small to escape the scrutiny of the IRS.

And they're the main organization that oversees the compliance of non-profits with the tax law and the tax code.

And so in the United States, there are approximately 2 million exempt organizations.

And every year, 100 organizations, and I'm going to call them 501c3 organizations, because that's the most common nonprofit organization that you see registered under the tax code.

Approximately 100 of those organizations lose their tax exempt status every year.

And it's kind of like a lightning strike or a shark attack.

You think, well, 100 out of 2 million, that's never going to happen to me.

But if it happens to you, then it becomes important.

And it can happen, depending on how you administer your nonprofit.

And the reason why it becomes so important is your loss of exemption can be deadly for your nonprofit.

If you lose your exemption, you're going to have to file some tax forms, but that's the least of your worries.

The tax forms that you may have to file are regular corporate tax forms because the IRS is going to treat you as not being a for-profit entity.

They're going to consider you to be a for- or a non-profit entity.

They're going to consider you to be a for-profit entity.

So you may have to file a corporate income tax return.

Or if you're a trust, you may have to file a different form for trust.

But the worst part of it is you may have to pay penalties, excise taxes, income tax.

And even worse than that is if you lose your exemption, you're going to create problems for your donors.

Because number 1, it doesn't make for very good PR and your donor base if all of a sudden you've had your non-profit status revoked by the IRS.

And it can also cause some practical problems for your donors that can create ill will, because if your donor...

If you lose your tax-deductible status, obviously you can't receive tax-deductible donations.

If you can't solicit tax-deductible donations, maybe your donor base isn't going to be as willing to donate.

You're not going to be able to be identified in the IRS master file extract as able to receive tax-deductible contributions.

So you're going to be publicly identified as not being able to receive these sort of deductions or deductible contributions.

And then you're not going to be able to be included in Publication 78, which is basically a list of all nonprofits that are able to receive tax deductible donations.

You can Then try to get your tax exempt status back, but that can be very difficult because you have to refile your original tax exempt application, which is called a Form 1023.

I don't know if anybody here has ever filled out 1 of those forms.

If you've ever had to work on 1 of those forms, they're not easy.

It can be somewhat expensive to have a professional help you.

It's something you really only want to do once if you have to.

You're going to have to refile that form and go through that process all over again.

You can ask for retroactive reinstatement when you file your new application, but you're still going to have to deal with the IRS, and maybe you get it, maybe you don't.

What I was alluding to earlier is, with problems with your donor base, sometimes you may have a timing issue where somebody writes a check and sends it in, thinking that they're going to get a tax deductible contribution.

And maybe you haven't been able to advise everybody that you're no longer able to accept them.

So you might have hard feelings if somebody sends in a check and thinks that they're getting a tax deduction and then later they're told they're not.

If they're unaware, if your donor's unaware that you've had your exempt status revoked, they can claim a deduction only until the IRS publishes an announcement and it's auto revocation list.

So if they get it in before then they can still claim a deduction, but if they get it in after it's been published, they're not going to be able to claim a deduction.

Basically, charities and nonprofit organizations are coming under increased scrutiny by the IRS.

And so from 2009, or in the year 2009, they had a 30% increase in audits of charities and non-profits.

2010, they had an additional 12% increase.

So it wasn't as big as 2009, but it's still a double-digit increase.

Radim Passer

Using Your Business Platform for Evangelism

Grace and peace to you from our God and Lord Jesus Christ.

It's my big privilege to be here with you.

And ASI, it's always, I am calling it, recharging my spiritual battery every year.

Of course, you will hear next 75 minutes my not pure, but poor English.

But I believe you will be able to understand.

And that's why is here Rene, because otherwise I would have to switch on Czech, and it would be even worse.

I accepted Lord Jesus Christ 15 years ago in 1998 and I considered accepting Jesus in my life as the best decision in my life.

It was not easy conversion because I lost my firstborn son, but God changed this tragedy into the blessings.

And Holy Spirit leaded me to read the Bible, to read the spirit of prophecy, and very soon to became a Seventh-day Adventist.

And it leaded me to the desire to share Jesus with others, because at the end this is the only 1 job which results we can see in the heaven.

I consider my job as a real estate developer as a part of my ministry, part of my mission.

Because as a Christian, we know that 100% what we have belongs to Jesus.

We are a very specific developer, because we are working just in Prague, Czech Republic, and not only in Prague, but even only in some specific place in Prague.

We are working as a, let's say, urban developer.

We're developing a small city in the city.

And the name of the project is BB Centrum.

BB Centrum, so far in the last 10 years, is the largest business park in the Czech Republic.

15 years ago, we finished the first building.

Today, There are about 15 buildings with 2 million square feet and working environment for approximately more than 10, 000 people.

Maybe I would mention 1 of the flagship of the business park.

There was so small story behind the name of the project, because Jesus' letter to Philadelphia in chapter 3 from Revelation is my favorite.

And of course, because it's a description of the Advent movement in 19th century.

And even the people can learn from the history of this building something about the history of the God's church and time.

Sometimes 2001, 2002, You can see the pictures now.

And we had some ideas how to finish the whole business park.

And 1 of the ideas coming more and more often to my mind, and it was to build a church as the most important part of the whole business park.

We had to wait some time for planning process, approval process, and then to build the building.

10 years ago I came to my first ASI convention in Albuquerque in 2003.

And 3 years later, 2006, I had my first interview here with Debbie Young.

And at that time, I mentioned also something about our vision in our business in Prague, Czech Republic.

And we mentioned our ideas to build the Seventh-day Adventist Church, the kindergarten, and the Seventh-day Adventist elementary school, and the vegetarian restaurant.

And I'm grateful to God that several years later, all these ideas were fulfilled.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church is probably the smallest building in the whole business park, but the most important.

Of course, as a Christian businessman, I understand the most important is to reach out to people for Christ.

And it was the idea of all our activities in the BB Center, to share with people the Adventist message, to get people for Christ, but not only to get them, but to serve others.

Series

ASI 2013 Seminar: Business & Nonprofit

Using Your Business Platform for Evangelism

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Personal Evangelism

The Stones Cry Out

1h 7m

The History and Role of Outpost Ministries

1h 11m

ASI 2009 Plenary Meetings

ASI Members in Action

1h 58m

Personal Evangelism 2

IMPACT’ing Your Country for Christ: How to Run an IMPACT Week

2h 15m

The State of Missions in Adventism

The Bible on Missions

23m

Plenary

Looking Back, Moving Forward

2h 4m

Jesus An Unsurpassed Leader

45m

GYC 2008 Plenary Sessions

From Business to Ministry

40m

Preparing for the Overwhelming Surprise

57m

The Life of a Rich Man without Money

1h 5m

Mission Possible!

5. Introduction into Public Campus Ministry

1h 11m

Seminars

Three Types of Churches

1h 23m

Sound Doctrine