I want to share with you the greatest danger regarding the issue of ordaining women that is swirling around the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
The greatest danger is not…
By ordaining women we will be opening the door to LGBT clergy. Yes, this is really an argument that is out there I have seen it with my own two eyes. I would say the vast majority of Seventh-day Adventists, even those that believe in ordaining women still hold to the truth that marriage is between a man & a woman. So this is not the greatest danger.
By ordaining women in North America we will alienate the world church, thus causing a great schism. The same countries that are against the ordination of women pastors are also against the ordination of women deacons and women elders. But to the credit of the world church they respect sticking with the denomination even when they don’t agree with all “her” rules, much better than some of us in my part of the world. So if we haven’t alienated them already, I highly doubt this issue will, no matter what the hyperbole is to the contrary. So this is not the greatest danger.
By ordaining women in North America we are embracing the feminist movement. NO! Why does a desire to have God’s calling recognized by the body of Christ have to signal an embrace of feminism? That is a sexist position. This is not the greatest danger of women’s ordination.
By ordaining women we are somehow promoting women to leave home and not be mothers as God called them to be. 75% of women participate in the labor force in the United States, making a choice to ordain women will not suddenly cause those other 25% to jump into ministry and abandon their families. Women work and women will become pastors with or without ordination. I’ve never heard one girl I know say, “well I was thinking of going into ministry, but since they don’t ordain me I’m going to stay home and have kids.” This is not the greatest danger of ordaining women.
By ordaining women we are opening the doors to the agenda of the liberal wing of the church. I’m 100% for women’s ordination and I would not consider myself a liberal (though maybe just by making that statement some of you are saying “yes you are” Trust me the liberals I know don’t agree with you:)) I want our church to be more conservative: To return to focusing on public proclamation of our foundational truths. To return to having it be a reality that the majority of SDA’s are vegetarians:) and believers in the prophetic ministry of Ellen G. White. I could go on, but the point is, I still think women should be ordained because it has nothing to do with liberal or conservative. It has to do with affirming those that God calls on an equal setting. This is not the greatest danger.
By NOT ordaining women we will completely turn off an entire generation! WRONG! My generation is already turned off and it has very little to do with the fact that we haven’t ordained women. Yes, many of us are bothered by this, but I don’t think this will cause a mass exodus from our church. Not anymore mass than has already occured. This is not the greatest danger of NOT ordaining women.
By NOT ordaining women we will miss out on some of the giftings that God has given to the church. REALLY? Doesn’t this limit God a little? Ellen White is the perfect example of if God wants to use a woman’s gifts, He’ll use a woman’s gifts! This is not the greatest danger of NOT ordaining women.
By NOT ordaining women we will not see revival. With great deference to my mentor, this is also a position I am not willing to take, because again it limits God to having His divine will being modified by the action of a committee. This is not the greatest danger of NOT ordaining women.
The GREATEST DANGER in regards to the ordination of women is that Satan will keep us talking about it to each other and in the meantime we won’t be talking about what we need to be talking about to those whom we need to be talking to: Telling a lost world about JESUS!
That is not a 10k race…for those runner friends out there. I am writing of 10k as in 10,000, & the 1 is representative of 1 church.
We need 1 church for every 10,000 people, to be precise we need 1 church of 200 active members for every 10,000 people. This is the conclusion many have come to, including those in the North Pacific Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. Why? Well let the folks at NPUC explain:
“A typical church of 200 active members will impact a maximum of 10k people (200 members x 50 contacts = 10k if there is no overlap).”
Now let me throw in this caveat that I believe to be absolutely 100% truth, and definitely verifiable through the stories of scripture. God could reach everyone with just 1 person. I don’t know how, but He could do it. And although that is true that is not the way God seems to work. In fact He seems to work in the way we would typically think of working, at least when it comes to numbers.
More people reach more people!
“The harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.” –Matthew 9:37-38
The idea is MORE laborers MORE reaping!
So yes God could reach everyone with just 1 person, but He has chosen to use people and to call for more people to help Him in reaching everyone. Which is the very reason why the statistic above is significant. For a church to truly impact 10,000 people it must have 200 soul winners, engaged members in its midst.
In most communities where there is an Adventist church of 500 or more folk will often ask, “Why do we need another church?” It doesn’t matter if the city is 20,000, 50,000, or 100,000+. A church of 500 or more is usually quite satisfactory to folk and again people ask, “Why do we need another church?” How do I know this? Because we have recently started another church (in my mind it is a campus, but to the community it is another church) The Ark a Seventh-day Adventist Christian Church, & because there is already a significant size church in our community, The Visalia Seventh-day Adventist Church, (740 members and growing) I have heard many times, “Why another church pastor?”
My answer is this:
Because 1 church cannot reach 125,000 people quick enough with the Adventist message (and yes I do believe in proselytizing) That is how many people there are in my city. Which would mean we need at least 12 churches of 200 soul winners to reach all 125,000+ people in our community.
What about in your community? How big is your city? Does your city have a population of 10,000 or more?
And if so…
Do you have an Adventist church? Are there 200 engaged–on fire, Jesus loving, people serving, Good News spreading–members in your church? Do you have enough churches & or enough members if your city is 20 thousand, 30 thousand, 40 thousand, 100,000, 500,000 people?
For most of you the answer will be NO!
How do I know? Because in the United States the mean size of a typical Adventist church is 215 members. That is good, except…there are only 4950 churches which in comparison to the population of the United States computes to just 1 church for every 63,267 people.
(Even if we took our total Adventist membership in the U.S. and divided it by 200 we would still only have 1 set of 200 people for every 58,900 people. Now probably wouldn’t be the right time to mention that only about half of all professed Adventists are “active” in their local churches right? Yeah that would be a much more dismal picture, so let’s at least let something be rose colored:)).
Back to our situation. In order to have 1 church for every 10k in the United States, we need 31,317 Adventist churches of at least 200 in the United States. So roughly, 26,350 more of our mean size (215) church.
So do we throw-up our hands and say impossible? Can’t be done? Do you remember that God that could reach everyone with just 1 that you were defending earlier when I was throwing-out numbers? Yes, He is still on the throne and He can very well do this! And He can very well do this through us!
Based on some quick adding and some quick math on my part. Let us state that there are about 750 churches with 300 members or more.
What if every church with at least 300 members, encouraged, taught, made a part of their culture, a membership tithe from the church. In other words if a church has 300 members they would ask 30 members to step out in faith and plant a church. If they have 400 members, 40, 500, 50…600 they plant two churches and send out two groups of 30.
What if a church such as Loma Linda University church made the decision to tithe their members. To call for 600 members to step out in faith and plant churches…what if they sent out 6 different teams of 100 to plant a church. 6 churches in 1 year. The same could be true for Pioneer Memorial Church, Pastor Dwight Nelson if he were to stand-up every year and teach every year his congregation to tithe themselves? Could they plant 3 churches of a 100 members every year? Why not? On faith they could!
Here is what I know about tithing financially. With an honest tithe I am never found in need! I believe the same would be true for our churches. If we stepped out in faith and said “we will not be satisfied with the inability to reach more people; we will not ignore the call to pray for more workers, we will actually send out more workers.”
If we were to do this, our churches would never be found wanting and the Adventist message would spread like wildfire!
Are you a Seventh-day Adventist believer? Then the above scenario is not something nice to throw around it is your calling!
“Upon ALL who believe, God has placed a burden of raising up churches.”
–Ellen G. White, Medical Ministry, p. 315
A few months ago I attended the Pacific Union Conference Ministerial Meetings in Ontario, CA.. While there I attended a seminar by Pastor Carlton Byrd has in the very near past become the speaker/director of Breath of Life Ministries and also just recently became the new Senior Pastor of the Oakwood University Seventh-day Adventist Church in Hunstville, Alabama.
I attended the seminar because I wanted to learn from Pastor Byrd, not about preaching, which he is a great preacher, but about how wherever he has gone his churches has grown (yes I know part of that has to do with great preaching)? I believe it was last year at the church he is now transferring from Berean Church that they baptized 800 folk. Their membership is now 4077 people, they have three sevices, they have a closed circuit feed into their basement for the overflow of folk, and all of this without being attached to a Seventh-day Adventist school of higher education (in the United States our mega-churches have typically only existed next to our colleges).
So I was curious…people come to your church for great preaching, but 800 in one year don’t get baptized without first of all the Spirit of God, but secondly some intentionality.
The following are the notes I took. I didn’t edit them or pick and choose what I thought was great or not. I am simply sharing with you the thoughts I wrote down from him in this seminar.
“I’ve never had a vision for ministry I could afford; If I did, it wouldn’t be from God.”
“Do good (pardon my English) just to do good and God will bless you.”
“If worship is to contribute to the growth of your church, three things must be true:
“The greatest advertisement for your church is word of mouth.”
“Intentional careful selection of parking supervisors, greeters, ushers, and worship leaders must be done!”
“Don’t let people box you in!”
“Sabbath needs to be a celebration!”
“We can’t do music just to please older generation.”
“We’ve kept our hymnals but lost our children.”
“Should the church be held hostage over someone picking at the instruments? NO!”
“The Senior Pastor should be involved in decision of what songs we are going to do.”
“Singers sing, preachers preach. Don’t let your singers get up there and think they can preach a sermon or share something they think is just so wonderful. They are there to sing.”
“Don’t let your minister of music say, ‘I am running this (worship). LET’S BE CLEAR, there is ONE leader! If there were multiple leaders in Israel the children would still be slaves in Egypt. God gives the vision of the ministry to the leader and it is not a compromise of your idea and my idea.”
Evangelistic Outreach:
“An evangelistic cycle throughout the year with good worship, a friendly environment, and strong leadership will grow.”
“Build database from EVERYTHING done at or through your church. I have over 8,000 names in our database that are not members but have attended one of our events.”
“Send communication by Monday to every visitor within two days of their visit.”
A Bible Workers work six weeks before the evangelistic meetings:
“When folk come to our public campaigns and become interested or are baptized they are assigned a Spiritual Guardian. We don’t want to just baptize people, we also want to keep them. We don’t want people going out the back door where we wouldn’t notice, especially in our large church.”
“Singers sing & preachers preach” (seriously he said it again, must be a pet peeve)
Typical length of meetings 2 weeks 5 & 5
I always cover and usually go in this order:
“I always then do some special midweek. Why? I don’t want someone that just was convicted of the Sabbath or true church or something like that to then go back to their church and be discouraged from our message. I don’t want them at their old church I want them at Berean!”
“I do two to three public campaigns a year.”
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And those are my notes from Pastor Byrd. Some powerful stuff. He is a dynamic individual that beleives 100% in what he is doing and Whom he is serving!
So a few weeks ago I had a little rant against Adventists dropping the ball on some modern technology. Well, I am not taking that rant back, but I do want to promote a site that is trying to use the tools that are available to us to reach people and grow people in Jesus.
The site is: Adventist eBooks this site is from the Pacific Press Publishing Association. I mentioned it my RANT but I wanted to promote it again because as Doug Church, VP of Sales & Marketing stated so accurately,
“It is difficult to overstate the difficulty of “marketing to the Adventist Church.”
So let’s help this ministry out and market it! Go visit Adventist ebooks and then repost this blog post somewhere or share it on your twitter, Facebook, or Google+ page and we can help Pacific Press get the word out that we are moving into the 21st Century.
I already bought a book from them, “A God Named Desire” by Ty Gibson
Oh and for those of you that do read Kindle or Nook & also study the Sabbath School Quarterly you can also get the S.S. Quarterly each quarter in e-Format
If you haven’t heard Harold Camping is predicting that the end of the world will take place May 21…that is tomorrow in case you were wondering. Maybe as you are reading this for some of you Down Under. I wanted to take a moment to share a few thoughts I had regarding this prediction.
Harold Camping’s prediction and the prediction of William Miller in 1844 should not be seen in the same light. William Miller came to the wrong conclusion but the process by which he got to that conclusion is still in existence today within Adventism and without. Camping uses numerology to get to his conclusion, William Miller used a Bible based exegetical process.
That said, my second thought is that while William Miller’s methodology was more sound his prediction was still wrong! His prediction was wrong, just like Theudas in 44 AD and probably John Denton’s will be in 2034 A.D.. (There have been 242 known apocalypse predictions since the life of Jesus). We should never get caught up in predictions! God will come when God will come. Our only hope for being prepared is to live each day completely committed to Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour!
As Adventists I hope we would not mock Harold Camping, we should remember that in our history many of our forefathers were once confused as well! I have heard many folk comment about how stupid and foolish people must be to believe such claims. Was our church founded by stupid fools, or people that were sincere, just sincerely deceived? I believe that rather than mocking the followers of Camping we should pray that just as God led our founders to discover greater truth as they went back to their Bibles following “The Great Disappointment”, that the folk following Camping will in their disappointment do the same and come to a greater understanding and appreciation for the Word of God!
My friend Kessia Reyne Bennett tweeted the following: “Seems like so many people are insisting that heaven isn’t coming on May 21st but we haven’t stopped to ask why we’re so glad that it’s not.” I believe this statement is very thought provoking. I can think of only one reason that we should rejoice that Heaven isn’t broaching our solar system: Because it means we have more time to reach more people for Jesus. If this is not the reason you are glad that Heaven is not here, than there should be an examination of our heart. In all of us I believe there should be tinge of sadness each day that this world and it’s sin continues on! Probably something we rarely think about, but this world is not our home…and every day I am away from my earthly home I spend a moment thinking about my wife and my boys and wishing I was with them. Do we do that in regards to our heavenly home?
I believe people need to be careful. I like sports, and I like some sports talk radio. One of my favorites is Colin Cowherd. Well today I was very disappointed, Cowherd labeled his email inbox: the Judgement Day inbox. He was mocking what Camping was saying was going to take place. In the process of mocking Camping, which I don’t believe is right either, but they were truly mocking God. I think folk need to be careful, just because May 21st, 2011 may not be the day of judgement, a judgement day will come and folk will have to give an account of the words they spoke and did not speak, and the deeds they did and did not do.
These are some of my thoughts on this Sabbath evening. I look forward to worshiping our Lord tomorrow and I live with the knowledge of the truth, though I do not know the day or the hour “He who is coming will come and will not delay.” –Hebrews 10:37