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February 27, 2008

 

 

 



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In this Edition:
Video: India Literacy
To the Point
Editorial: Measuring Success
Book Review: Searching for the God of Grace
Resources & Ideas
Calendar of Events
To the Point:

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
 - Carl Jung

The shortness of time is urged as an incentive for us to seek righteousness and to make Christ our friend. This is not the great motive. It savors of selfishness. Is it necessary that the terrors of the day of God be held before us to compel us through fear to right action? This ought not to be. Jesus is attractive. He is full of love, mercy, and compassion. He proposes to be our friend, to walk with us through all the rough pathways of life.
 - EGW, R&H 8/2/1881

Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it.
  - Jane Wagner

I have enough money to last me the rest of my life, unless I buy something.
  - Jackie Mason

No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one.
  - Elbert Hubbard

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.
 - Harry S. Truman

Got a favorite quote? Send it to [email protected]
Thinking Aloud:
Measuring Success
by Loren Seibold, Best Practices editor
A conference leader said this to me: "We spend millions on evangelism in the NAD; we generate thousands of local meetings and a few big downlinks; and we report baptisms. But I keep looking for the non-immigrant church that in recent years has grown substantially and been transformed by evangelistic converts."
   
There are a few. (Bill McClendon's Tulsa, OK, church comes to mind). Immigrant churches, mostly Hispanic, have grown. But in American middle-class churches, durable evangelistic growth is the exception.

The visiting evangelist I had in my church years ago blamed me. "I baptized them. You failed to keep them," he said. We talk about this as the "back door" problem. But there's more to it than that.

I believe it has to do with how success is defined. What we hear about most is how many efforts are held. How big the evangelism offering at camp meeting. How many baptisms in a particular city. Only rarely do we measure the total impact on congregations. We take credit for starting a process, not for finishing it.

I wonder if all of this might be clarified by finding a new way of measuring success? Being a farmer, I know that you don't measure a harvest by how much seed you planted, nor even by how much you harvest from the field; you measure success after the grain is successfully stored away, sold and reinvested into the business.

It's easy to measure how much work we've done at the front end. How many meetings held, how many flyers distributed. The 30 baptized in the latest crusade makes a great picture in the union paper (even if half of them are gone by the time the picture comes out.) By those measures, we succeed. But thoughtful pastors have always been aware of the impact on our congregations. The cycle of baptizing and losing takes a toll.

How we define success tells us how we should go about our work. Perhaps holding everyone--pastors, evangelists, church-growth coordinators, even conference and union administrators--to the standard of how healthy our churches become through our outreach efforts would stimulate a new era of creativity in soul-winning. We would surely continue to use some of the same methods we use now, but they'd have to be part of a holistic, coordinated approach, in which opening church social boundaries and creating a positive community impact through service and involvement would be as important as delivering the doctrinal message.

Thoughts on a evangelism and healthy church growth? Write [email protected].

Cutting Edge Book
Searching for the God of Grace,
by Stuart Tyner


Point: Grace is both central to Christianity and Adventism, and any presentation of doctrine history or theology must be informed by it.

Key Word: Afraid. Grace in the unique context of Tyner's Adventist perspectives, and biography is the real difference in this book, and his own fear of the concept forms the central reason for his writing.

Pros: Tyner does a wonderful job of pulling together a wide variety of sources and weaving them into a very readable and enjoyable book that has the potential to transform your thinking. His wide use of Adventist sources including Ellen White is particularly helpful. If Pastor Tyner continues in this vein he has the potential to have the impact that Morris Venden had on the Adventist discussion of grace.

Why you should read it: This book is as eye opening as any you will read on the topic and holds in its pages many significant quotes and story elements that make it uniquely important to Adventist discussions of the topic.
--Review by Walter Groff
Resources, Reflections, Links and Ideas
by Best Practices Editor, Loren Seibold

  • Correction to a correction? From Monte Sahlin:"Loren, you did not make a mistake in your statement about our communication leaders discouraging the use of 'SDA' in favor of 'Adventist'. Instead, you've stumbled upon a problem in our system: two departments issuing somewhat contradictory guidelines. Any communication expert will tell you that the use of initials is troublesome; SDA is not a good way to label our denomination because it is so similar to LDS. At the same time, the legal office at the GC has pushed the idea of trademark as a way to discourage the use of the name by splinter groups. But it's largely a non-starter with the faithful in the pews and pastors on the front lines. In any case, no one should use this as an argument to hold onto SDA in regular usage."
  • Getting ready to die--again: In response to "estateplanning.pdf" referenced in the last issue, this from Dennis Yoshioko of Northern California Conference: "We do all of the documents recommended in the A.G. Edwards flyer, and many others. All the California conferences prepare trust documents for their constituents without charge, provided there is a "substantial gift" to the church at the end. We prepare wills and power of attorneys without any charge to our constituents." (Note: what trust directors are allowed to do differs depending on state laws.)
  • Resources:
    • From our own Signs of the Times: A column by John Rosemond about teenage boys and pornography--something we may be asked about more and more often.
    • I recently heard Dr. Fritz Guy (retired professor from LSU and LLU) give a presentation about why we should be modest about our theological knowledge. Excellent! Would make a good piece for a discussion group. Download his notes here.
  • Reading for pastors
  • Sermon of the Week: Anthony Campolo at Harvard Memorial Church. Good sermon for a political year. Includes characteristic Campolo wit: "The difference between an evangelical and a terrorist is that you can negotiate with a terrorist."
Got a tool, resource, site, article, idea or seminar that you like a lot? Share it with us at [email protected].
NAD Events
Do you have an SDA-sponsored event that you'd like to invite NAD pastors to? Tell us about it at [email protected].
NAD Church RESOURCE Center
Best Practices is an e-publication of Vervent
NAD CHURCH RESOURCE CENTER
Editor: Loren Seibold
Senior Pastor, Worthington Ohio Seventh-day Adventist Church