Updates on The Church of God

Well, good afternoon, everyone! Wonderful to see everybody here again. It's been a long time since I've been here with Bev, and it's good to see many familiar faces that we've known over the years. I haven't had a chance to talk to many of you before services, but hopefully afterwards we'll have a chance to talk. We've been very, very wonderfully hosted by Randy and Mary de Los Andros. And as he mentioned, I was privileged to perform their wedding on August 1st, 2004. In fact, I had their wedding pictures online. I did the wedding, but I also took a lot of pictures and posted them on the Internet.

This is before Facebook days, and I found them today. It was interesting to see them, to see a lot of people that I hadn't seen in a long, long time. But Randy has been a very good friend over the years, back to where we were before in the church, in the worldwide Church of God, and also his service in Detroit and now in Chicago.

And we're just very, very grateful for them being able to come from Detroit to this area. We've been expanding our ministry and moving our ministry around in different places. We have two new ministers that we've moved into the central Michigan area, but very grateful to have Randy be able to come here. I've known Mary for a long time. I know her family, her mother in particular. She is the wife now of Lloyd Nelson. Lloyd Nelson is someone that I've known from Minneapolis days for over 50 years, actually going back about 52 years or so. And his first wife, who was in her 30s, died of cancer.

That was one of the first deaths in the Minneapolis church, when the Minneapolis church was just getting going. And then a few months after that, my father died. He was 42 years old. He was just baptized six months before that. And so that was kind of an event in the church that was kind of hard on the church, hard for all of us, certainly. But then Lloyd Nelson was single for a number of years. And it so happened that when I graduated from Ambassador College, it was sent from the United Kingdom, from Brick and Wood, to serve in Sioux Falls.

We also served the Mankato church where Lloyd Nelson attended, so we got to know him quite well again. And then, after that, I was transferred to Minneapolis and became part of the Rochester church. There was Lloyd Nelson again. But we were very—he just keeps popping up all the time. He's in his 90s, 92, 93 years old, very wonderful person, married to Norma, and that is the mother of Mary. So we have certainly got to be connected with a family in that way.

Norma writes to me from time to time, and so does Lloyd Nelson, who still, I believe, puts out good news magazines. It's kind of a personal mission, as he did with the Plain Truth magazine, to put out copies of—it was a good news magazine, and now Beyond Today magazine. But one reason why we're passing through this area is that we're on the way to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Sioux Falls is where I began in the ministry 49 years ago.

I can hardly believe that. I hardly look 49, don't I? But 49 years ago, it was actually the first Sabbath after the Fourth of July, because I graduated in 1969, went to Israel for a couple of weeks, and then was assigned to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And I gave the very first sermonette ever at that time.

In fact, the first time I spoke in Sioux Falls, I gave an icebreaker to tell them all about my life. I was 21 years old. And I remember I went for eight minutes, and I hadn't spoken that long. Collegeably, the speeches were six to eight minutes. I spoke for eight minutes, and even the pastor I was working for says, you've got to say more than that in the other church in the afternoon.

He says, you've got to have more than just eight minutes that you tell the people about yourself. And so I was scribbling and scribbling in the car, and got up to 12 minutes for the Sioux Falls Church. But those were the areas where I began a long, long time ago. And one interesting fact is that the song leader for that very first service, Orly Wangsnes, that's in July of 1969, will be the song leader of their next Sabbath. Very much of a landmark event of 49 years. The church started the year before in 1968, and I was assigned there and also to Mankato.

And we had a Bible study in Rapid City, South Dakota, where the Mount Rushmore is. And we had people who came from all over Wyoming and Montana, Eastern Montana, to that Bible study. That's where I began the ministry. Our area was 1,000 miles long. And this was the last area in the United States that had no church designation to it. It went from the border of Yellowstone National Park to the Mississippi River. It was like one big pickle or cigar, if you want to put it, that stretched that way. And that's where I had begun. Anyway, it's very good to see all of you here. Last night we came to the dell'A'sandros, and I had a sermon prepared.

I had a sermon prepared about prayer. I was very, very certain about it. I thought that would be something that would be a very profitable sermon for all of us, because it's the subject we need to be reminded of, as the church, when it began in Pentecost, was assembling continually and they were constantly in prayer.

The church grew as many were added to the church, and they assembled in prayer. But as I was talking with Randy and Mary, we talked about the various things that we do in the church. In my job as the president now for going on six years, and the various things that we're involved with, with the major areas of the ministry, the media, the proclamation of the church.

I explained to him about some of what we're doing with the ministry, and these are things that are my day-to-day work. I mean, I come into work in the morning, and I'm continually involved with meetings, with planning, with discussion, with personnel matters, and so forth. And I take it in a sense for granted, this is what we do, this is the plans we have, and this is who we send where, and this is why we send them to the different places that we do.

These are the local churches, these are the elders in those churches that serve there, and he said, well, this is something that you might want to talk to the people about, you might want to talk to the church in Chicago about. Then we got to talking about some of the international activities that we're involved with. There's been a lot of very interesting developments that have taken place with our association, our contact, and relationships that we have with other groups overseas that perhaps aren't that widely spoken of or voiced abroad.

We have some very fascinating developments in Angola with thousands of Sabbath keepers, and I'll tell you a little bit about what they actually are doing with us, and what they have benefited from us, and how they have used the material we have. To now, a relationship that's developing with people that we've been working with in Ukraine for 25, actually going on 30 years that we've been friends with, that we've talked to, some of them coming very close to the very beliefs that we have, and mostly it's coming to the Holy Days. That's the big clinker, usually, with groups that we work with overseas and internationally.

The Holy Days. The Holy Days. That seems to be the linchpin and sort of the common denominator in the thing that's mostly neglected or not included in the fundamental belief structure of many Sabbatarian groups overseas.

And it seems like when they come to understanding the Holy Days, it kind of completes the whole complex of beliefs. In fact, the Worldwide Church of God basically was established on that fact from the Church of God's Seventh Day over the Holy Days. That was the big issue. When you talk to the old leaders from the Church of God's Seventh Day, when they talk about Herbert Armstrong, that's where the difference, and that's where the genesis was with the beginning of the Worldwide Church of God, or at that time the Radio Church of God, to what it became later, and what we have adopted and have become part of our standardized beliefs.

Sometimes we take them for granted. We also are working with a group in Misuram, India, that in the same way has adopted the Holy Days established in their beliefs and want to become associated with us. We've written them letters of friendship. We've written them letters from the Council of Velders itself, establishing a friendship and a brotherhood and a desire to work together. And finally, a group in Argentina, also, that has come to the same understanding. So we have these various people now who believe, in essence, the things that we do believe.

Their understanding of the Roman holidays, why we don't keep them, and their understanding about what happens after death. You know, that death is not going to heaven. It's being asleep until the resurrection. The use of the cross and all the things that we believe. You feel very, very comfortable with them. So I want to talk to you about the work of the Church and what we have done in these areas today, because I feel like you might find these things to be of interest.

I thank God every day. We praise God. We should be praising God every day and thanking Him for the things that He does. I thank God for His sovereignty in the world, that He's very much aware of what's happening in the world. He actually is directing and guiding what's happening in events. But also, He's working very, very closely with what is happening in His Church. To be truthful, I don't know all the things that He's doing in His Church.

I've been in the Church for a long time. As I said, I've been in the ministry now for 49 years. And I've had a deep conviction from my teenage years about the truth of God, making a sea change from beliefs in an entirely different structure of the Trinity, Sunday keeping, the Roman holidays, and so forth. And coming to understand and believe what I truly believe is the mystery of the ages, of what the Apostle Paul called the mystery of the ages.

The understanding of who God is, who He really is, who we really are. And has developed a delivery system through His Word, through His ministers, through the Holy Spirit, to dispense this to the world. I feel very privileged to be a part of what I consider to be the Church of God. I feel very, very sure. I feel very, very confident of who I am, what my purpose on this earth is, what my future is, understanding what life and death are.

Understanding, to me, the greatest of all truths. Of course, we can't just say, this is my favorite belief, this is my favorite belief. And to me, the greatest understanding is what the Kingdom of God is, that has been so occluded and blurred. But that is what we should be praying for every day. Hallowed be Your name, Thy Kingdom come. We praise God, we thank Him, but we should be praying at the top of every prayer daily, Thy Kingdom come.

Pray for God's will to be done. I take these as orders daily, as an outline of the things that I should be thinking. Not only thinking, but implementing, and also as President of the United Church of God, putting them into action every single day. One thing I look upon, my job is sometimes not easy, but in another sense, it's a job where I feel like I'm being pushed along and driven along on a stream with the Spirit of God, of what He wants done.

And I'm trying to find out just exactly how to navigate through a stream of events to where God is leading us to. I take a look back, whether it's in my personal life or in the life of the Church, and see God's hand in all the events that have taken place. That includes the founding and the formation of the United Church of God, how He led us in 1995, actually at the time of the Exodus, in the springtime of the year, at the Passover, to make a break, to go into an area that we had not really knew exactly where we were going to, except that we didn't want to be back in Egypt.

We saw in Pentecost in 1995 the establishment, the very first service, of the United Church of God. I've seen that through much tribulation we enter into the Kingdom of God. We've seen shifts and changes, but we've seen God deliver us over and over and over again. I have stared up cliffs and saying, how are we going to face this, whether it's a financial matter, whether it's a manpower matter, or whether it's a matter of mission and what we should be doing.

But every time I've stared up the cliff and prayed, I could also look back to how God delivered us here, there, and this, and that place, over and over again. That is where my faith lies. This is not my work. This is not the work of the administration. This is not the work of the Council of Elders. That is, right now, what we have as the structure for being the delivery system, you might say, for God's work. By looking upon the working of God the Father Himself through Jesus Christ and directing and managing this church.

In Isaiah 55, verse 11, it's a passage that I absolutely love because I look upon it as what we do, what we accomplish, what we project, what we preach. And some may say, well, it's not doing much good. Or who's listening? Or what's the point and what's the purpose? Isaiah 55, verse 11. So shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth.

It shall not return to me void, but it shall accomplish what I please. And it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it. God's word, God's work, will accomplish a particular purpose. It did in times when Jonah was sent to Assyria and a nation came to repentance, a most unlikely event. I'm not sure how long they repented for. Obviously they became the evil kingdom that conquered the world later. But nonetheless, it accomplished a lot, certainly in the lives of people through the workings of Jonah.

But at other times, like in the time of Noah, he was asked to build a huge ship. A huge ship. And there were very few people in that 100-year period that really came around. In fact, nobody. It was a high cost per response in Noah's ark. It was terrible. It was economically unfeasible. But it had a particular purpose. And we are living now in the days of Noah.

There's a certain coldness. There's a certain disinterest. There's a certain occlusion of the spirit that at times, in history, opens up. Other times, it closes. But God is the opener and the closer of those events. But our job is to preach the gospel into all the world. Do you wonder if after 70 years of working on the ark that Noah says, I just wonder what this is all about?

Into the 80th year, he's telling the world, a preacher of righteousness, telling the world that the flood is coming. It's going to wipe all of you out unless you repent. I sit in there hooting and hollering. Probably most of them didn't even show up. They didn't even aware of or care about it. He was kind of the guy up the hill who was building this huge boat.

But finally, it came. I feel truly that a message of repentance that we teach, the message of repentance that Jesus Christ taught, repent for the kingdom of God as a hand. And the message of the New Testament church, the first message that the apostle Peter spoke when people were coming to him after his accusatory, condemning sermon about you killed Christ. And they thought, yeah, two months ago we were all shouting, crucify, crucify him.

They said, well, what should we do? Repent and believe the gospel. And there was once again a spurt and opening where 3,000 people were baptized that day with somewhat pent-up demand. And then another couple thousand were baptized in the days ahead. And there was a growth spurt at that time. But also towards the end of the first era of the church leading up to the time when Jerusalem was conquered, the church went into slumber, both physically and spiritually. The book of Hebrews talks about a church that was asleep, that was neglectful.

A church that had gone soft. A church where when even the apostle Peter prayed over people, they weren't healed.

So those areas and periods come. But did the apostle Paul, to this very dying day, or did the apostle Peter or any others, shirk their work and say, hey, this is not for me. I'm not going to continue on with this. One of our fundamental beliefs is the church, which might be good for all of us to look at. We have these 20 fundamental beliefs, and we say, yeah, we believe in them, but then how much have we gone back to review what we've actually said about the very, very foundations of our beliefs? What is the church? We believe that the church is that body of believers who have received and are being led by the Holy Spirit. The true church of God is a spiritual organism. It's not a corporation. It's not a people that even baptize members. We term baptize members. Those who have a pin number. That is not the qualifications for membership in the church of God. It's a spiritual organism. People who are united by the Holy Spirit of God. The biblical name is the Church of God, which is used multiple times in the New Testament. We believe that the mission of the church is to preach the gospel of the coming kingdom of God, which we should be all praying daily, Thy kingdom come. It means to just not to shout and to chant that word, but to be involved in every single way we possibly can in Thy kingdom come.

To all nations is a witness and to help reconcile to God such people as are now being called. And as we preach the gospel of the kingdom of God, there are people that come to us and tap us on the shoulder, text us, write to us, email us.

I'd like to know more.

We have many people who are being contacted by the church. And I'll say this about the United Church of God. There is no church of the familiar churches of God who has the resources, who has the voice, who has the reach as the United Church of God. Our website now is the 16th ranked among major religions. We have 5 to 8 million unique users per year, unique new users per year. We have thousands of downloads. We have ministries around the world from other organizations that say, can you please send us 100 copies of this booklet or 100 copies of that booklet because we have the resources.

We have many churches that have told me that when we need something, we know that you folks have it. You have the material we need. I've had Sabbatarians from Ukraine who have commented about our booklet about the Sabbat in Russian, the booklet Sunset to Sunset. They said, we have never seen a piece of literature that was so succinct and is accurate and is compelling as your booklet, Sunset to Sunset. And they have ordered it. They have downloaded thousands of copies of it because they deem our work to be excellent. On the website, we have upwards of 80,000 pages of content. We have 20,000 at least sermons that are online that people can listen to. Not too long ago, I did a co-worker letter on the subject of hope, and I said, I'd like to see what we've got on hope on our website. 17,000 references to the word hope. In fact, we have almost anything you can imagine on our website that you can find about anything. In fact, we were just joking one time at the office and saying, hey, let's see what we have to say about blueberries. So we did that. Would you believe there was a recipe for blueberry pancakes for Dave's Aladdin Bread on our website? We were just very surprised that we had that. That was kind of a humorous thing, but nonetheless, there's just a lot of material. And whether you want information on marriage, you want information on prophecy, you want commentary, you want Bible studies, you want sermons, you want transcripts, we have a huge amount of content. And there are groups around the country that have come to me and said, we would like to consolidate or we'd like to aggregate the resources of various churches so that we can kind of use these sorts of material. In a sense, I had people come to visit me and I said, you know something? I don't know if we need anybody else's material because we've got pretty much everything that we need for our church and our purposes. And anybody can link to our material. Anybody can download, link, print, whatever they want to do with our material. In fact, with other Sabbath-keeping groups around the world, there are usually groups where there aren't that many people who are writers and communicators and have journalistic skills. And when they see the material that we have that they preach, they say, this is valuable material. For example, in Angola, there are 8,000 people who believe similarly to the way we do. 8,000 people.

They keep the Holy Days, but they do not have religious material. And they say, could you please allow us to use your material? This is not us sending them material and paying for it. Now, they want PDFs of our material, and we have allowed them to put their name and address on it, giving credit to us, certainly, for the original material that they can use in preaching the gospel in their way.

Because we've got the stuff. We have the material for them. I was talking to John Barbusch before services here today of one of the early stories that we have of the church, our church, the material we have, that has been fulfilling this passage in Isaiah 55.11, that God's word won't return to him void. When the Soviet Union collapsed, fell apart in 1991, there was a rush by people in Europe and in Ukraine to go back to areas where they had lived and known people to evangelize.

Well, in 1992 is the first year that I went back to visit in Ukraine, the Sabbatarians, and I brought with me everything that we had in the Russian language, because we did have a Russian department. In fact, I understand that Bill Bradford, a senior, will be here next Sabbath. He worked with that department and he knew the director of that department, Dr. Ivan Chornay from Cleveland, who translated a number of our pieces of literature back from that time.

Why were you born? Does God heal today? What about the Sabbath? And so forth. Well, I had copies of the original literature translated into Russian. It was rather primitive looking. It was not really, you know, it was a black stripe and it was laid out in a very, very rudimentary style. And I brought over a copy, maybe a couple copies, of this literature to those Sabbath keepers. And they saw what we had. And they said, this is fantastic stuff. We are heading to Siberia to do an evangelistic mission.

Some of us are from Siberia. Our parents were settled out there and now we have returned back. And those people need Jesus Christ. Those people need God. And these people formulated a mission trip from Ukraine to Siberia. It's about the distance of Chicago here to Alaska. You know, they had no money. They just had three vans. They took along about 15 people to sing and to preach.

And they took our literature along. They stopped along the way and asked people to give them gas money. And they got all the way to Siberia. And they had just these few booklets, you know. They went into a newspaper office and said, could you please set these to type and print them for us? And they got this newspaper office to do that.

They printed hundreds of copies of the booklet on the Sabbath. And they used this material in their evangelism and established churches in Siberia. And it was so interesting to see the copies that they brought back to me which were printed on newsprint. I mean, they looked absolutely terrible. But it was the truth of God, though written here. It was written copyright, Radio Church of God, Gerbert W. Armstrong. You know, it was just interesting to see this God's Word not returning to him void, but going out there and making a change in people's lives. I have no idea what's happened to those churches in Siberia.

But nonetheless, they were established. They went there to sing and to preach as we had. I'm not going to be naive to say that we're the only ones doing the work of God. I can say that we need to be doing the work that God wants us to do in fulfilling his purpose. He also, as Jesus said in John 10, he has other sheep doing other things. And that, in some ways, could be our business or maybe none of our business. But God is certainly doing the work that he's doing. So, we believe that the mission of the church is to preach the Gospels of witness, to help reconcile to God such people as are now being called.

So, as people come to us and say, I'm interested, we respond and serve their needs. That's why we have a ministry. And the United Church of God, of all the groups from where we came from, has the strongest ministry of all, bar none, in numbers and dedication. We have nearly 400 ministers around the world, 300 of which are in the United States and 100 which are in international areas. Now, I work with the ministry. I'm also the director of Ministerial Member Services. We truly have a phenomenal, dedicated group of ministers who know who they are and know what their mission is.

They're not just going through the motions. They are responding to the spiritual needs of those who are called. They're caring for the people whom God has brought together.

We believe that it is also the mission of the church to strengthen, edify, and nurture the children of God in the love and admonition of our Lord Jesus Christ. That's what Randy Losandro is doing. That's what Bill Bradford. That's what others in the ministry are doing, Mr. May, John May, in doing that particular mission.

Ephesians 1, verse 22.

Ephesians 1 and Colossians 1 are chapters in the Bible that I have as sermon outlines. If I was called to...if I just showed up in a church somewhere with no notes, not even a Bible, perhaps, and was asked to give a sermon, I would say, please give me your Bible. I would give a sermon from Ephesians 1, which is the whole plan of God, right there. Just the main points about what Christianity is all about, our calling, the mystery of our calling, and who the personnel leaders of the church are. But this chapter concludes with the work of Jesus Christ in verse 21, who was far above all principality and power and might and dominion, that every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in which to come, He has put all things under His feet, God the Father has put things all under His feet, and gave Him to be the head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all and all. What this is saying is that Jesus Christ right now is the living head of the church, as He ascended into heaven ten days before Pentecost. He continues with His Spirit to direct and guide His church.

It's very sad if you don't believe that Jesus Christ is alive and well and through His Spirit in His church. He is. He's here. He's one that we look to as one who guides and directs this church. There's one of my friend evangelists at the Ambassador College one time who was leading a group tour of a group that was similar to us in Sabbath Keepers on a campus visit. And this group was asked the question. They didn't know who the head of the church was. They seemed to know about Herbert Armstrong at that time or whoever it was, the head at that time. And they asked Him, who is the head of this church?

And this group leader said, Jesus Christ. Yeah, yeah, we know that. But who really runs things around here? He said, Jesus Christ. No, no, no, no, no, no. Who is the name? Who really is the power behind this church? Jesus Christ. He was making a point there. He was making a point that the real head of this church is Jesus Christ. He identified that way in the writings of the Apostle Paul. He is the one who is the head of His body, the church, the fullness who fills all in all. Jesus Christ will marry the church. That's one of the great mysteries that we read about in Ephesians chapter 5. Now, when we read this almost every marriage in the church includes Ephesians 5 to one degree or another, but it's only a type of the marriage of Christ to the church. A close relationship. Christ is a bridegroom. We are the bride who are being prepared. So the work of the church now is involvement with the here and now.

The church is involved with the here and now. We're preparing the bride, the people of God. Part of that process is regular attendance and regular being together with one another. Assembly is extremely important as far as being part of the church.

One thing that's been really a downer from the use of the internet in so many ways in which we can do church without being there is the fact that some of the most important aspects and strength builders of Christian and spiritual strength builders are missing. It's the missing vitamins, so to speak, by not being together. By coming together, you got dressed up very nicely. You are here on your best behavior. You are here to say pleasant things one to another. You're here to upbuild and encourage one another.

There are some who stay away from church because they're just too tired and they can just log in and connect to an internet service somewhere around the country. I'm not sure if you stream your services or not, but many areas do. People can either tap into a public one that we have around the country or two individualized services around the country and hear a service. In their shorts, their hair undone, unshaved, and they sit there and they hear this, it isn't the same as coming here, all dressed up very nicely, carefully listening and turning to the Scriptures, not eating a bag of popcorn while you're listening to the sermon, but really focused and attending the way you should. I wrote an e-news column a few weeks back that some assembly is required to be a Christian. Assembly is required. Also in the here and now, as we prepare ourselves, and certainly pastors, I really enjoy listening to Randy de Los Andros' sermons online. Bev and I had listened to different sermons, almost every evening we turn on something. Randy's series on prophecy have been very interesting to us. But also, we care for people spiritually, but also care for their humanitarian needs. In Matthew 25, we care for people that are homeless, people who are hungry, people who are lonely, people who are in prison.

People have said, what subject? You may want to check this out yourself. What subject is covered more than any other topic in the Bible? Can you tell me what the most covered topic in the Bible is? Be surprised. Caring for the vulnerable. Maybe it's not the most important. Of course, everything is important. But going back to the Old Testament, watching out for the widows, the fatherless, making sure that they're covered, to be compassionate for them, you see the ministry of Jesus Christ Himself, the healing of thousands of people, even raising people from the dead, is being compassionate towards these people, the fatherless and the widows, the vulnerable among us.

My mother was a widow at age 40. She was baptized. My father was baptized at age 42. He died of a heart attack. And I was the oldest of five children. I was 19. And my youngest brother was three. And she was left with five kids. To me, the testimony of how the church watched out for her was truly a wonderful story of people coming together to care for the vulnerable, for the disadvantaged. My mother was a hard worker. She had a job. She cleaned homes. But she had close friends, brothers, sisters, so to speak, in the church, that watched out for the kids, that befriended them. And certainly is a testimony to that. And certainly in Chicago, I'm sure that as people have gone through hardship, that you've been there to support them, whether it be mentally, spiritually, physically, to support them. Caring for the widows and the vulnerable among us. Jesus Christ's miracles. Which miracle wasn't one of caring for people? Of releasing them from bondage of a sickness? Compassionate. So the church is a cradle for preparing the bride, teaching and preparing the bride. But also, it's a place where we talk about the hereafter. Where we talk about eternal life.

To me, as I read the writings of the Apostle Paul in the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 15, 1 Thessalonians 4, Ephesians 1, Colossians 1, talking about what eternal life is. And its importance is what kept him going. It's what was the Gospel. The Gospel is talking about eternal life. That's the good news. That's what we all look to. And we all look to it with anticipation and joy. That's the hope of the dead, the resurrection. And I look forward to it. It'll be around before we know it, when we'll be resurrected, as is described in 1 Corinthians 15 and many other places. Right now, in this world, there is a movement among scientists to bring about eternity without God. Immortality without God. And you know what's getting closer and closer? I'm talking about eternity and immortality in this body that we have. And we talk about portable consciousness. As scientists now want to take our human brain and feel like it's not that far off. Maybe just a few decades away, the human knowledge is exploding in this industrial revolution that we're in right now. From what it was a hundred years ago to what it is right now. To where it would be literally possible to upload your brain to a cloud. And have a new body. And have your brain downloaded into a new body. Scientists are really coming to that point. One of the most popular books of last year was called Homodu. Not homo sapien, not man homo sapien. But homo do, man God.

And the story about we don't need God. We can do it ourselves. God's going to stop that because God wants us to be immortal. God wants to grant us eternity. God wants us to live with Him forever. But not the way we are. And not with the nature we have.

God wants us to be transformed. God wants us to become like Him. He wants a relationship. He wants to be married to us with a compatible bride as a church. It's a wonderful story. It's a whole story of the future, the Kingdom of God. It's an amazing story, an amazing story about God's plan for mankind. More than just a generalization and more than just a platitude. But it's something that is bringing us in this age, in this time, to devote our life and energy to bringing this to people and getting them excited. We in the church are excited about this. But I'm sure that Noah, when he was building his ark, as he preached his heart out, Come on, people. Come on, people. Get this. But they didn't. Right now in the church, we're in a period of transition. We're in a period of transition in the ministry. And membership, for that matter, as our church is getting older, As I've told, our people were losing a minister or a mate to death every three weeks. We had 17 memorials at the General Conference of Elders last year. Most of those people who are retired, but we lost a number of ministers also who were active in their ministry when they died. Notably, John Sephoric in Salem, Oregon, a total surprise to all of us. But we're moving at an accelerated rate right now towards new leadership. And one of the highest priorities we have right now is the training of tomorrow's ministers. We consider that to be most important. We lost Ambassador College, but we can't lament about that because there was no Ambassador College in the time of Jerusalem, and the early converts in the church were very, very few people who had gone to seminary someplace, or had gone to higher education at some of the institutes with the Pharisees and Sadducees studied. Most of them were people who were mentored privately through Jesus Christ at first, the Twelve. And then these people mentored and educated others. And so we've come to the point ourselves where we have to do it some other way. And we are now at a very, very active stage of training new ministers with a number of different vehicles for exactly doing that. Ambassador Bible College, which was started 20 years ago. Mary de la Sandra was very much a part of the discussions of that back in 1999 when Ambassador Bible College was initiated.

The mission of Ambassador Bible College has morphed to a more focused purpose in the last three years. I'll read you the mission of Ambassador Bible College. Because we were trying to be very careful not to say it's a seminary or it's a study to train ministers or ministers' wives.

We were so careful and so cautious about that because we didn't want people to get the wrong idea. But what's wrong about saying that this is a place where we really want to train future leaders of the Church? The mission of Ambassador Bible College, sponsored by the United Church of God, is to diligently uphold and faithfully teach the truths of God as found in the Bible to equip disciples of Jesus Christ for a life of faithfulness and godly service. Still doesn't say much about being ministers, but we really want them to be focused on godly service and being faithful.

We want them to be skilled and we want them to be people of integrity. Those are the two routes, two parallel roads in leading people in education. We want to train them in integrity. We want to train them in skills. This year's Ambassador Bible College class is one that's going to be a little bit bigger than we had the last two years. We have about 30 people right now that we're looking at, including eight from international areas, which is very, very thrilled.

And it's a class which is kind of heavy on the males. Before, our last two classes were shifted more towards females with, like last year, very, very few men. But this next year, we're looking to a class where we're very hopeful of some outcomes that will be very helpful to the future leadership of the church. But we're not ashamed to say that the purpose of Ambassador College is to train these leaders. In fact, we've also started a ministerial training program where we have hired people as trainees, people who are not yet ordained.

The way it was back when I started out, I started out, I wasn't ordained for three years. I was a trainee, first working in South Dakota, then Rapid City, then Minneapolis before I was ordained. Well, we've reinstituted that system now, and we hired six the first year, then three and three the next two years.

We have already a dozen people that we have hired, and a good part of them have been ordained. And some of them are pastors of churches. It's a very, very effective route of people that we have brought along into the ministry. I feel like it's one of the smartest things that we have done is to fully dedicate people this way.

Because before, other options were, well, maybe if it's a smaller church, we could have one of the local church elders, who's retired, manage that church. Mostly it's being preaching on the Sabbath, visiting people as they are needed, conducting an occasional Bible study, and visiting people on an occasional basis for a church of 20 to 30.

Also, we have hired people half-time who have continued on with their career and have been able to also pastor the church. That is a very difficult one. That's very difficult. Very demanding. Being a pastor can be very, very demanding on the emotional and spiritual toll it takes and the care that needs to be given to people, especially if the church gets to be up in the numbers and requires ministers to be there, to be responsive, to visit, and so forth.

We've also had pastors, volunteer pastors. We have a number of pastors around the country that are independently cared for financially and that have pastored churches. We have a number of people that have pastored churches very well and given it as their life's mission. We've had, we said, part-time volunteer pastors, but we found the most effective route, really long-term, is the ministerial trainees.

And we have found Ambassador Bible College, even if they have gone through the class once, to be part of it again by coming to the home office. Because at the home office, we have a congregation, a resident congregation of over 300. And we have a congregation that has all the diversity that you find out there in society. We have young people, we have babies, we have pre-teens, we have teenagers, we've got young adults, we've got mid-age people, we've got seniors. We have all kinds of people, and it gives them an opportunity to be trained with that diversity of people, still being around Ambassador Bible College.

And we can train two at a time. That's what we've been doing the last couple of years. We have two couples now that have been brought to the home office, and not only are they around ABC, not only are they around the pastor, Steve Myers, who's done a fantastic job of mentoring them, but also I invite them to come up and talk to us. Some of them do come up and they talk about life, they talk about their expectations and desires, and they have a chance to interface with all of us at the home office.

And almost everyone who we've sent out has turned out well, so to speak, in that. So that's been a very, very good product. Also, back in 2012, we developed a program online to train ministers called Online Training. Surprise. And it began with...

I mean, I'm just amazed as to how this accelerated from an unplanned dinner. I was sitting across a table from Dr. Donald Ward at a dinner, and I wasn't planning to see him, just got to talking with him. At that time, we just started the use of WebEx, sort of an online conferencing facility. I thought to myself, you know, we could probably use this for training, because we could get 20...

with our minimal account, we could get 25 people on the class with a presenter. They could sit there and talk to 25 people at the same time, and they can see them by video. Internet has been picking up in robustness and speed and bandwidth and so forth, and it isn't like it used to be. It's much more reliable. Then we also had some software that was used for online classes. And I thought, well, if we could put these two together, you know, have a think for developing curriculums, lessons, and communicating with students with this program.

The way we got into that is that we used only a portion of this freebie program, this shareware, for our elders forum. But there was a whole part of it here that we just didn't bother with at all, and that was the learning part. You could develop classes, you could send out tests, you could have grading things online, and so forth. And so I said, if we put this together and the WebEx, we could develop an online school.

And I knew that others were already having it, but I said, it's possible for us. I was talking to Dr. Ward about this. And his reaction was very, very interesting because I saw what the doctor was in Dr.

Ward, of EDU, Doctor of Education. He was so excited about this. He got to say, yeah, we need to do this, we need to develop a curriculum, we need to have a gathering of all of us together to develop a syllabi for the programs and so forth, and this, that, and everything else. He was so excited about this. And two or three months later, we had a conference where we got our faculty together, we got the classes that we wanted to be put together, and developed our first online school, so to speak, for the new ministers.

And so the very first class that we developed was called Pastoral Care. All the things that ministers really need to have basic skill set in. How to visit, how to answer certain types of questions, demeanor, etiquette, knowledge of certain basic scriptures, one of the most likely things to be asked, and how to respond to them. And we had numerous instructors among myself and others that ran the class for a period of two hours, Tuesday morning at two o'clock, at ten o'clock in the morning, Eastern time.

Then we had another class that Dr. Ward did every Wednesday on Fundamentals of Theology. He ran that for a whole year. Then we were looking for other instructors. I did ask Bob Fay, the pastor of the Chicago Church, I was kind of afraid to ask him because I knew that he was busy and he was really involved with Evelyn and her health and so forth.

And I didn't know whether he would want to do that. But he took the class and said, I have a special class that I would love to teach on the Book of Matthew, but really focusing on the Sermon on the Mount for the ministry. Okay, I said, give it a go. And he became one of the most popular teachers. He was very, very intense and very, very interesting to listen to. Students rated him very highly. He got to liking it himself that he says, is there anything else I can teach? And we got to talking and just a few years later, the last time I saw him, had dinner with him and Evelyn, and he was going to teach a class.

This is in August. He was going to teach a class in Daniel and Revelation. He was so excited about it. I mean, he was just like a young person, just couldn't wait to do it. And then he suddenly died after the feast, just two months or so after we saw him. Great loss. But we had others who have stepped up to teach the online class, and it's been a way in which we have been able to teach groupings of ministers without bringing them in for our residency, expensive residency program, and we've been able to disseminate knowledge to them. We had a class that we developed that ran for two semesters through a year, an academic year, starting in September, ending in late May, and we've been doing this over the years.

So that's been something that we have found that, whether there's a will, there's a way, and as new technology develops, we've been able to move that forward. Then, once we developed the ministerial trainees, the ones we've developed a program to called a pastors development program. We felt like we needed to have a high-intensity residence program for the new trainees, and we have this in November every year. For two weeks, we bring in ten couples. Some of them are new, some of them are just new pastors, for what we first called boot camp.

And it was 60 hours of class on things in a very, very personal eye-to-eye way, with ten couples as 20 people. The participants stayed in our homes, and we had, my wife and I hosted two couples. We had breakfast with them every day, we take them to classes all day, we are there for as much as we possibly can of the classes.

They spend the evenings with us, the evenings sometimes we had social events with the others, but it was intense. And on the weekends, we took them to a Sabbath service, where two of them gave split sermons. Then also on the Sunday, we had a social day with them, and we would talk about the history of the Church of God going back 40, 50, 60 years.

You know, how we've developed. A lot of these people don't even know where we came from, or don't have the whole history of our United Church of God. And how we got started, what we believe, why we believe it. Yes, they are ministers, but they don't always have an autobiography. And so we needed to have this type of first hand talking with them about ourselves and what we do.

This has turned out to be a very, very popular program. This year, we have ten couples coming, and it looks like about six of them are from overseas. From Zimbabwe, from Zambia, from South Africa, from the Philippines. We're bringing couples in for this program. The fruits of this program have been, to me, beyond expectation. We have sent people to work in major cities in the United States. Some of them have risen to become pastors. One couple, Louis and Lina Venaso, we sent to Malawi, Africa, basically through them, you know, 8,000 miles away to manage pastor or church there. And it has also inspired others to want to do those types of things as well. We have people that have come through as, first of all, being the mentees, the ones who are mentored, and now have risen to become the pastors. In some cases, where the pastor is retiring. In fact, we have a number who have declared their retirement. For the next year, we have two, three actually, that have said, I want to retire at this month in 2019. And so we are sending people for them to work with, with expectation that they will continue on in pastor that church. Again, we feel like in the teaching of our pastors, just as when we have the ordination of pastors, we read 1 Timothy chapter 3 about the qualifications of an elder. And when we read these things, we read that there are many things having to do with character. Not a person who is a striker, or brawler, or an alcoholic, or a person who has very, very shady aspects of character. But one who is given to hospitality, a person who is open, and a person also who is apt to teach. So an important part of our training is training in integrity, and character, and ethics. We feel like this is vitally, vitally important. The agency in this world that Satan hates most is the Church of God. Because this is the birthing place of those who will become part of the family of God at this time. We cannot be unwise to his devices and to what he is doing. And I talk to myself, and I talk to others, about the fact that this is a spiritual battle, and a spiritual war that we are in right now in the Church. We have forces of evil to divide us, to make us angry at one another, and we've seen it. We've seen a Church that was a monolith and very, very strong to come to where we are now. But I tell our people not to be discouraged, not to be upset, but to take the resources that we have and move forward. We cannot undo the past. We have to move forward. And again, as I've said earlier, I've seen us have to scale one cliff after another, and God has given us the tools to do so. He's given us the ability, He's given us the resources, He's given us the personnel, where we've had people that have popped up out of nowhere to provide us for the needs that we have for the Church.

A couple of interesting things about working with other groups. I could talk to you all day long about this because I'm so excited about what God is doing of things that we did not expect or look for, particularly the group in Argentina. Now, three years ago, when I was talking with Mario Sigli, who is the regional pastor over Latin America, actually about five years ago, because at that time he didn't know anything about this group in Missiones, Argentina.

I didn't even know where Missiones, Argentina was. It sounded far away, sounded like some people out there in a jungle, probably, whatever.

And so, he was telling me about them, and I found out that they are Sabbath keepers, and there's a group of them that are keeping the Holy Days. In fact, this whole group here is keeping the Holy Days. They're Spanish-speaking, and they needed to have some connectivity and some connection with a Sabbath-keeping church. So, they found us online in Chile. They're about an hour's flight or so from Santiago. And they contacted our ministry there, who took a great interest in them, went to visit them, and found out that they believe just about all the same things that we do. And they have quite a history.

They found out that these people were, in large part, not people of Spanish descent, but people of German descent. People like Ritter, that's one of their leaders, and other German-sounding names.

And so now, our ministry goes there once a month to pastor them. None of those men, none of the families there, want to be in charge, so to speak. They are just people who had come away from another group that wasn't keeping the Holy Days and said, we are wanting to keep the Holy Days. We see what the Bible says. And so, my wife and I went to visit that group this last January, and we were just amazed as to what we found. These are prosperous individuals. By prosperous, I mean when they came to services, they had cars and so forth. You know, many of them did. It wasn't like us working in Africa where nobody has anything. Found that these people had good jobs, were very responsible, had fine families.

One of the members had a radio station. He operated FM radio station, which was part of where he had been before as a church. But now he was with the United Church of God, and he was calling it United Church of God Radio. It was FM station. This Misionis area of Argentina is a little sliver of land that's tucked in between Paraguay and Brazil, up in the northern part of Argentina.

It's the area where all the Nazis held out, you know, hold out. It was interesting. We met with one of their families for dinner, and they said, you know, Martin Borman used to live ten miles up the road. Well, really, you know, he says, but you wouldn't want to go there. It's a very rough road there to get to his place. But it was a place that a lot of Germanic people, so forth. Mario Sigli and I gave sermons on the Sabbath. Then in the evening, we were asked to go and speak on the radio, because every evening he had a three-hour program of discussion, sometimes played sermons by Mario Sigli and by Jaime Gallardo and our other Spanish-speaking pastor in South America.

And he said, I want you to come and basically give what you have given here on the Sabbath. And so we did, not knowing what we're getting into. It was most interesting. Mario spoke. Of course, Mario had to translate for me, and I gave the sermon that I had given earlier in the day. And I found it to be just very, very interesting. I'd never spoken on the radio and never given an evangelistic type of message.

You know, you're speaking out there to the public, and you can't see them. Although you see the director, and you have a screen here that tells you how long to speak and when to stop and where they're going to play another song and so forth. And I found it to be just very, very interesting. I kind of got into it, really. Well, the next day we had a church picnic, the same people that we were there on the Sabbath with, and a number of them listened to the broadcast on Saturday night. Because for a while I was wondering, does anybody hear this stuff?

You know, I mean, here we are just talking like this. And one man said, you know, you saw them better on the radio than you do in person. So I found that to be an interesting presentation. But this group wants to develop a relationship with us. They are building a feast site. They kept the feast by themselves last year. You know, they had tents and so forth. They showed me a video of the feast site that they had.

But now they've bought a plot of land, and they're putting up about a dozen cottages on it, a little meeting place that took us out to the place where they had their land. It was very, very interesting to see what they're doing. So we have a close relationship with them. Their services are a little bit different, you know, but certainly not every service around the world is going to be exactly the same.

They have their own hymns, their own songs, and so forth. And hopefully we could, you know, kind of share things with one another. But nonetheless, the Spirit of God was there. We also have a group in the Far Eastern area of India.

In an area there where these people have also been relatively prosperous. By that I mean they're self-sufficient. They're not rich people, but they're built at church. They want to have a church hall dedicated this fall. They want us to be there and so forth. I don't know how we can do all these things, but they really want us to be a part of them. Our regional pastor, our senior pastor, David Scriber, goes back there to visit regularly with them. Anyway, God is working with different people.

Now also the Ukrainians that I've been working with since 1991 and 1992, and I have visited there probably a dozen times or so. We've never talked about being one as a group because while our doctrines may be very similar, in fact, with this particular group exact with the keeping of the Holy Days and all the other aspects that we have, they have wanted to develop a relationship that's closer than just being friends.

But we're not ready to just kind of unite with them. And so we're looking to develop relationships with others that are friendship, we share literature, we share a lot of our proprietary information, so to speak, but we're not ready to be one with any of them. But we still are very close and very good friends with them. The final area I'd like to make comment on is our work with proclaiming the Gospel to the world. Our flagship publication is Beyond Today magazine, which has a circulation of 300,000.

300,000. Sounds like a lot in some ways, but remember when we had the Plain Truth magazine? That was a circulation that was literally 20 times as high. 20 times as high as that, when we were up in the 7 million range or so. One way in which we are able to boost that circulation is not by just people kind of out of the blue writing for it, we have to advertise it. We have to make Google keywords possible for people. When we advertise more, we get more subscribers and more people who subscribe to it.

These people then become more interested people since they receive the magazine on a regular basis as a periodical. They become acquainted with the articles, they become acquainted with the doctrine, they develop a relationship with us, and they are the ones who are most likely to ask questions about where church is, wanting to meet with others, and make more of themselves as far as coming towards baptism and a member of the body of Christ.

We also have, beyond today, television.

One of our recent programs is the closest thing that we went viral in. It was entitled The Moment You Die by Darris McNeely. We had 100,000 views of this program. Right now we're on WGN America, which airs on Friday morning, not the best time. But that's all the better that we can do as far as putting our program on cable or on-air television. We're also on in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, and in the Philippines.

Our subjects are more the subjects for the world to engage or to interest them. We are praying to God that with the new facilities that we have that we could produce a number of new products with video, not just a television program, but a documentary that we're working on as far as the kingdom of God and another one on the Holy Days. We're also working on a program that's between the 28 and a half minute for broadcast program length to when it's more of a TED talk length of about 15 to 18 minutes. Because that's about what people listen to, to develop a program of that length. Plus, our shorter program, our BT Dailys, and yet another unspecified product. We want to have five products available that we can produce. We're asking for the church to pray and to fast for God's word to go out to the world, and to be asking God for his will to be done just as we pray, praise God, and ask for thy kingdom come. We need to be praying for his will to be done and for us to do those things that God wills us to do.

I am confident that God will hear our prayers and show us what to do. Our new media studio is within weeks of being completed. Our set is going to be put in there through the month of July, August. We've almost decided on one. We've had seven or eight different designs that we have looked at or actually permutations of it up until even yesterday. And we plan to have an area that will be robust for like a Bible study group, an audience, one for stand-up the way we do it right now, and one for less formal. Plus a radio studio. We want to be able to continue on with podcasts. I have produced or I have narrated about 80 podcasts, already 82 or 83 of them, and I've kind of gotten to enjoy the format and talking to different people in more of a casual podcast style. And also we want to be able to look at the possibility of radio with our studio to produce some type of program that could be like similar to what Australia has with their 24-7 radio, but have live segments in it to develop these types of things. So that's what we're working at with media, certainly asking for your prayers. A lot of what happens with the media depends upon financing. Talking with John Barbush here earlier, we have some phenomenal products. We have some very, very interesting programs. But to have people listen to them, you've got to tell them where to go. You have to tell them where they need to go find that program. It needs to be advertised in certain things. You see all the time, if you watch regular television, promos for TV programs, and you say, oh yeah, I want to go watch that then. They say, 10 o'clock tomorrow, see such and such. That costs them a lot of money to do that, but they get people who go then and watch the program. So that's the kind of thing that we're asking God to provide us the means, the ability to be able to direct our people there. And we are very, very confident in the fact that we are going to produce a product of greater quality, of greater impact, of greater ability to reach people with the facilities that God has given us. Again, I find that we are not asking for us to do our will, but for God to do His will through us. Also very grateful for all the local work that is being done in our congregations through local websites. We have some pastors who are more active than others. I know that in churches like Chicago in the past, they've held small group Bible studies and so forth that have been a magnet to other people. But, you know, for the most part, we have always been a media-based church, whether we like it or not, or whether we don't want to think about that. From the very beginnings of the 1930s, we have been a media-based church first. We have not been a community church. Now, I would like for us to be a church in which we can be more of a draw in the community, but we have to ask ourselves, you know, how are we going to really look at it? Are we going to move more in that direction? Could we use both ways of being a media-based church and a community-based church? You know, those are questions that we are working with and wrestling with right now.

So, I just wanted to tell you about the things that we are doing as a church. Some of the outreach that we are doing is the last thing that I'll just mention here. Through good works, we have a number of projects to help people overseas. And then through the Para Church organization LifeNets, we've been able to help a lot of people in a church, particularly with any number of subjects, but the ones most prominent have been scholarships, where we have helped people in developing countries not be out there in a market that's got 60% unemployment, as is typical in Malawi and Zambia, but with a degree in teaching, and one young lady graduated next year, her seventh year of study is medicine, she will be a doctor, you know, to have these opportunities in a church that we're doing. And we're providing this in areas around the world. Well, it's been really a joy to be able to talk to you today. I get very, very excited and passionate about what God is doing in his church. I have to ask ourselves, is God show me your will, show me what to do, open the doors. And when I have prayed that, I see that in retrospect where he has opened the door, where he's brought a person along, where he's brought an individual along. There's one person, one particular type of employee that I've been looking for, for five years, recently here. And I have no idea where I could find that person. And that person that just is needed for that particular role has popped up. And I'm just very, very grateful to see, yes, God, you are doing your work. You are hearing our prayers. You are providing the things that we need in doing your church. I'm grateful to God for his church. It's almost been 50 years that I've served in it in the ministry. And I'm just so very thankful for the opportunities that I've had to do whatever I have been able to do, but also in looking forward to the next generation of workers in doing that work. The gates of hell will not prevail against the church, Matthew 16. The gates of hell will not prevail against the church. God's word will go forward, and it will bear fruit in the way that he wishes for it to bear fruit. At times it's more, at times it's less. I am praying for another day of Pentecost, like in 31 A.D., where the Holy Spirit descended and 3,000 were baptized. I don't think that's going to happen next week. But I'm hopeful that, with us being prepared, with our eyes wide open to the great vision before us, as we take a look at the vision statement of bringing many sons in glory into the family of God, with everyone doing their part. And then the mission, which is the way we get there, is to preach the gospel into all the world, and then to make disciples and to care for them is what our life is all about. Well, it's been great talking to you, looking forward to visiting with you after services.