Vision for the Church, Part 1

Good morning, everyone! On this very beautiful Sabbath in the Miami area, which maybe is not the correct term, but it's what it is to us, and we're very happy to see you come from so many places, from Fort Myers, from Bureau Beach, from Orlando, from everywhere. And I just feel very, very inspired and hyped up, mostly by Stan Brown Miller than anything else right now, and hopefully the Spirit of God. But he really gets me very, very much on kind of mental steroids whenever I see him. Anyway, I just am so very, very happy to be here with my wife, Beverly, and I just want to thank you so much for all the special wishes, goodwill statements, and the warm greetings that I received here in walking into this room and the statements of support, not for me so much, but the support for the Church of God and the work of the Church that has yet to be done, which we are so very happy for. We're also very happy to be with Chuck and Mary Smith, whom we've gotten to know. Actually, we haven't known them for too many years, but we met them for the first time, or maybe before that once, but met them when they came to the home office all about two years ago or so, and just had a very nice visit with them. And we have just been very inspired by the work that they did on their own in the Caribbean in particular and in service to God's people. And we are so excited and so very happy to be able to have him function as a full-time elder in this area and also in the Caribbean. So we decided that we would come to see you and that we would come to visit with them, and the visit has been very wonderful. We came in yesterday a little bit afternoon and spent the afternoon talking about the various things that can be done for the Church and how we could move things forward, and was very, very inspiring. Then we went out to the beach and walked the beach for a couple of miles, probably up and down, and my wife and I said, sometimes we don't get vacation time, but this is vacation. It was wonderful, you know. People pay big money to go to the beach, you know, and to see the beauty and the excitement. And so we were there and I had a very, very enjoyable time. And look forward to the baptism this afternoon. I did bring my swimming trunks and I'm waiting to wade into the water and help Mr. Smith with the baptism this afternoon. So looking forward to that. Also, we were greeted very warmly by Mr. Juan Laguer, and it was just very interesting to talk to him. Of course, we got the whole history of the Church.

And it was just very interesting to hear from him and his well-wishes, and also Bill Wilson, whom I have not seen for years. I remember our contact in that or our relationship. Well, we didn't know each other that well, but back going to Ambassador College days, and maybe other people here that I've been named. But the Braumellers have been to the home office for ABC Continuing Education. And again, he just is a very, both of them, are very inspiring and very enthusiastic people. Also, as I mentioned, my wife Beverly is here. My wife Beverly is an constrictable part of my ministry, and the things that God has allowed for me to do, I would not be able to do what I am doing, or neither would I even be here if it wasn't for my wife Beverly. And she has been part of everything that I do, from church services to the work with humanitarian projects that we do, to advisor to everything else. Most of my ministry, in the field ministry, and serving churches, I have always had two churches. There's only one year out of nearly 40 years that I only had one church. And that was when I was promoted from associate pastor to pastor, and that time there was only one church for me to pastor, but I started another one shortly thereafter. But in almost 32 years of marriage, my wife has maybe, and I have gone to two services all the time, most of the time. Sometimes we have only one service I've sat with, but I've always pastored at least two churches. But my wife Beverly has gone with me to almost everyone. I would say maybe two or three times in all that time that she didn't go to both services and was fully engaged with the work that is being done. So I just that kind of speaks for itself. Do you want to say that Mr. Smith said that I should give the sermonette time and the regular time, so I'm not sure exactly what's going to happen here. I think what I'll do is I'll talk for a while, and if it seems to go okay, I'll just keep talking. And if it doesn't go so well, I'll stop, and maybe you could sing some more songs, and then I can talk some more. So we'll kind of see how that goes. We're a little bit indefinite about that, but I also want to say is that I enjoyed the inspiring choir that sang, the strong voices, and I really appreciate singing songs that are biblical and appropriate for the Sabbath. Not to say that we don't sing appropriate songs for the Sabbath, but something that really has meaningful words that put me into a spirit of worship, worshiping God on the Sabbath day. I do thank you for both the songs that were sung. Excellent. Just a couple bits of news here, and I'll kind of work myself into what I wanted to talk about, and some of that you may already know because of what you have heard maybe on CDs, DVDs, and right now my wife tells me that whatever you say, remember that it's going to be recorded, and remember that it'll be published, and remember it'll be blogged about, and everything else. So, you know, we have to, you know, what I'm saying is that so many things that I say in one church may already get around, you know, to other places.

But this coming Wednesday, I'll be leaving for the Philippines with the senior pastor Earl Romer, who I've known for many, many years. In fact, I used to work for him at one time back from 1974 to 1975, and he was the pastor of Cape Girardeau in Paducah, and I worked for him, and little did we know that years later that we would wind up in a different environment. He is actually an associate pastor right now in Alaska, but also the senior pastor for the Philippines. He is an amazing person in how he respects people who are disadvantaged and, you know, people in poor areas. He works extremely well with people in international areas. I have a lot of deep respect for him. His wife died a little over a year ago. She died in May of 2012, and Beverly and I were up there to do her the memorial for Carol, who was just one of the finest Christians around. You wonder why does that kind of person have to go when sometimes we could have a list of people that we would tell God to prioritize to take, you know, and not the best people of all. She was truly an amazing Christian, and they had a very, very fine family with four children. But we'll be going to the Philippines and visiting all three major areas. In the Philippines, we have 26 churches in Bible studies. We have seven elders. We have an office that mails out, I think, 5 or 6 thousand good news magazines. I may be incorrect about that, but a very, very viable work in very enthusiastic churches that we've had contact with over the years, but I've never been to the Philippines. And so I'm looking forward to that visit. We're going to be wearing the local garb, which I am very, to me, almost as big a fascination as anything on this trip. They're called barongs. They're not sarongs, but barongs. They're big oversized shirts that even the president of Philippines wears all the time. So it'll be a comfortable trip. I guess it's about either as hot or hotter than the temperature is here and more humid. And it's the typhoon season, I understand. So just before hurricane season, we're leaving here and headed for typhoon season in the Philippines. One of the interesting things, it may not be maybe the biggest news for you, but we are doing some significant changes to our TV studio for very little cost. You mean, if you were to come to see our TV studio, how many of you see the Beyond Today television program from time to time? Okay, so you're kind of aware of how it's all set up. The area in which it's done is extremely small, very, very small. In fact, it's so small that the presenters cannot stand up. You cannot stand up and do a program because he'll be knocking your head against the lights and there's no room to put a camera above or, you know, to be able to do it properly. But what we're doing is we're cutting the stage down, actually taking things out, to try to produce an area where the speaker will stand behind not exactly podium, but it's called cafe tables where he could kind of stand, but he could also kind of move away and talk to the audience in a little bit more animated way rather than just sitting at a desk. So we're gonna have like these, you know, cafe tables, the kind of higher table.

They just gave us appearance, sent us out a whole bunch of styles that they will be. And so the program hopefully will have a different little bit of spirit to it, perhaps even more spirited in having a presenter be able to talk more naturally rather than sitting at a desk. Also, a few of our presenters, some of it that is said is read through a teleprompter. It's really scripted to a great degree, but we're trying to produce a program now with maybe just the first two, three sentences that are on a teleprompter, and then the rest of the program will be just like a minister giving a sermon.

We're trying to produce a very natural, a very spirited, a very compelling type of speaking rather than to have something that is carefully read. So anyway, that's kind of what's happening here, and we really do want to hopefully break through the market even more completely.

We have quite a bit of response. It's a different kind of response. Right now, as Mr. Chuck Smith tells me, that he stays home after the program because there are people who see the 800 number, then people no longer really write as much as they used to. In fact, we get very few letters from this, but they will call an 800 number.

They will take the safest route. They will go to the website, and then they will go to a local website and find out where they live, what there is with the United Church of God locally. Then they will find Chuck Smith's name, and they'll find the telephone number, and they'll call him. He gets a number of telephone calls after the program. But it isn't like it used to be where most of us, when we listened to the World Tomorrow program on the radio, and then there was an address to write to. There was no internet.

There was no 800 number. There was no any kind of number to call. It was always carefully listening to box 111. That was burned into our heads as the address for the kingdom of God. Box 111, for a year, listened to that. You couldn't forget it. I can't forget it now after all these years. Then people wrote to box 111, and that's how you made contact. But right now, there are so many other different ways. People say that this makes things harder, and this makes it more difficult for us to be able to reach people. I disagree. I do believe that every era in the history of God's work had its ups and downs, had its upside and downside.

The Roman Empire, I mean, they didn't have telephone. They didn't have, you know, communications like we do now. There was no cell phones, no copy machines, no internet, no Twitter, no Facebook or anything. How in the world did the church ever get going? In those times. But you read the history of the New Testament church, and I'm fascinated by it. To me, every time that I read through the epistles of Paul and the book of Acts and try to put it together, I am amazed as to how the church with the trials and obstacles it had, but also the upside was able to do its work.

And in the Roman times, there was the advantage of the fact that that whole area was under one administration and the fact that Paul had a passport to every single place. I mean, truly, God knew what he was doing. Of course, God always knows what he's doing. But God had picked the right person who had a background in the Gentile world, but also who was a Pharisee, actually probably the most educated of all Christians. There's no other Christian who was, you know, most other leaders of the New Testament church were fishermen, builders, tax collectors.

I mean, the only thing they weren't was learned men. The only one that we have record of was the Apostle Paul, who was learned, sounded learned, and was very well versed with the law of Moses, but also was very well versed personally by Jesus Christ in the training that he received from him. And God used this man with his passport that saved him a number of times to travel through Asia Minor. It seemed like he had no trouble at all getting across to Philippi.

You know, this was his first stopover in Europe, and then move on down to, you know, Thessalonica, and on down to Berea, Athens, Corinth, you know, all the churches that he visited. In fact, he was a formidable force because when people threatened him, he said, hey, guess what? I'm a Roman citizen, you know, oh, sorry about that. We didn't mean to hurt you, you know. The Apostle Paul was able to do a work at that time, and the church grew, and the church became the nucleus for the powerful presence that is had to this very day and even in your life that God has created. In the 1950s and 60s, and I started listening to The World Tomorrow in the 1960s on daily radio over and over and over again.

It had its allure. I sent off to box 111 in an envelope and received literature, received the Bible study course, and became involved that way. Now we have generations that think differently.

We have my generation, which is the baby boomers that think one way. We have the generation exers, those from about 40 to 60 years old, that think another way. Then we have the millennials from about age 20, 25 to 40, whatever. Those born between 1980, I should say, and 2005. So they would be there up to 30 some years old. Think yet another way. But I do believe that we need to understand how to work that particular group of people, how to talk to them, how do they relate to things. In our home office, we have people from all those generations working together, and that's what I'm trying to do, is that we have some of us old people, older people, let's put it that way, older people, that think in terms of how technology and how information was transmitted 40 some years ago. There are those who are sort of in between, and then there are those right now that walk around tweeting all day and texting and communicating in different ways. They send things on Pinterest and send pictures of flowers, of scriptures, and get thousands of people to look at them. And it's just a different way that they think, and we have to appreciate how they think.

The last president who was elected was elected because of a grassroots effort of massively engaging young people to get a message about him through modern mythology. And I do believe that, just like the Apostle Paul, who was able to use his Roman citizenship, who was able to use his education as a learned scholar and as a Benjamite academician, and also as a person who had the courage to be able to stand up in Athens and give this very clever presentation about the unknown God, God worked with people in that way at that time. And now I just pray that we can be his instruments to have him work with us in a way that's suitable for our time today. Now people say that, well, it's just really difficult to crack into a market because it's so divided and so fractured. But I was examining here and talking with a few people in media about the fact that there are groups that are very successful. In being able to reach many people. I'm not talking about their message, I'm talking about the fact that they are effective in reaching people. And I truly believe, I truly believe the best days for the United Church of God are at hand and that we can truly do something yet. And I say that with real positiveness. But Bev and I have been reading the Bible. Now I'll have to tell you this because it's something that really tells you just about how things are happening now. We like to read the Bible, or had been reading the Bible to each other in the mornings. And then my son comes by and he's, you know, obviously from a younger generation, says, Dad, have you tried the Youverse app? And I said, No. And he's sitting there on the couch just relaxing and just, I hear the Bible being read to him. Well, I said, No, I haven't heard of it. He says, Yeah, he says you just download it. It's free. And then it'll read the Bible to you. I thought to myself, well, I don't believe this because I'm sure you have to pay something like $100 for it. You know, remember how we used to buy Bible on cassette and paid $100-$200 for it, you know, and had to get different cassettes out? Why would somebody give this to you for free?

And here I find that I could download Youverse. In the mornings now, Bev, instead of reading, we listen to two, three, or four chapters of the Bible being read to us. And we could have it read in five different translations, not by some computer voice, but by a real human being that, you know, reads it to us. So we've been doing that, you know, but never questioned, never questioned where it came from. Then we find out, and I was talking with Clay Thornton, one of our senior producers, that, Hey, have you heard of Youverse? He said, Yeah, I have. Do you know the church that's behind it? I said, Well, I didn't even know there was a church behind it. Their number one mission, in fact, maybe their only mission, is by young people whose mission is to put a Bible app on every mobile phone in the world. That's their mission! And you get it for free.

And their mission is somewhat like the Gideon's that have a mission of putting Bibles into hotel rooms. That's their mission, and that's what makes them go. Their mission of this church, I'm not sure the name of it is called Life Church or something of that kind, their mission is to put the Bible on mobile devices. And right now, I've got the Bible on my cell phone. I've got the Bible on my tablet. I can refer to it. I find myself, even when I traveled to Wyoming a couple weeks ago, not even take a Bible with me on the trip, because I had it on several different Kindle versions and U-verse versions that made it easy for me to access it without having to even carry a Bible. It made it even easier for me on a plane to just open it up and just flip through and even search. So it's a different world. And this particular group has grown into the tens of thousands, literally overnight, because people are passionate about that particular cause. So why am I saying this? We need to find some very specific niche that we are passionate about. And we have several different products that we can release. I believe the Kingdom of God is one of them. I know that when I listened to the World Tomorrow program, it was prophecy. I don't know if that's the center and front place to go right now. I honestly don't. There are so many people preaching the same thing, but we do have a particular edge about certain very, very noble truths that people pick up their ears and listen too carefully. I truly believe that some of what we preach about the Kingdom of God being a very, very literal kingdom that's coming to this earth, because it connects with people's desire to fix this world and makes it relevant to them. I truly believe that we are going to be able to be a voice that's heard even in this noisy world with mixed technologies and mixed generations, a voice that truly broke through, whether it was in the Apostle Paul's time, or when he came to Ephesus, really just a big, grimy, gentile port city.

And where the commentary about the Apostle Paul's work was, he turned the city upside down. I mean, that's what the book of Acts says. He turned Ephesus upside down. In fact, the merchants were all upset at the Apostle Paul because the makers of the little Diana trinkets and idols said, he's got a wreck, our business and so forth. When the Apostle Paul came through, he had impact.

When the Apostle came through, even to Philippi, he was thrown into prison. He was thrown into prison because he made some kind of a splash. He went to other places and, you know, received either a rebuff, like he did in Athens, but other places, like in Corinth, God whispered to him in a vision, go there. There's a lot of growth there, which was a response to his lack of success or the fact that there wasn't much going on in Athens. So I'm just pointing out to you how God is working. And one of the scriptures I think about a lot is, let's not be unwise in not understanding what the will of God is. Maybe not our will, but God revealed to us what it is that you want us to do in fulfilling your work. We are not doing God's work. God is doing God's work, but we are his instruments, and we are those whom he uses to get things done. And if we have humility, and if we look not to ourselves and to our great thoughts and to our wisdom, but to what God is accomplishing and will accomplish, and if it's not going to be accomplished through us, believe me, he can just say, okay, I'm done with you. I'm going to go work with these people. I still want God to use us to be able to accomplish something very, very specific and something very, very real. When I became president, I had a couple of people make some comments to me that I have taken very much to heart. And one of them was from a young man who said to me, please don't allow the United Church of God to become another dusty C.O.G. to be another place that is having aging people, collecting dust, and not really doing anything. And that statement really stuck to me. I know that our demographics that we have from the young to old, but I do believe that from young to old, we have a part in being able to do the work of God. Starting from the oldest, like Anna the prophetess, who was a hundred years old or so, she prayed for God's work day and night. And God felt that was an important enough statement to be canonized and said this was her part in doing the work of God. She prayed day and night for the work of God. That was her part in doing the work. There are three chapters in the New Testament that talk about spiritual gifts, about specific gifts, good things that God gives to His people as a function of the Holy Spirit. They range from prophesying to preaching to administering to helping to being merciful to healing. There are over 20 gifts that are mentioned in the New Testament. And I truly believe that that's not all the gifts. Those are just the ones that are mentioned. But God gives to His people special tools to be able to do special functions. Some are administrators, some are leaders, some are teachers, some are prophets, some are evangelists. Some of those that can stand up and motivate and move a crowd. Others that can teach a very good point. I know of one particular speaker. He's a local church elder that has an amazing gift, amazing gift, of being able to make a point very, very clear. In fact, he gave a sermonette, this was a couple years back, about the unjust steward. I thought, this is the first time that I really understood it just that way.

Because it's a little bit difficult to explain about how this unjust steward really is commended by God. But he made it very, very clear. He had, I believe, a gift because he's done it, how he works and talks to young people, and how he explains certain scriptures that we think we may know, but maybe not fully know. And so God is working with his people by giving them spiritual gifts. God is working with young people in the church. And one thing that we have really paid special attention to, and that I, when I was still worked with ministerial services, and I still hold that title right now, but I work with a team of people, is to be able to develop a youth and young adults program of not just organizing a lot of activities for them, but to be able to talk about things that are really on their minds about what they want to do for the work. I have had young adults, I've had people, of course, young now is a very relative term. You know, young is anything under 82 or so.

That want to accomplish and do something for the work of God. They want to actually make a difference.

And they have a romantic vision of being able to make a difference. And we have those people in our office. As I said, our office contains very young people. The managing editor of the United News is probably, I'll get the age wrong, but it's probably no more than 26, 27 years old. And very mature, but he thinks like a millennial. And I talked to him like a millennial, and we really have a very good rapport back and forth with him because I'm older, he's younger, but he comes in, he asks for ideas, we talk about things. But, you know, I don't look upon him as a competitor or somebody who has thinks in a way that's offensive. I just realize that with all the tools that he has and with what he's grown up with, he has a different way that he gets around. He also gets along real well with me because I give him direction and things that we want to produce and say. And we usually come to a meeting of his ideas and my ideas. But he's a millennial.

Our producers, those that produce the festival video, for example, what you see in the festival video, which you'll see even this year, are not produced by old timers. You'll be seeing old timers on the screen like me. But the production, the music, the tempo, the cutouts, how things are emphasized is all done by millennials, by Rudy Rangel, by Clint Porter, by some of our young men who have exceptional wisdom, but in their way of doing it. It'll be different. But it's a function of all of us working together. I want to tell you a little bit about our festival video, that we did a lot of work on producing just this past week. In fact, the feast this year is early. It's on the Roman calendar. It's going to be way over with, way before. My birthday always falls during the feast, and here I come home and it's still two more weeks until my birthday.

But anyway, we decided that we better get on with the festival video. What can we do?

Because we've had a lot of big changes this past year with the death of Denny Luecker and the things that he would have said and that he would have done. What in the world are we going to say?

So we had a brainstorming session about two weeks ago and talked about what we would want to say.

And in discussion, we came to Philippians 2 and verse 5 as the theme for our festival video. Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. And what we wanted to emphasize there is that our faith, our belief, our conversion is a function of mind, of an intellect, of intelligence, of reasoning, of knowledge. It is not something that we just all of a sudden come to by emotion or some type of osmosis that we can't describe. Our salvation is a function of education. In fact, one person said, it might be stretching it too far, that salvation is education. I think that's probably maybe stretching it a little bit there. But in order for you to understand what you have to do, in order for you to know what the commandments of God are and what your responsibilities are, is a function of being instructed and being told. Now, it may be by your finding a Bible and reading it for yourself. That's still being educated. But in a vast number of cases, it is something which has had to be explained to you. It's something that had to be shown to you. It's something that had to be read to you. Something that had to require you to ask questions for you to grasp a better understanding of it. So we decided to have the theme is, let this mind be in you, which is also in Christ Jesus. And then we started talking about, well, how can we talk about the various ways in which we educate people? And, you know, we were actually very, very pleasantly surprised by all the various means that the church since 1995 has been able to educate people. It's been massive. It's been far more than we even dreamed when you really take a look at it. Because when you're just working it day by day, you see the good news here. You see what we had with vertical thought. You know we had a Bible study course. You know we've got booklets out there. You know we've got reprint articles. We know we have a website. We know that there's a section for the members on the website. We get the United News. You know, we have all these things, but it's almost like it's natural. It's something that's taken for granted. And we took a closer look at all the things that we have. We have produced over 100 issues of the Good News Magazine, which contain not only timely articles, but timeless articles. In other words, you can go and find the Good News that's 10 years old and say, here's an article that really makes sense to me. All of this is online. All of this is searchable. All of this is something that you could piece together and find for yourself. We have a Bible study course. Even though I'd like to do a rework of the Bible study course, we had one person who requested it just this past week said, please send it to me on paper. I can't get that kind of stuff on computers. I just don't know how to work it too well. I want paper. Well, we need to produce perhaps a little bit more interactive, interplaying with questions and answers type of Bible study course. And that's going to be one of my projects here in this coming year, to produce a course that really is more gripping and compelling and engaging, where people after four lessons will start asking questions, well, so what? What do I do with this stuff now? What am I responsible for? Like in the old 58 lesson, Bible study course, it was not until you got to lesson 13 or 14 that we got people to feel responsible. Like what about what you have learned? What are you going to do with the knowledge that you have acquired? Now that you know about who the true Jesus Christ is and what salvation is, where do you fit? What is your obligation? So we'd like to produce a course that's more that way.

We have study papers that are available to everybody. Study papers that have been produced by the Council of Elders and by various committees, dealing with various things relating to church services, relating to jury duty, and I mean all kinds of other biblical questions that you can find on our website by going to members.ucg.org and under study papers. I think it'd be good for us to really go back and explore the various things that we have. We have ABC. We're accepting our 14th class for ABC, which is going to be one of our bigger ones. We have just accepted, well, we have 40 people have been accepted for the new year starting August, the third week of August, but we have two more who just sent in applications, so we may have upwards of 42 or more people for this coming year of ABC. This is going to actually be one of our bigger classes of recent times. We have ABC Continuing Education, as we will have here in Florida, where instructors will come and do, you know, a series of courses for, you know, a span of days. We have all of our ABC classes. We have them all recorded and online that could be listened to by anybody. So we say, well, these people get all this knowledge and we just can't get it. Yes, you can. You can go to the ABC website, abc.ucg.org, and go under courses, and there you will have all the classes. You can listen to in-depth presentations about all the epistles of Paul, the harmony of the Gospels, with the survey of the Old Testament, the general epistles, tremendous classes that are biblical classes, plus other classes on other subjects, as well as finance, prophecy, and other subjects.

So that's going to be our theme then for the feast video, and I gave the core message for it on Monday to our home office staff. We have every morning at every Monday morning at nine o'clock we have what's called Focus Meeting, and we spread it around to where every employee is assigned his week to do his or her presentation about what they do in their department. And actually, it helps draw us closer together and helps us to understand what other people do in their job. We only speak for 15 or 20 minutes, and we had Emma Kennebec that talked about how, you know, she processes mail and what she reads and the types of things are sent out, you know, that we even in our office didn't know or appreciate. And then once every month we have it videoed to where it's put on our website. This last video was by Richard Kennebec about how we manage IT. We had a presentation by Gary Antion about education. We had another presentation by Peter Eddington about media. Gary Antion was very entertaining, probably for you people in Florida. He talked about how ABC did a fundraiser, which was for a well in Africa, and we call those wells boreholes. But in the video he called them sinkholes.

We have a fundraiser for sinkholes for people in Zambia. I thought, oh, I'm not sure if they edited that out or not, but we gave them a hard time about that. So that's the theme then for the Feast of Tabernacles video. What I thought that I would do, in fact, I think that at this point maybe we could have a song. Is that okay? Or are we in trouble with the CDs? Or is this going to be acapella? Well, let's have it be something. Okay, let's take a break for a song, and then I'll continue on with the by message.