As I watch the documentary, “Waiting For Superman,” I can’t help but see how our Adventist Church is suffering with a similar problem the American school system is currently experiencing.
Waiting For Superman — “Documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim explores the tragic ways in which the American public education system is failing our nation’s children, and explores the roles that charter schools and education reformers could play in offering hope for the future. We see the statistics every day — students dropping out, science and math scores falling, and schools closing due to lack of funding. What we don’t see are the names and faces of the children whose entire futures are at stake due to our own inability to enact change. There was a time when the American public education system was a model admired by the entire world.” [READ MORE HERE]
Watch this short video clip about the above movie before reading more…
Many of our conferences, churches, schools, and medical facilities are failing in the Great Commission of Matthew 28 and we continue to do the “Conference Employee Shuffle” or “the Dance of the Lemons” instead of trimming the fat.
- Instead of equipping our church leaders with the administrative tools they need to be effective, we tie their hands with slow moving bureaucracy and traditional committees.
- Instead of letting go of conference employees who choose to ignore our fundamental beliefs, promote secular agendas, fail to equip and lead the members into mission, etc, we do the “Conference Employee Shuffle” because we are afraid to offend them.
When will we realize that what we are currently doing is not working (don’t worry, I’ll give our current GC leaders a chance to bring about revival and reformation before I say, “Final answer!”). Whatever we do, we need to stop shuffling ineffective conference employees around and get serious about our mission to seek and to save those who are lost. If a teacher, professor, conference president, pastor, etc. does not want to have a real walk with God that produces results-driven fruit on the Adventist tree, then we need to prayerfully remove the “roadblocks” that cause us to sit idle and spiritually dead (dying).
Let’s continue to pray for our church and do all that we can to hold our leaders accountable to God’s vision and mission.
BetterLiving
April 13, 2011
Actually my experience differs from this writers complaint. I was a worker with a deep and abiding life-long desire to lead and equip church members for the mission of the church. I was not among that number who questioned and quibbled with standard SDA theology. My life-long journey to know and do God’s will was uninterupted, while I rejoiced more and more in the work of God’s grace. Yet I was dropped from church employment for no given reason, other than the complaints of members who resisted the message of God’s grace and resented and stone-walled efforts to engage them in community outreach. Since that time, at the age of 57 I’ve floundered in my attempts to muster the entrepreneurial skills, networks and funding necessary to survive in the business world, while my heart is still yearning to be engaged in ministry. I woud say, instead of letting experienced workers go, the church ought to have available a process by which that experience can be salvaged and put to good use in the cause of Christ. But sadly the contrary is true. When my conference dropped me from empolyment, having never had a negative review of my service, I was never contacted again, by anyone at any administrative level of the church. So quick and clean and cold was the ‘divorce’ that the very following month my copy of MINISTRY magazine was cancelled! The church effectively threw me away when the very best years of my ministry were just ahead, with the accumulation of experience, wisdom and skill that 22 years in ministry represented.