Editorial

Push Buttons and Promises

Church members today do not need to push buttons as much as they need real challenges.

Leo R. Van Dolson is an executive editor of Ministry.

 

ONE OF MY first summer jobs was in a shipyard in San Francisco. The job consisted of sitting on a cushioned seat arranged on the tool carriage of a large Niles Planer, and pushing the buttons that would keep the machine going back and forth in proper sequence. It was one of the largest planers I have ever seen. The tool carrier moved back and forth in monotonous repetition on about forty feet of railroad tracks, and the steel that was being cut was set up on a stationary platform. Since I was working the mid night shift my hardest problem on this job was that of trying to stay awake. There is no question about it. That was one of the most difficult jobs I have ever been assigned.

We have come to a time when too much of our work is associated with merely pushing buttons. In fact, this philosophy seems to have spread throughout the church. Too often we as leaders conscientiously, yet mistakenly, are engaged in an effort to give church members more and more push buttons.

In our eager attempts to help them accomplish their work as quickly and efficiently as possible we provide programs that promise maximum results
with very little effort if they will just follow the right steps. The problem with this approach is that we condition them to think that missionary effort doesn't
need to involve much time or energy. All we have to do is push the right but tons, and there will be a bountiful harvest of converts. When it doesn't work
out quite as promised they become discouraged and lose interest in any soul-winning effort.

Church members today do not need push buttons as much as they need real challenges. In recent months we have seen again that when our members really feel challenged they respond far beyond our expectations. This was certainly true of the appeal to build churches in South India. But when there is no challenge it is easy to be lulled to sleep. What is the moral? Isn't it time to get away from the push-button complex and recognize that our people do respond to challenges that require some initiative and unusual personal effort on their part?

Even in those places where Seventh-day Adventist work has been most active and results have been most encouraging as in South America, Inter-America, and Africa we find that when the number of active members is compared with those who are inactive, it is still true that most of our members are not really involved. This points up a perennial problem the lack of properly training our members to do the work that the ministry of the church can never accomplish by itself.

However, there is an even more basic problem that underlies this lack of training. Often lately we have heard that ministers just aren't being taught how
to train and use church members. If this is so, our basic problem seems to be that of discovering ways and means of reorienting our worldwide ministry to the need of involving church members and then showing them how to go about doing so.

It is more important for the minister to be recognized as the leader of a soul-winning team than to be widely acclaimed as a great soul winner himself. In our Ministerial Advisory in Vienna, Pastor Ruben Pereyra pointed out that surveys among apostatized Seventh-day Adventists in South America showed that 92 per cent who did apostatize did not join other churches and still considered themselves Seventh-day Adventists. In fact, 95 per cent of those contacted indicated that they would like to come back to the church.

Pastor Alvin Cook, Ministerial Association secretary in Trans-Africa, reporting on studies conducted in that area, emphasized that most of the apostasies that are taking place in the church occur after ten years. As was brought out at that meeting, we really don't understand what apostasy is if we think that the main problem is lack of careful preparation of members in evangelistic campaigns. The point is that many of those who join our ranks
seem to be willing to sit in the church doing nothing for from eight to ten years, but then they decide that they can sit just as well at home. This, of course, leads to apostasy.

With this background in mind, we see that apostasy is not based so much on lack of agreement with the teachings of the church as it is on lack of involvement in the church's soul-winning program. Don't you think that instead of developing more push-button programs that promise church members easy and immediate results we need to interest and challenge them in that area of service they feel that they can most adequately perform, and then carefully train them to become, from that point on, full-fledged members of the soul-winning team?

L.R.V.D.


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Leo R. Van Dolson is an executive editor of Ministry.

February 1976

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