The minister's resource center

One objective of the General Conference Ministerial Association during this quinquennium is to develop a resource center that will make more readily available materials that ministers can use in their work. The Ministerial Supply Center is just now beginning to function. MINISTRY interviewed W. Floyd Bresee, secretary of the association, about what the center is already doing, and his dreams for its future.

Floyd Bresee is the secretary of the Ministerial Association of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

MINISTRY: From time to time you have remarked that you feel one of the most important things the General Conference Ministerial Association can do for the pastor in the field is to help him to find the tools he needs to do his work. Why do you consider that so important?

Bresee: One reason I feel it is particularly important for us is that it especially fits the General Conference function as I see it. It is unrealistic to think that the General Conference Ministerial Association is going to be all things to all pastors. Some things can be done best at the local level and should be done there. For example, sitting down and encouraging an individual minister is best done at the local level. On the other hand, preparing tools and materials can be done more economically at the world level. Because we serve the whole world we can produce materials in higher quantities and thus sell them for less money. And some parts of the world don't have the expertise or money available to develop tools.

MINISTRY: So you're talking about general materials that would be adaptable to various fields.

Bresee: This is very important. This is one of the problems we are concerned about in establishing the Ministerial Supply Center. We don't want to prepare materials that are useful only in North America. Actually there is a greater need for our help in other fields than in North America.

MINISTRY: What types of tools do you have in mind?

Bresee: Everything from baptismal certificates to videotaped Bible studies. Visual aids will probably make up a high percentage of the things that we will be providing.

MINISTRY: Visual aids that the evangelist or pastor can use?

Bresee: Yes.

MINISTRY: But a lot of tools are being produced. Is there no one currently making them all available? Didn't the North American Division recently produce a resource catalog listing what is available?

Bresee: What we have in mind would probably never be as complete as the NAD resource catalog. I think they have brought together all of the tools that they were aware of. We are thinking of being involved with a more limited listing of materials and only those that have proved to be most successful.

I want to emphasize that we do not intend to take over the work of the local divisions. Some of the divisions are already active in preparing evangelistic equipment, and we surely don't intend to compete with them. On the other hand, some divisions are not able to keep a strong program going. What often hap pens is that when a division office has an individual who is interested in visual aids, they have an active program. But when that person leaves or retires, the program falls dead.

Another thing I would like to emphasize is that it is not our intention to take away business from our publishing houses. For example, we are now selling the baptismal certificate and the profession of faith certificate. They are printed by the Review and Herald, and the press used to do the marketing, too, but the market for these certificates is limited to ministers. The publishing houses are better equipped for selling to the membership at large.

I would like to pass on another disclaimer, too. It is not our intention to provide materials that would be competing with the other General Conference departments. We are coordinating this program with other departments, particularly the General Conference Church Ministries Department. We have no intention of taking over every thing that has to do with soul winning. Our concern is specifically with those items of particular use to ministers.

MINISTRY: So the Ministerial Supply Center is going to be kind of a store where ministers can get what they particularly need.

Bresee: Yes, and also, because we have the advantage of having MINISTRY magazine, we will be able to communicate with the ministers about materials that are useful to them.

MINISTRY: There seems to be a wide gap between North America and much of the rest of the world: An abundance of material is available for evangelistic work here in North America, but evangelists in other areas would be happy if they could find only a Picture Roll to use. Would the supply center help to assure availability of useful materials for more cultures?

Bresee: Probably if it were not for this particular need we would not have set up the center. I am convinced that the greatest need for it is in the developing countries. Now we must be careful that we don't presume that somebody from the Western world can prepare materials that fit either the language or the culture of a local area, but we think we are coming up with a program whereby our materials can be especially adapted to the developing countries.

Traveling in the developing countries and seeing the tremendous evangelistic potential of simple things we take for granted here has laid this burden on me. For example, I was up in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, and the district pastor—a man who was a missionary from Australia—said that he depended heavily upon a simple projector. In many of those countries where mechanical materials are not readily available, mechanical expertise is rare, so you don't want to have anything fancy. You don't want to have generators, you don't want to have any more moving parts than necessary. This missionary was telling me that what he uses is a small battery-operated projector with a solar panel to charge the battery during the day. He likes to go out into the primitive areas with a sheet. He doesn't want a screen—they get too dusty in the truck—just a white sheet and a piece of string. He goes into a village unannounced, hangs the sheet from the string, turns on the projector, and in a half hour he has half the village interested. He will stay for a week or two, and a very high percentage of the people in the entire area will eventually spend every evening with him.

Now, as soon as these kinds of visual aids become generally available they will no longer be that attractive. Our problem is that we can't afford to provide these materials now, but now is the time when there is so much potential. So we must find a way to get some simple visual aid materials to the economically impaired areas while they are still fresh and new.

MINISTRY: Some of this has been done, I understand, through the World Medics program. You are speaking of wanting to expand this?

Bresee: Dr. Ernest Booth, who was originally a biology teacher within the church and then became engrossed in providing visual aids, set up a program that was to a large degree financed by missionary-minded physicians and others. They found that there was no good projector available for the kind of need that we are talking about, so they designed their own and marketed it for several years. The design is now owned by the General Conference. The projectors are manufactured by a company in Japan. This Opix projector is small, and it has no moving parts, so it is ideal for primitive areas. It can be hooked up to a motorcycle or car or portable battery and can go anywhere.

MINISTRY: So we have procured the rights to produce this projector as well as some materials that Don Gray has developed Bible studies. This is in a sense the beginning of the Ministerial Supply Center's work, then?

Bresee: That's right. For several years some of the administrators here at the General Conference had been talking with Don Gray, and finally it was voted and we have purchased all of his inventory, which mostly consists of his GoodNews filmstrip series of 30 subjects, and we purchased the projectors that he had been handling since Booth died.

MINISTRY: Don will be retiring one day do you anticipate that further development of these materials will go on after that?

Bresee: That's one of the great problems we face. We are hoping eventually that we will have a person here at the General Conference Ministerial Association whose principle responsibility is to keep this project alive and growing.

MINISTRY: And to provide updates so that the material doesn't become dated?

Bresee: That's right!

MINISTRY: The stock that is available includes some 70,000 master slides on various biblical themes. Will some of this be available for divisions to use to develop their own materials?

Bresee: Our only interest, of course, is in serving the field. If the logistics of a thing like that could be worked out, I would know of no reason against it. But I think our plan is more in the area of a division coming to us, explaining their need, and letting us prepare a solution for them. We would use this material in cooperation with them.

An example of how this could work is in progress right now. Don, his wife (who has had a large part in developing this program), and a professional photographer recently went to the Far Eastern Division to work on a program in affiliation with that division and the Ministerial Supply Center. They traveled to different parts of the division and took pictures with a local flavor. They sat down with people from that division who will adapt Gray's basic doctrinal series to each culture. If a Westerner tried to do that alone it would not come out quite right.

So our plan is this: We can take a large number of pictures and have them available among our materials, but some one in the local field must actually take the script of the original series, make changes, adaptations, and suggest different scenes that ought to occur in the pictures.

Second, the local field will do the translating. In fact, the type will be set in the local publishing house. The idea is that they do what they do best and we do what we do best. Out of that one trip to the Far East, we hope to have six or seven new series that will be adaptations of Gray's original Good News for Today series.

MINISTRY: In other words, series developed for six. or seven new cultural settings?

Bresee: Yes, and languages.

MINISTRY: An entire 30-filmstrip series?

Bresee: I think there will probably be 24; the series will be slightly abbreviated.

MINISTRY: In conclusion, just share with us your dreams. What would you like to see the Ministerial Supply Center become? What would you like to see it accomplish?

Bresee: I would like to see us make the best tools available to our ministers at the least expense. I don't think this should necessarily mean that we develop the materials. Many times it is best to pick the best materials being developed some place else and give them wider distribution.

I have a dream that maybe some day—perhaps once a year—MINISTRY magazine could publish an analysis of the best tools that are available. And let pastors know how to get them.

I would like to see us change and adapt the materials that are so available in the industrialized world and make them available to the developing world at a price they can afford.

MINISTRY: Would you see us stocking materials, or mainly providing lists?

Bresee: I think we should stock a few of the most popular materials that have the greatest worldwide demand and sell them through the Central Departmental Services here at the General Conference. But in order to hold prices down, I would like to see us accept orders from divisions. For example, at present when we want more Opix projectors, we have to turn in a large order to the manufacturer. This can require a heavy outlay of capital. And the projectors are shipped from Japan to the United States, then we have to ship them all over the world. Rather than stocking so many projectors, I would like to see us coordinate a large cooperative order from various divisions. Each division would order from the supply center, and when enough orders had accumulated we would contact the manufacturer. When the projectors were manufactured they would be shipped directly to the ordering entities. This would reduce both the shipping expenses and the capital outlay necessary to provide the projectors. The same sort of plan can work with other items too.

When it comes to any kind of audiovisual materials, there are companies that specialize in reproducing them. All we would have to do is place a master copy in a company's vault, and then when we wanted 1,000 made, we could simply call them and say, "Please make 1,000. Send 500 to the General Conference, send 200 to this division, 100 to another, and 200 to another." They could turn them out so inexpensively and quickly that we couldn't compete with them.

A third service would be to publish periodically, probably through MINISTRY, an evaluative list of materials that seem to be the most popular, an analysis of strengths and weaknesses. That's the thing that nobody has really dared to do so far. When I was a pastor, I would have loved to have had just such an article, a few paragraphs telling me of the advantages and disadvantages and helping me to decide the direction I would like to go.


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Floyd Bresee is the secretary of the Ministerial Association of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

February 1987

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