Key Leaders Conference: Eric Scott

[00:00:00] Speaker A: There's a lady in a wheelchair. And this lady in the church got mad at me because I said to the lady in the wheelchair, you're healed. You're now healed. And the lady in the church said, I'll believe she's healed when she gets out of the wheelchair. And I said, well, that's not faith. If she gets out of the wheelchair, the devil can say she got healed. Everybody knows she got healed if she gets out of the wheelchair. The trick is for her to believe she's been healed on the inside, so. So she'll step out of that wheelchair by faith, right? [00:00:37] Speaker B: Welcome to another episode of the well An Elam Fellowship Leadership Podcast. Join us today as we hear from Dr. Eric Scott as he shared at the Key Leaders conference. Enjoy. [00:00:50] Speaker A: But I was studying a while back. We were planning on meetings, we were planning on regionals. And the Lord put this in my heart in Acts chapter three, if you remember, it says here, Peter and John went up together to the temple at the hour of prayer. This is Acts 3:1 at the ninth hour. And a certain man lame from his mother's womb was carried, whom they laid daily at the gate. You all know the story, right? And I think they say he's lame. They figure for about 40 years. So this is a long term deal. And verse three, it says, seeing Peter and John about to go in the temple, the man asked for alms. God named spare change. And fixing his eyes on him with John, Peter said, look at us. And so he gave them his attention, expecting to receive something from them. Well, he did get something from them, but it wasn't what he thought he was going to get. And Peter said, silver and gold I don't have. But what I do have, I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, get up and walk. Amen. Sometimes that's all we got. In the name of Jesus, get up. Sometimes you'll be doing deliverance. And it's in the name of Jesus. Shut up. Right, you gotta use the name of Jesus because that's what we do. So of course, the leaders, you know, it's usually the leaders that wig out. Have you ever noticed that? He says, Peter says to the religious leaders, the God of our fathers glorified his servant Jesus, but you denied the Holy One. You asked for a murderer to be granted to you. And you killed the prince of life whom God raised from the dead and his name through faith, in his name. And I took my lead off of Pastor Phil this morning. Through faith. Nothing happens except through faith. Two equal Sides, faith and love through faith and love. That's how the gospel gets done. That's the motivation for the gospel. And without faith, you can't please God. Without faith, you're not going to see anything come from God. Amen. So we have to be walking in faith. Faith means you're going to be stepping out into things that you haven't seen before. Well, when I see it, I remember I had a lady one time, we were praying for her, and there's a lady in a wheelchair. And this lady in the church got mad at me because I said to the lady in the wheelchair, you're healed. You're now healed. And the lady in the church said, I'll believe she's healed when she gets out of the wheelchair. And I said, well, that's not faith. If she gets out of the wheelchair, the devil can say she got healed. Everybody knows she got healed if she gets out of the wheelchair. The trick is for her to believe she's been healed on the inside. So she'll step out of that wheelchair by faith, right through faith, in his name. God made this man strong. Who you see and you know. And yes, the faith. There's the word again, which comes through him, has given him the this perfect soundness in the sight of you all. I would say that y', all, because that's where I'm living now. And you know the story. They get threatened, they get put in jail, they get forbidden to speak and all this. And then Peter and John answer the. The leaders again, and they say whether it's right in the sight of God to listen to you more than God. You decide, should I listen to you or listen to God? You figure it out. For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard. And friends, that's what it's all about. We can't help but speak out the things that we have seen and heard. Now listen, a lot of us have seen some pretty ugly stuff. We've seen some stuff through our one brother we're sharing today. Seen some stuff you can't unsee. Nevertheless, our God's strength, his power, his love, his grace is not diminished by the things that we've seen. And so we have to step out by what we've seen and what we've heard. And we have to keep speaking it out regardless of whether it looks like something is happening in the immediate. In our immediate presence. So when they had further threatened them, same story now they let him go, finding no way to punish them because the people were about to. To Go after. And the people were saying, we like these guys, since they all glorified God for what had been done. Here's the part that I really want to get to is Acts 4:23, being let go, they returned to their own company. Everybody say, their own company. They returned to their own company, One version says, to their own companions, one version says, to their own people. And it says, and they reported all that the chief priests and elders had said to them. So, so here's the deal. These guys go out on their own. They're on a prayer walk, let's say, and they encounter a situation. In the midst of the situation, they begin to speak out the name of Jesus, speak out in the authority of Jesus. This guy's totally healed. Everybody melts down. The leaders are accusing them, people are after them. Everything else, they're saying, we can't help it. We have to say we. What we've seen and what we've heard. And then it says, when they got all done with all of that mess, they went back to their friends, they went back to their company. Everybody say their company. See, here's my premise. Elam is our company. This is our company. This is our faith group. This is where we belong. This is not detracting from anybody else. This is not putting anybody else down. We're not shooting down a denomination. We're not negative about anybody else. But this, this is where we belong. Our gates are open. Our wells are open. We're the kind of people. And we were talking at dinner tonight and somebody made the comment, isn't it amazing the people that Elam is able to connect with, people from all kinds of denominations and all kinds of walks and all kinds of backgrounds and ex drug addicts and military people and bikers and I mean everybody. How many of you have had somebody show up in your church that when they walked in you were like, okay, bring on the pink hair, baby. Bring on the bikers. You know, those bikers make some of the best Christians you'll ever encounter. And nobody ever messes with them, which is really good to have them on your side. That's right. Elam is our company. This is our people. When their friends heard it, they raised their voice to God with one accord. And they said, lord, you are God who made heaven and earth and the sea and all that is within them. Our message is simple, folks. Our walls are open, our gates are open. We serve the one true God. We serve him in all different kinds of dynamics, all different kinds of ways, where one company with so many different Expressions of that company. It boggles our own minds that we're in the company. Look at this. When they had prayed, the place where they were assembled together was shaken and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. They spoke the word of God with boldness and great and with great power. The apostles gave witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and great grace was upon them all. Listen, our brother talked about the vision this morning. Here's the deal. Once the vision gets down on the inside, it's going to find a way to come out. Whether it's in your expression or whether it's in how you talk to people, whether it's how you preach on Sunday morning, the outreaches you go on, the mission trips you go on, the way you treat your family, the way you treat your wife or your husband. The vision of God, once it's on the inside of you, will begin to come out someplace and see as the leaders of Elam. That's our job. Our job is to express that vision and express it and I wouldn't even begin to measure or number the different ways that we're going to be expressing that vision. Peter said, we can't help it. We have to speak it, we have to say it. We've seen it, we've heard it, we know it's for real. We got to get it out there. I love what Pastor Mike did earlier. Say I'll do something, I'll do something. What's it going to be? I'll do something where I'm not going to dictate to you what you're going to do. But I already know there's stuff working on the inside of me that I want to do. How many other people? We don't want to go out of this meeting unchanged. We don't want to go out of this meeting with this ho hum attitude. Look, I've been an area rep for probably longer than most people, Regional director for years and years, pastor for ever. There's an effect affected me at all. It's so easy to get in this trap of, you know, I tried that and it didn't work. Yeah, that's never going to work, or yeah, I did it and they just didn't come or whatever. Hey, look, I know it. I'm with you. And sometimes that stuff can be really disappointing. But I want to tell you, when the vision is on the inside, it has to find a way out. That's right. We don't give up. We're not the people that tuck tail and run. We don't Give up. We continue doing what the Lord has instructed us to do. So I don't want to take long, just an hour and a half. I don't think I have much time anyway. The sheet that I gave you, take a look at that. It says Considering Us Ministries. So Joe and I have talked together, we prayed together, we spent several sessions together. I've met with the staff here, I've met with the elders, the executive team. And the thing is, this is not my fellowship, it's your fellowship. It's our fellowship, it's our company. And so we're going to have to allow ourselves the freedom to, to tailor make these ideas for what's gonna work in your area. How many people have ever gotten a church growth book and said, oh, this is the best thing ever? And then you get into it and it doesn't fit your culture, it doesn't fit your church, it doesn't fit the size of your group. It doesn't fit your theology or your attitude or the people in your church. So what do you have to do? Well, you either ignore it or you say, I can take this piece and this piece and this piece and this piece, and I can knit those together and I can make something out of this. That's what those books are intended to do. You're never going to find a book that you're going to read the book and it's going to be bang, bang, boom, there, it's all finished. You're going to have to tailor make it. So this is going to. This is open to discussion, this is open to being tailor made. So I've got three basic areas of ministry that I really believe we need to cue in on. And with all respect to anything that's gone on here, I believe that our regional and area structure needs to be bolstered, it needs to be supported, it needs to be grown, it needs to be. You hear the expression, we need to dig around that vine, we need to fertilize that, we need to pray into that. We need to get a renewed faith, a renewed mind about all of this. So I've got three areas and I really feel like we want to develop now. Interestingly, when we began working with Global, before Brother Jonathan got here, I was working with Tom Brazell. And we identified three main areas that we wanted to work with for Global. And we had. Gary was in charge of one of them. Harry, Bella, Coop had one of them, I had one of them. And so we had little teams, little, I hate to call them committees. You know, hey, God, so Loved the world. He did not send a committee. Right. We, we had, we had teams working on these different areas. And so I just kind of copied this and I thought, well, we can integrate this and use it. So first of all is member care. Member care has got to be at the top of the list because if we're not caring for our people, we're, we're a fellowship that talks about relationship, relationship, relationship. And honestly, sometimes we haven't done relationship as well as we could anybody agree with that? Do you think we can do better? I think we can do better. So we want to get member care, pastoral care of credential holders. I put triage down here. You know, we have people, but we just had a little prayer time here. And we had several people who said, you know, I could really use prayer if we can really use prayer. And we're doing this all the time. We've got people in our churches. I mean they are flying on one engine. They are barely choking through. And we need to allow time and opportunity and a season where we can connect with them and help them. And we need to connect with our pastors the same way. Triage, urgent care. I mean, there's some people that have serious needs. We used to teach the thing in our church with our home group leaders that was called know when to say when. And that was when you're a home group leader and somebody tells you they're thinking about suicide, you got to say when. I've, I've, I've discovered that my son is an alcoholic. You need to say when. When. I'm, I may, I'm planning to leave my wife next week. You need to say when. I'm declaring bankruptcy in two more weeks. You need to say when. You need to know the limits of what your capability is so that we can bring in the help that we, to help care for these folks. Does that make sense? And so often the idea has been, well, the pastor's just going to do it. The pastor's not going to do it all. We're not going to do it all. But we can get help. Other credential holder needs are routine or regular check ins with people. I mean, I want to begin working on a system where we're making regular phone calls. I'd like to see everybody in our fellowship get contacted personally at least once, if not twice a year. Every single person. Oh, that's a tall order. Yeah, you're right, it's a tall order. I didn't say like Mike was talking with his, with his groundskeeper. Today, I'm not telling you you have to call 800 people, but you can get some people who. Call some people who can help. Some. We've got the hemp flings coming in next month. They're going to help us with some training. As we get the training, we're going to pass the training out to all of you guys. Regional and area gatherings, chances to get together, chances for team development. Phil's going to do some regional meetings. I'm going to do some regional meetings. I think Pastor Mike will do some regional meetings. Tom will probably do some other. What if we had teams of. Of leaders that helped with the regional meetings and traveled around and helped with the. With the regional meeting? So nobody feels like they're all alone, but nobody feels like they're going to get, you know, our brother Phil. I mean, we rung that guy out. Everybody say, rung him out. We rung him out this past year, and he was meeting himself, going out the door, and it didn't let up. I mean, it's a little better right now, but not much. Not much. We have regional and area gatherings. We have. And what are we doing? Planting and watering. We're planting and watering. Ongoing training. So member care is connecting. We're connecting. Ongoing training is building. We're building. We're building our group. I mean, if you. If you own an area that you need help in, an area that you don't feel like you're firing on all eight, you're not really functioning, let us know. Let us create something or find something or. Or have a resource that you can use and you can look at and it'll help you. Leadership resources, regional and area leadership development. I mean, Ben Nichols is in here. He's. He's at it, man. She's like a. My wife. She's like a bulldog on a bone. You're not going to get the bone away from him. And he's like, feed me, feed me. Help me, teach me. Kurt Kimmel. Is Kurt Kimmel here? Did he make it? [00:18:20] Speaker B: No. [00:18:21] Speaker A: He's probably snowed in, too. Yeah, but I mean, I just got a. I just got a message the other day that he. He. He included me in an email string where he's now. He's now connecting with the people in his area in his region and say, hey, here's three different days. Let's have a zoom meeting one of these days. Let's all get to see each other face to face. Let's talk about what we're doing, talk about our churches, talk about what God is doing in our region. He did that on his own. That was no corporate mindset that happened. He said, I need to connect with my people. And I said, man, that's fabulous. That's exactly what we want. Wings is another chance to identify future speakers and attendees. This is in your. This is in your ball court. You're the one that's going to spot the people that can go to Wings or spot the ones we should be inviting to our regional meetings or to our. To our May meeting. And the last one of the three that we're working on is recruitment. So member care is connecting, ongoing training is building, and recruitment is growing. We can't grow, but we can. We can seed and we can water. We can plant and we can water. We can put the vision out there. Here's something Maxwell says all the time, people flee from need and flock to vision. When you put vision out there in front of people, they may think you're a little bit touched, but they'll say, wow, these guys just might pull this off. You know, do I want to be part of the vision that succeeds, or do I want to stand on the sidelines accusing it and ridiculing it the whole time? I want to be part of it. Even if it only partly succeeds. It'll be better than doing nothing. Regional conferences, I know we're working on those. We don't know exactly how many conferences we're going to have, but it looks like we're going to have a whole bunch of them. And we're going to kind of take turns, tag teaming to get involved with those new regional and area leader development. We have got a lot of gaps in our regional and area structure where we need new men and women to plug into these things and help us build these regions. I mean, Joan is down there in Florida. Some of you guys better watch out. She's about to run you over. I mean, she is hitting the ball. It's like, hold it, Joan. You know, I said, okay, well, you be the director and you tell me what to do. You know, she is on it and, and people are getting together and she's got ideas for new new areas and, and new and new regional people. And that's what. That's what we want to hear. Can we do it all tomorrow? No, can't do it all tomorrow, but we can work on all of it all the time. Amen. I'm excited about all of this. I've got a question down here at the bottom of that page. How can we encourage and support our affiliate churches and affiliate ministries. You got a place like Nisum. I mean, they are in there slogging it out. They are going for it. And I don't know what it's like trying to work in that city now that we've got some very special people in the leadership roles. I mean, I just don't know what it's like. But you talk to Peter, he's like, yeah, we're doing it. Yeah, we're going for it. We're not backing down. We're not turning aside so future us ministry things. We're going to put together a job board of the placement service. You know, we've got people coming out of Elam Bible Institute. They go through four. Four instances. Four years at Elam Bible College. They come through. They come out the other side and they're like, yeah, I'm ready to storm hell with a water pistol. What do I do next? Come to an area meeting sometimes. I mean, it's nothing. It's like the road just ends. We don't even tell them it's going to end. It just ends. And I'm thinking, we can do better. How many people think we can do better? I mean, I'm getting people calling me all the time. With little churches here and ministries there and an internship over here. Can I do it all? No, we're not going to. We can do it all, but we can do a lot more. Because with all of us together, we. We're. We're unstoppable. I mean, maybe, you know, a ministry that needs a leader. Maybe your ministry needs a leader. Maybe you can take an intern. I mean, we took about 12 or 13 interns over our time pastoring. Where's Jeff? Jeff, Partial. He was one of our interns. I mean, he was great. We wept tears when he left. You can't go. He sent him an intern. That doesn't mean anything. You. You stay where I tell you this. Right, Right. Fabulous job. He and I were just talking today about some of the things that happened during that internship we had. We saw miracles with our own eyes. Miracles. And. And because we're just working together. Well, what's my job going to be? You just tell your intern. Your job is whatever I do. If I do a funeral, you do a funeral. If I clean a toilet, you clean a toilet. If I do a wedding, you do a wedding. That's what I did with all of our interns. And I'm telling you, most of them, I think out of 12 or 13 of them, probably 11 of them are serving the Lord. Full time. So it works. It really does work. Develop and promote the cha. I mean, if you could hear our brother Phil when he talks about the cha, it's so much more. And, well, you got to give your 5%. I don't really like to give 5%. Okay, we'll find a way out of it. You know, that's not. That's not the deal. It has nothing to do with 5%. When you affect Elim, you affect the nations, you affect this nation, you affect the local church, you affect our missionaries going out, our upcoming generation. You're paving the way for these young guys going out on this highest call. Or what's it going to be called? Raised wrong. Praise song. Praise song. Yeah. Raised wrong with a van. Hallelujah. What are we doing? We're sowing into this thing. You know, I've got a whole fresh perspective on. 5% has nothing to do with 5%. It has to do with the kingdom, the picture of what God has put in front of us. And so, you know, I'm going to finish. I'm already over. I think I'm over. I don't know. I'm supposed to go half an hour. The point is, we can do this, but we can't do it alone. We have to do it together. And we have. And listen, let me give a little byline here. If you've been serving in one of these capacities for a long time and you're like, man, I am barely making it. I'm done. I mean, stick a fork in me and put me away. I'm finished. Would you come and talk to us? There's no shame in saying, look, I need to step back from this for a while. I need to take a break. So somebody else has got a little more vim and vigor going on, can jump in there. It doesn't mean you're done. It doesn't mean you're out to pasture. It doesn't mean you're dead and gone and we throw a little dirt on you and say nice things about you. It just means the vision is too important for us to not give it what we got. So if we're not able to do it, well, that's fine. Everybody needs to take a break. I know all about it. Sometimes you just got to take a break. It's cool. It's not cool when we pretend like everything is okay, but we're really not hitting the ball. That's not cool. If we're hurting people, we're hurting the next generation. We're hurting our chances, our Potential. We're hurting our own vision for what the Lord is showing us. So directors, going forward, you can expect more authority and more autonomy. I've got a thing here. It says three basics of delegation. One is assignment. Two is authority. Three is accountability. Here's the deal. Most of the time we got lots of assignments and tons of accountability, but almost zero authority. You don't have resources, you don't have finances, you don't have the ability to do what you need to do. Well, we're going to change that. We're going to have assignments with appropriate authority to get the job done without having to have one of us run in, you know, write a check, whatever. We're going to figure out how to make this thing work for you. And then there's going to be an accountability loop. Well, what'd you do with it? How did it work? What works? What doesn't work? I mean, we're going to have to have this kind of, kind of rotating feedback. Area reps, you're going to have more responsibility. I think there, there have been times when the area reps look at their lives like, you know, I'm, I'm a glorified home group leader on a whole different level. Well, that's not, that's not right. And, and that's not what you are. And that's not how we think of you. And that really constitutionally and otherwise is not your job. You have a much bigger role than that. You can expect more support, more resourcing, more guidance, more follow up, more accountability. I mean, I'd like to see us when we have a regional meeting. Well, I'd like to see us have a debrief meeting with that region and the leaders of that region and say, how'd we do? Did we do good? Could we do better? Did we miss something? You know, when we got done with our, with our meeting, we just did, for the first time ever, a regional meeting in Tennessee. Pastor Phil and I went out there and we had Tom and Nancy Reinecke were there. Anybody know who they are? Oh, man, let me tell you. So. She was amazing. I mean, she had everything lined up. And we got out there and we had a bunch of people show up and, and we had one couple come from. I don't know where they came from, but they had to spend the night to make it to the meeting. It's like they had to come part way and then come in the rest of the way. And then we started getting phone calls. Oh, I wish I'd known about it. And I realized we didn't put any of our alumni or former credential holders on our invite list. We spaced it. We forgot it. So now I'm saying, well, wait a minute. I went and met with the school a couple weeks ago and I said, look, we gotta do something to meld our mailing lists so that when we're having something, you know about it. When you're having something, we. I mean, we're on the same hill, for crying out loud. You could throw a rock and hit one ministry from the other, but we don't know. Nobody knows what anybody's doing. Well, that's not, that's not how a trinity operates. Right. We need to be able to have that, that inner connectivity. And, and so I'm, I'm not going to just keep going. You get the picture, right? Is anybody ready to do something? Ready to do it? Let's do it. Say it. Let's do it. Do it. So God bless you. I don't know who I give it to. Brother Joe. Everybody okay with that? Oh, it looks like. Is there, are there questions? Religious Columbia sidebar, deep burden cabal area. Oh, great. Oh, maybe you're the reason we thought of it. College is just going nowhere and it might be coming. Pension holders and I just be crying saying, gotta be something. It seems like such a no brainer. Yeah, but we never. Maybe we've all known it, but we've never said it or something. I don't know. Let's just bow our hearts before the Lord. God, you are so much bigger than the things that we face and the issues that come our way. And Lord, you're there on the sidelines and you're cheering us on. Come on, come on, you got it. You got the vision. You got the vision for the nations. Ask of me. I'll give you the nations. I'll send you to the nations. I'll prepare you to meet the nations. I'll raise up a new generation. More Bud Sicklers, more Art Dodds Whites. We're not done. And the Lord's saying, you're not done. You're not finished. And I'm not finished with you, says the Lord God, it's our privilege to serve you. You're the one, Lord. You are the one and only. And even these guys that we're reading tonight, in this ACT story that didn't know anything about you, they crucified the King of Glo glory. They were still left going, these, these are the guys who spent time with Jesus. There's something about these people. And Lord, you have. You are using us in that very same role. We are those people for this hour. Now we pray, Lord, use us for your glory. Use us in these areas and regions. Use us, Lord, to spot new folks and new pastors and new leaders and new reps. And Lord, new leaders to come alongside and serve with brother Phil and Brother Mike and the executive team. And Lord, let us always remember that it's all about the kingdom and it's all about the King. Thank you, Lord. In Jesus name, amen. [00:32:06] Speaker B: We hope you enjoyed that teaching from Dr. Eric Scott. This is Kevin Neville. I am the producer of the well. And this has been our season finale of season two of the well well. Because we are ready to dive into Oasis 2026 conference. It's beginning just next week. From the recording of this, I hope you are going to be there live. I can't wait to see you. If you miss it, don't worry because season three will emphasize some of the great teachings and keynotes and breakouts, workshops, interviews, obviously amazing things that happen at OASIS and this coming season of conferences, you will hear it heal, but there's nothing like healing it live. So I hope if you get this in time, you could join us. If not, we will see you on season three of the well. God bless.