Michigan Camp Meeting 2016: The Harvest is Great

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Children's Ministries

Sue Gilmore

What’s In Your Teacher’s Toolbox

Dear Heavenly Father, I thank you so much for this wonderful, quiet time that we have to spend with you and in studying about the awesome ministry that you have given to each 1 of us.

And I pray for your Holy Spirit to be with us, and I pray that everything will be clear and that you will help us to be the very best leaders that we possibly can be to help these boys and girls to become little disciples of Jesus Christ.

Well, today's seminar is called What's in Your Teacher's Toolbox?

And you can see I have my husband's toolbox with me.

I have toolboxes of my own at home, but they were much bigger.

Okay, but this morning we're going to take a look at our teacher's toolbox and see how we can use them to reach boys and girls for Jesus.

And this toolbox is going to represent all the skills and and resources that we need as leaders, okay, to be effective evangelists in our Sabbath school rooms.

So let's start first start out by following Jesus at the Sea of Galilee.

Now this is where Jesus finds Peter and Andrew, and they're all done fishing, they've been fishing all night, and they were washing their nets.

And there were other fishermen there on the beach too and they were doing the same thing.

But poor Peter and Andrew, they hadn't caught a single thing.

But So Jesus told them, he said, you know, row out a little ways, let down your nets again, and you'll catch some fish.

Now by this time, it's morning, The sun is shining, it's very bright and warm.

And my Uncle Norman is the 1 who taught me, and he said, we got to go out very early.

I mean we went out fishing it was at dawn you know dragging yourself out of the bed because he said when it gets warm he said the fish are gonna go down down down where it's cool to get away from the bright sun and he says a lot harder to catch fish.

So of course Peter knew that but he loved Jesus so he did what Jesus said anyway and of course we know the story what happened when he did that.

He got so many fish his nuts started to break and he had to call for reinforcements from his partners, James and John, who were fortunately nearby.

And it was at that very moment, at the peak of all that fishing success, that Jesus gave that invitation that we know so well.

Follow me and I will make you absolutely fishers of men.

What a revelation to give to these guys, right?

And, you know, if you've been coming to any of our children's seminars this week, We've already talked a lot about methods, right?

Started out, you know, displaying a whole new program that we could be doing in our kindergarten or primary classrooms.

But, you know, I wanted to start this morning with this story because it's vital to look at our mission and to understand what it's all about.

And because the mission's got to come first, the principles have to come first, really.

And then we match the methods with, you know, with those principles.

And so first off, I just wanted to remind us all that our mission is the same mission as that of Peter and Andrew and James and John.

And what was the mission Jesus gave them?

And if we're fishers of men, then our ministry is the ministry of evangelism, right?

And whenever I think of that, I think of these words.

And this has always been, since I became an Adventist, 1 of my absolute favorite books, the book Education.

And Sister White says, in the highest sense, the work of education and the work of redemption are what?

Okay, it's not like teaching is over here, and evangelism is over here, and there is nothing in common between the 2.

And she says the reason for that is other foundation can no man lay that is laid which is Jesus Christ.

So the foundation of both of those ministries, Though the really 1 ministry is Jesus Christ.

So, when you go into your Sabbath school room, you are not just a storyteller.

You are not just a warm, fuzzy mama or grandma who loves children.

You're not just somebody who loves singing with children and being with them.

We are evangelists for Jesus Christ and we are saving souls for the kingdom of God and we need to keep that thought always uppermost in our minds.

But you know with any ministry I don't know if Peter and Andrew had a tackle box, but fishermen do today.

But we're going to call ours a toolbox, and we need a toolbox for our ministry.

Now our toolbox is going to be different from the toolbox that maybe your friend uses who teaches an adult Sabbath school class.

Because they're fishing for adults and we're fishing for children.

And specifically we're fishing for young children.

And the young child is very different individual with different needs than those of that are in juniors or early teens.

And so what we're going to do first of all is we're going to remind ourselves what our mission is.

So we're going to add to our toolbox a little sign that says, Bring them to Jesus.

And so every tool that we're going to put into our toolbox is going to be for that 1 purpose.

So it's 1 thing I've learned over the years, and whether I'm helping my husband around the house, or whether I'm ministering for Jesus in church or out in the community.

It's all about the right tool for the right job.

Okay, so all the tools we're going to put in here are going to grab our children's attention, it's going to turn on their little minds, and it's going to hopefully give them a hunger to know Jesus as their very best friend.

And so all the tools in here are going to be tailor-made to how a young child thinks and feels and grows.

So what's the first tool we're going to add?

We're going to start out with a boy and girl coming to Sabbath school.

All right, this is, I don't know if you can see her, but this is Karen Kindergarten.

Okay, and on her, she is wearing a t-shirt that says, Learning is Feeling.

Okay, and here's her friend, and this is Paul Primary.

And Paul's wearing a shirt that says, Learning is Doing.

Okay, so we're gonna add them right away to our toolbox.

Now, notice that I put in, did I put in a whole child into the toolbox or just part of her?

You know, sometimes even teachers think of their ministry more like they're a cook than they're an evangelist.

They kind of look at the child as if they were a bowl and that all they needed to do was add the right ingredients into the bowl and their job is done.

All he has to do is open up the head and fill it in with the right information, and we're good.

This little boy is going to come to Jesus, but is filling his head with, even if it's Bible information, is that enough to bring him to Jesus?

I have had the joy of giving Bible studies for a lot of years.

I've even worked at a missionary school where I trained Bible workers.

But 1 thing that we all learn when we do that is that information is the foundation.

If they need to hear about Jesus, you need to hear about His plan for our lives.

It is the foundation, but that alone is not enough to bring someone to Christ.

So we've got to do a little bit more than that.

We're going to look at some of those things today.

Okay, so sometimes though we we look at our kids like they've just got a hinge on their head and fill it up with facts.

Judy Shull

Sabbath School and the Home

Dear Jesus, we want to thank you so much for letting us be here.

Thank you for the opportunities to witness for your children and be with our discussion this morning we pray in your name, Amen.

Well when Linda Gellimore talked to me about the presentation today.

She said, what about how do HOME and Sava School support each other?

That's a very interesting concept, which is absolutely what we should be doing.

We have the home, we have Seventh-day Adventist schools, we have Sava schools, we have Pathfinders and Adventurers, and all of those entities should be working together because we're all ministering to our boys and girls.

So it's pretty exciting when they all work together.

It's hard when we work apart, so we want to work together.

I want to start out with looking at some of the concerns homes might have.

How do our homes I'm going to give you this list.

First of all, families have no time to study.

Kids if they're in school, they have schoolwork to do.

And families just seem to be, if you've got working parents and they get home and they've got a couple hours with their kids before they go to bed, they feel like there's no time to study.

There's no time even to train and obey, getting them to obey.

When I talk to my students, and this year I had ninth and tenth graders, I said, well, you know, when you have family worship, they kind of look at me like, no, we don't really do that.

Oh, we got to start doing some training there, because families don't even have time to be a family.

Everybody is coming and going and doing everything else.

Children want to play video games, watch TV and movies.

They don't want to study their lesson, and they don't have that desire.

And I'm a teacher, and the kids are saying I have too much homework.

Okay, how are you using your time in class?

But once you get to academy, you're going to have homework.

That's just even ninth and tenth, eighth, seventh, 5 through 8 you're gonna have homework.

And then the Sabbath school has some concerns.

We have children who don't attend faithfully We have children who arrive late.

I know I'm a member of the Lansing Church, and I'll go down to do a Mission story with the kids only half of them are there And I get all done with the mission story about 10 o'clock and then they show up.

The families aren't studying the lessons, so when you get your juniors in and you want a nice discussion, they have no clue.

I remember my younger son, he was in Sabbath school and down in Beginners, And every, we'd be in adult lesson study back in a little room, and he would show up and crawl into his dad's lap.

And he wouldn't go back to Sabbath school.

And my husband would always say, okay, we're gonna go back, and he'd sit with them, and then he'd be OK, and he could come back.

Well, we got to discovering that he would sneak out of Sabbath school, and it was memory verse time.

And he could say it to us, but he didn't want to say it to his teacher.

So then 1 of us would be with him during the memory verse time, and as long as he could sit on mom or dad's lap, he could say his memory verse.

And that lasted about 6 weeks and then he was good.

But children now, they don't even bother to know ahead of time.

And then the children issue, they don't know how to obey.

And they develop this desire to have things move along.

You know, they don't want to slow down, to sit down.

I was talking with my daughter-in-law today, she came up with me, and she was saying, you know, Laura Engelwilder complained about having to ride on a train because the train went 20 miles an hour.

She was used to going on a covered wagon where you only went maybe 30 miles in a day.

You got to see the jackrabbits and the prairie chickens and you got to see everything and you got to look at all the details.

When you're going 20 miles an hour, everything's just whipping by.

And now we're doing this to our children where they have video games and they have movies and everything's changing, changing, changing.

We don't have time to sit down and just sit back and relax.

This last year at school, a couple years ago our Christmas program had been based on the prophecies of Isaiah about a Savior.

So we said, I had said, we need to go through Isaiah in detail and see what Isaiah says.

And we didn't get to it until this last year.

But then at Bible class, we could start with a nice deep Bible study into Isaiah, chapter at a time, talking about it, looking at what the commentary said before we began our Bible class.

You can't do that in Sabbath school because you only have 52 Sabbaths.

You got to use those Sabbaths as powerfully as possible.

And Maybe we need to be teaching our parents how to do Bible studies with their children It's not a priority again you go back to families aren't having time to be a family let alone be a Christian family In education the Ellen White's book page 17 every human being created in the image of God is endowed with a power akin to that of the creator.

Individuality, power to think and to do, and that's where we want to get our children thinking and doing.

And at this point, I'm going to give you a little piece of homework.

Not homework, we're going to do classwork.

These are the 2 lists that we just looked at and let's add to them.

I just came up with a list that, you know, the things that had struck me the most in dealing with things.

But do you see, what other concerns might you see With the home or with Sabbath school, what are their concerns?

I know that I don't know what junior lesson you're using, but when we designed the real-time faith lesson studies, we designed them for 2 weeks on the same topic because So many of us who are working on the project had students who would come every other week.

If they were with mom, they'd come, but not, you know, or the other way around, but they were only there every other week.

So we knew we had to hit it more than just once, Which is why that 1 was designed that way So divided homes Okay, what other issues are you finding?

Well Let me say that that finders adventure groups only school Here to the church only school once a month, the kids are going for a program where they're consistent at the churches.

And so that takes them away from Santa's school.

Which, you know, they're still doing a good thing.

There has to be that balance of being active in the church so that they're learning these things, but then they're not learning their own lessons at the same time.

I believe, I believe in Pathfinders and all those other groups.

I do believe that they're over-taxing each other.

I know that we're wrestling with the same thing in Lansing because we take the music groups out and we try to only keep of the 4 groups, we try to make sure that they only miss 1 Sabbath a month.

But if you've got a brother or sister in a different group, Then you're missing that Sabbath too, and it's important that there so how do you do that you have to get them out and With our non-advent parents those are the times we can get them to church This last year we had 3 of our non-advent parents baptized you know, but that was after years of them showing up at church because of the program.

Well, they have the Bible experience competition.

So they studied that and did their homework.

And they said, well, we didn't have time to do the lesson.

We had to read years of things so that we were not discovering the lesson, but we have to bring out the high points in the lesson too, so that they are getting that even though it's that once a week instead of the week long.

Yeah, so they're still getting them in Sabbath school, which is what we have to do anyway, because they don't study.

At least yours are studying for Pathfinder Bible experience.

I'm torn on that, Because I do, I mean, I think all are, because I'm Pathfinders as well, I didn't include that.

Well, you've had all of children's ministries, yes.

But I mean, I think that each school, Pathfinders, Sava School, UBBS, they all bring different things to the table.

So I'm torn because I understand the desire to want them always there to get the lesson at Santa's school, but I also think they're also learning so many valuable things in Pathfinders and doing their, you know, academically.

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Sabbath School and the Home

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What’s In Your Teacher’s Toolbox

1h 16m

Sabbath School and the Home

1h 16m

Sound Doctrine