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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Talking Points, 3rd Quarter 2020: Making Friends for God

Kameron DeVasher

Mark Howard

How to Prepare a Quality Lesson Study

This is not a full Sabbath school program.

In fact, this isn't even the replacement for that.

This is actually a training session we're gonna do about how to teach an effective and study for an effective 7th quarter.

We've just finished up quarter number 2 in the 7th quarter lesson.

And in our transition to our new format, we said we would do some training on how to teach the lesson.

Maybe we should talk for a minute about that new format, what we have been doing and what we're aiming to transition to.

First of all, We have been, as hopefully you're well aware by now, providing a full content Sabbath school program with the mission program, the interviews, the videos that go with that, and then the full lesson study with every aspect of it.

And it takes a full hour or plus to, just like you would in a regular Sabbath school.

I anticipate as this is going to be airing the first week of July, that by now most if not all of our churches in Michigan are in some stage of reopening.

When you say airing, the reality is that we are providing these videos as a resource and the churches may use them who knows when.

So what we have been doing is that Sabbath school program, when local churches weren't having their own Sabbath school program, So if you're at home or if you're in some small group that couldn't fellowship with the broader or whatever, that you could have a Sabbath school option.

But we in the Sabbath School Personal Ministries Department don't want to take that well-intended program and actually turn it into a detriment to the local Sabbath school program.

So what we don't want to do is supplant or take the place of the local Sabbath school.

That is the last thing we want to see happen.

And so what but at the same time we don't want it to completely disappear off the scene if we have a responsibility to help Sabbath schools be enriched and developed.

So what we're going to do is transition to producing, by God's grace, a weekly, much shorter, less fully produced video that will go over some of the main highlighted features and themes and topics in the lesson that week.

We haven't determined yet if it's gonna be a hard every week or we're gonna have a little bit of benefit.

Yeah and the goal being and also I want to release it earlier in the week so it's not tempted to be like, oh it's Friday night and we're gonna watch this for Sabbath school.

You're gonna notice we're not gonna be in a full suit, we're gonna be kind of less formal in our conversation, and it's kind of a working group working through the, well this quarter is gonna be Making Friends for God lesson studies and each week we're going to break down the lesson as to some of the high points that we see that would be good for teachers to be aware of and also for class members to be aware of so that all of our Sabbath schools and every local church can have a rich and full Bible study series every Sabbath.

That's right, and we're still going to be making outlines for the lessons like we did during the time when we were doing the program.

Not that anybody has to use the lesson outline or go verbatim through it, but as we go through today's study on how to prepare the study, right, you'll understand how we put the outlines together and you may use them to make your own outlines or however you'd like to use them.

Right, and so what we're doing today is not 1 of the new videos in the sense that this is not a weekly we're going to go over next week's lesson.

What we're doing today is talking about A.

What we're going to be doing in the future and how Sabbath school teachers and Sabbath school members can better prepare for lesson studies on the Sabbath day so that when they get to the local church Sabbath school program, it's not starting from scratch or just opinion fest.

There can be quality conversations and edification across the board.

1 other thing that we might note that's pretty obvious at this point is, generally you gain interest in a video by different camera angles.

And you also gain a lot of work in production.

We've only got 1 camera angle so we're gonna have to I guess be really interesting in the time that we have.

But in all seriousness what we want to do is have and we don't want it to be like we got to hold their interest for an hour.

What pith is what we're aiming for, right?

And so there's a lot that we won't be able to cover that hopefully your local Sabbath school class can pull out and really have a full conversation with.

So for this particular 1, we're going to walk through how a quarterly is made, how a weekly lesson is taught, and how to prepare for 1 effectively.

Yeah, it just steps in in steps in how to teach.

Well, you know, we've talked about this as we've gone around to a lot of different churches, and not just here in Michigan as we've spoken at other churches.

It's evident, and I don't say that critically, but it's evident that a lot of Sabbath school...well, I know this as a pastor even, that a lot of people are thrown into a position of teaching Sabbath school without ever getting much training, and I've had a lot of Sabbath school teachers say, man, I wish somebody would help me with this and that.

And generally, people do a decent job, but there are things in any kind of teaching, any kind of task that you're doing, that if you knew some simple tools that would help you in your proficiency.

And especially when it comes to Sabbath school, we want, there are certain things that we're gonna talk about that work against you as a teacher.

If you just come into it, you're generally thinking, well, let's see, I've got to go over the quarterly, and you're gonna follow oftentimes the bad habits of the person that went before you, because that's the only way you know how to do it.

And so we just want to provide some ways that you can make the Sabbath School more...

Like, if we're not consciously teaching people and making concerted effort...

People learn how Sabbath School works just from kind of either being in it or watching other people lead it, and We've kind of morphed into Sabbath school being what it is, and it's amazing.

But as we go around to different churches in this conference and probably elsewhere in the world, that Sabbath school is oftentimes very, very similar.

But some of those same things that people might see as a complaint or a drawback to Sabbath school are repeated in other places.

It's like our kids don't only copy our good habits, they copy our bad habits.

And generation after generation people move and take them to other churches, and so it just kind of like spreads across the paradigm of Adventism.

If time permitted, we talk about how we ran board meetings and everything because we've talked about certain things.

You come to the church manual and how a board meeting is run.

I've never seen a board meeting run that way.

And I was running a board meeting the way I saw my pastor run it and elders in the past, how that things went when I'd be in pastoral ministry.

So yes, we want to provide some tips and tools that will help you to have a more engaging and beneficial class that blesses the students that you teach.

Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this opportunity.

Please bless our time now together as we look at not just a particular lesson but how lessons are produced and how we can reproduce the same quality sabbatical programming in every local church, whether it's a small group of a handful of people or a large group with multiple classes.

Lord, help the tips that we're going to talk about today to be from you and a blessing to your field.

Now, you talk about how the lesson is put together, the quarterly, how the quarterly is made, and that may seem like an odd thing but it helps us to understand the role and the function that was intended by the quarterly and it may not be as helpful for everybody but sure it was helpful for me when I understood how the quarterly was put together.

For example, if you open, I'm going trying to get to the very first page of this quarterly.

And while we're looking at this, Mark and I have adult Sabbath school teacher guides, right?

So we have the adult teachers Sabbath school quarterly.

So it's the same content as the student guide, but it has additional elements for teachers to be helpful.

And you, every member of the class, is allowed to have a teacher's guide.

It costs a little bit more, but you get some of the added bonus material.

01-Why Witness?

Welcome to Talking Points for quarter 3, lesson 1, 2020.

We're talking about why witness, and we're in a new quarter, making friends for God, the joy of sharing in his mission.

Now this is gonna be hard for us Cameron because up to this time as many of our viewers know we did a full lesson study and now we've got it we've outlined the lesson study and we're gonna go through what we outlined without necessarily doing as much comment on it.

And so this will be a challenge for us, it's a new format for you.

And again, this is a resource not just for teachers but for members of the class alike.

This is not to take the place of your local Sabbath school study but to prepare for the Sabbath school class that all of you are going to be part of each and every week.

That's right and if you haven't watched it we did a video that went over some teaching tips that we're gonna employ in this and subsequent talking points lessons.

So, let's take a look at this week's lesson.

Oh, and we're coming to you from Cameron's office.

Actually, we have moved in the conference office.

We're still in the Michigan conference office in Cameron's office where we're going to have our talking points.

And in the future, we're going to have something that, you know, in the background that says...

This will be a developing system of working here.

But we believe that the Lord will bless us, and what we want to do is again not, you're gonna see that we're not gonna overlay texts and quotes and stuff.

We're not gonna have multiple camera angles.

It's not gonna be long, but what we want to do is boil down the lesson study part to its most essential elements so that everyone can be prepared to have an enriched and blessed time in their Sabbath school class.

That's right, and we will be providing the outlines and referring to those and maybe showing some things like that on the screen and some links to helpful tools.

And all of that will be available on MichiganSSPM.org.

We only have so much time and we got a lot to cover.

Well, so again, I say again, we talked about some of this in our teaching tips video, but if we take the first lesson here, why witness?

1 of the things we mentioned in a teaching tips video was to go through the entire lesson first, read all the scriptures, highlight the high points, which we have done from our perspective, and then draw out what the key points are of the lesson.

Now if you look at the headings for each lesson, usually Sabbath is an introduction, and on Sunday's lesson providing opportunities for salvation.

Tuesday's lesson growing by giving, That just says that we grow spiritually from witnessing.

Wednesday's lesson talks about faithfulness to Christ's command.

And then Thursday talks about a love motivation.

Well, we drew some key points out of that, but we rearranged them in a different manner.

So before we highlight the key points, the first thing we do in our lesson, and I often do this in an outline, is some type of introductory thought.

And the introductory thought here is what is witnessing?

What is it that we're trying to talk about here in this particular lesson and launching into this quarter?

Right, well it implies when the lesson starts with why witness It assumes that we all know what a witness is.

So, it might be a good idea in every local Sabbath school class to have the discussion about what a witness even is.

I went to the dictionary, as 1 would, to find their definition, and it said having knowledge of, and well, it's interesting, and I told you this, there was the noun and the verb, and we're talking about witnessing.

Also a witness, well, a witness is somebody who's witnessed something or seen something and has firsthand experience, But then 1 of the definitions given was a member of the Jehovah's Witness Church.

Yeah, and I was lamenting, we should have been the Seventh-day Advent witnesses.

Now you can be an Adventist and just believe in the Second Coming, but you'll have to witness.

So according to the dictionary, from the verb standpoint, witnessing is to have a knowledge of an event from personal observation or experience to give or serve as evidence of such an event.

So you're a witness to something that happened because you were there, you saw it, etc.

And in our discussion we talked about how the great event that we're witnessing to is the salvation that God's provided through Jesus Christ, and so my own personal testimony is not the sum and substance of what I'm witnessing to.

It's only my affirmation and personal experience to the reality of salvation through Jesus Christ.

Right, so we're not just conveying, like you said, personal testimony is great, but just what I've seen and heard is only a piece of what we're trying to share because there's plenty about God that I haven't personally seen, but I still trust that I want to affirm creation and redemption and all those things, so we're witnessing about the totality of the message that God has given us to bear, and our personal testimony is a piece of that.

In essence when we're talking about witnessing, making friends for God, and what have you, it's all from that standpoint of wanting others to come to that same knowledge of salvation through Jesus Christ, but my interactive part in that being 1 who has tasted and seen the Lord is good.

I have an experience that I can testify to so that when a person says, oh that's crazy, how could anybody be saved?

I can tell you how because I've had that experience and the Lord wants you to have that experience.

Well, let's talk about that because that's kind of the essence of the first day's question that leads up.

Because, praise the Lord that we have the opportunity for salvation, and I would hope that each of us has afforded, you know, that's what God has offered we have taken him up on personally, but why is it incumbent upon me now to share that same opportunity with somebody else?

Well, and again, for sake of the discussion and our time limitations here, just more as giving a teaching, an explanation of our outline, We're not going to go through and look all of these up, but the lesson cites Romans chapter 10 where Paul says that whoever calls on the name of the Lord is going to be saved, but how are they going to call on him whom they haven't heard of, and how are they going to hear unless 1 is sent, and how are they going to be sent unless...

As long as there's a preacher, it has a preacher unless 1 is sent.

But the idea there is Paul is speaking to the fact that there needs to be a preacher sent in order to give that opportunity, and it's interesting that in the very context of Romans 10, and we looked at this last quarter, Paul says, but have they not all heard, and then he goes back to the Psalms, and he refers to how the creative works of God testify.

So Paul isn't trying to overthrow his own argument.

The point I'd make here is somebody may say, well, why do we have to witness?

I mean there are lots of ways God reveals himself true, and Paul was admitting to that, that his creative works testify of him, but nothing is so great a revelation as the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, his Son, and when we can give testimony to that, what we're doing is increasing the opportunity of somebody to embrace the gospel message.

Well, before we get specifically into that, what I was thinking was, as we went through this, that basically, like with the perspective we just addressed there that you just spoke to, is about how it's a benefit to that other person.

It gives them their best opportunity, right?

It starts about how participating, like at the bottom of the first page, while participating with him, we enter into his joy of seeing people redeemed, right?

So it's actually a benefit to me by having the joy.

But it's also in the lesson, gonna talk about how it's a benefit to heaven, how heaven rejoices, God himself is glad.

So as I look through this lesson, I'm thinking this breaks down into, well, it's beneficial for at least 3 parties.

Number 1, the person being witnessed to, so they have the opportunity for salvation.

Me because I get the joy of witnessing their salvation experience, and it brings joy to the heart of God and heaven rejoices.

It's not just duty that we have to or a blessing to the other person but we're it actually it's a win-win-win for everybody.

Witnessing is good for the whole universe.

So what you'll find we did in our outline is we took those 3 points as key points and we added a fourth.

Number 1 to give opportunity for salvation.

And so those were the 3 you talked about.

And then our last 1 is because we're Christians.

In other words, And we could probably save into why that's different than you know, but go ahead.

Yes, but the question is why witness and So what we're trying to convey in teaching the class is these are key Reasons for witnessing 1 is to give opportunity for others to have salvation 2 is for our own personal spiritual growth, 3 is to make Jesus glad, and finally, because we're Christians, which we'll break down a little bit before we move through.

But again, if I were teaching this in the local class, I would wanna make sure my goal this week is to answer that question, why witness?

A, because it's good for me, it's good for the other guy, it's good for God, and it's my Christian duty regardless of the benefits that we might happen to see.

So I would, and that's what you're going to see in this lesson outline, we're going to walk through those 4 reasons to why we should witness.

That's right, and so we touched on reason number 1 a little bit with Romans chapter 10 and I have as a sub point there that well Romans 10 basically God sends witnesses so people can believe But as a sub point I have, verse 18 tells us all have opportunity or have had opportunity to know God through his created works, but this is not intended to contradict the Apostles point in verses 14, 15 that somebody needs to be sent with a message, and I like what Mark Finley says at the very bottom of the page there in the green on Sunday, we do not witness to give people their only chance to be saved.

We witness to give them their best chance.

In other words, yeah, there may be other ways that God reaches people, but why in the world if you have a loved 1 would you just say, well, I hope they get caught by 1 of those other...

You want to make sure they have every ample opportunity that is available to them.

Well, And he makes that same point essentially at the bottom, because in the notes we talk about maybe emphasizing the first 2 paragraphs, but the last sentence of that second paragraph on the same lesson says, when we share Jesus with others, we provide them with their best opportunity to be saved.

02-The Power of Personal Testimony

This week we're looking at quarter 3 lesson 2 inside of our Making Friends for God.

This week's title is The Power of Personal Testimony.

And before we get into our lesson preparation, because this isn't the lesson itself, of course, this is a walking through the preparation for the lesson that everyone's going to be doing, actually having a lesson in their Sabbath school live in a local church.

But we wanted to address something that may have come up.

We've had some input about that, about the actual format of this new series.

They were sitting here at a table and if people have noticed, we are not 6 feet apart.

We do not have that kind of wingspan in our forearms.

And so a legitimate question was brought up about what are we modeling?

Is this a subtle teaching to the conference to be thwarting or some sort of disregarding the rules.

And we wanna be crystal clear about that.

This is no way an endorsement of, or trying to get away from the structures and recommendations that have come up.

I'm just thinking to myself, this is a reality of recording space.

So if you wanna donate to our studio, we can build, we have, but as it is, we're doing this in your office.

And Cameron and I, of course, we are in this situation now where you can have groups of 10 and what have you and people you're acquainted with.

So it'd be like the context of your family, whatever.

So Because of that, us being 6 feet apart for this would do nothing but model, and we don't want to take that away and give the idea that we don't think this is serious or important and it would show insensitivity to those who have been sick.

But we do want to explain that we are not trying to negate some of the guidelines that are out there, but explain why we're in the format that we are.

Right, and if you notice, whenever we did the full Sabbath School program, we did have them 6 feet apart.

The conference office now opened, and so those rules are easing.

But to be clear, we do have people here and we get our temperature checked every time we come in.

We have to have social distancing when we're in larger groups and all the those protocols are still there.

But for our recording space, We're not setting this up as show, hey, everybody take off your mask and sit close together, if something happens.

But for this purpose of this format is just for the video itself.

Well, another thing we talked about is you'll notice that if you really look at your screen, you feel like you're at the table with us.

And a lot of people, we've gotten a lot of feedback from people that actually have been appreciative of that because they feel so closed up and isolated.

And so it makes it feel like you're in a group when in so many places you're not allowed to be in a group.

So anyway, there was no thought about trying to disregard any of the norms or protocols, and we actually do want to encourage people to be helpful and heed all those warnings, but for this particular production, that's the direction we're going, just for the logistics of that.

And Pastor Howard and I are in no danger from each other because we've been working together through this whole thing, and so it is more like a family arrangement than anything else.

And as you mentioned, we're checked every day.

We are, and so far so good, so praise the Lord.

We're clean and healthy, and I think we can dive into our lesson now.

Lesson 2, the power of personal testimony.

We always pray off-screen, but why don't we begin with prayer and then we'll dive into this.

Father in heaven, we are thankful for the opportunity and the privilege we have of knowing you and your Son Jesus Christ and your word, Lord, and being able to study that together.

We just pray now that as we go through our talking points for this particular lesson, your Holy Spirit would guide us as the presenters and our viewers as well, Lord, and bless us abundantly with your presence, we ask in Jesus' name, amen.

Okay, The entire quarter is about making friends for God.

Elder Finley has the main contributor here, and this week we're talking about the power of personal testimony.

Yes, that's the title of the lesson, and 1 of our main purposes for Talking Points, and just to reiterate as we're still kind of starting this out, is again the lesson format is laid out in a weekly Sabbath, afternoon, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, but that was for devotional purposes, not teaching purposes, and so oftentimes, and I've noticed it quite a bit in this lesson, the author of the lesson has something he's trying to communicate, and because by virtue of the setup of the lesson he's got to divide it up, And so oftentimes there may be 3 or 4 key points that are spread out over 7 days.

And so what we have done is gone back through and distilled those into key points.

And just to be clear, the way that we, our relationship is working here, I am the 1 who does the initial outline of the lesson and then Cameron and I go over the lesson together and so these are the key points that I would have drawn out.

Now if Cameron had the primary responsibility, not that when we get together he has input, but the main outline or key points initially are mine and sometimes, if it were the other way around, Cameron's outline would be different from mine.

It would be very similar because we're dealing with the same lesson.

But we're saying this to say, 1 of the things we're going to do is show you how we come up with the key points and why, but you may come up with different key points and that's fine.

We're trying to help you have some tools to make you better equipped to teach SavaSchool.

So I do want to make sure that whenever you have these and there'll be the link at the bottom of the screen again you can get to your the outline that has been provided here and it's not just like okay now I can be done with this I'll just follow this outline.

It's not a substitution for It's a model of how you can put together.

It's a good, if you want to use it, you can.

But like you were saying, the goal is to have people prepare a lesson study based on their own understanding of what was taught and how they would present it clearly for a class.

And so this is just a sample of that as you've put together as the Med Contributor.

So just as a for instance, now we won't do this every week, but let me just walk through what I've done this week.

Sabbath afternoon's lesson is generally introductory to the whole week, and the point it makes is the power of sharing a testimony, that personal experience, which of course is the theme of the week.

Sunday's lesson goes into the example of the demoniacs of the Gadarenes, and the fact that these demon-possessed men, Jesus turned right around and made witnesses for him, which we'll go over in lesson.

Monday's lesson goes over the women who went to the tomb, witnessed that Jesus had raised, and went back and told the disciples about it.

So again, a personal testimony experience.

Tuesday's lesson is highlighting Peter and John before the authorities and talks about the change, how changed lives make a difference.

Now already what I'm seeing in this is how some things kind of conflate together.

You'll see what I do with it in a minute, but as I go through, I said last week, I go through the whole lesson, then I step back and say, How does this answer our main objective this week of sharing the power of personal testimony?

Wednesday talks about sharing our experience, sharing about what Christ has done.

Series

Talking Points, 3rd Quarter 2020: Making Friends for God

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