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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Talking Points: Advent HOPE Sabbath School Training Series

Kameron DeVasher

Mark Howard

02 Preparing to Teach Sabbath School

03 Avoiding the Sacrifice of Fools

01 The Birth of Talking Points

04 Post-Game Analysis and Q&A

I wanted to share with you a little bit of context for what we're going to do this afternoon.

If you've been tuning in on the live stream each evening, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday leading up to this, we have been doing a live stream training.

Basically, the 2 of us sitting at a table like this going over certain aspects of Sabbath school work, especially the lesson study, how to prepare for it, how to lead out a discussion and teach the lesson.

And this morning then, we did something different than that.

We actually had the, as you probably recall, the Sabbath school program there, Pastor Howard led out and the lesson study for this week about this portion of Isaiah, which I found particularly fascinating about God's justice and his vengeance, wrath.

And then more of a sermon-like presentation by myself.

So we've done some trainings on video, we're doing Sabbath school teaching, this thing we did preaching, and now this afternoon we're doing a few different formatted things even beyond that.

So what we're gonna do at this time is take 1 of our afternoon features and break it into 2 essential parts.

Basically the first half of what we're gonna do is what we're calling the post-game analysis.

And Pastor Howard will let you know a little bit more about that in just a second here, what that is and why we're doing it.

And then after we have a discussion for several minutes here about some of the things we've seen in recent Lesson Quarterly, strengths and Weaknesses, then we're gonna open the floor to questions or comments that you might have because we would like to, in the spirit of Sabbath School, have an interactive opportunity.

And I know we're you know distanced and we got masks and whatnot, but they still, just like this morning, have microphones on the ready for anyone who would like to raise your hand or have a comment and talk about some of the questions you might have when it comes to Sabbath school preparation, Sabbath school study, Sabbath school, anything related to Sabbath school, we wanna help you with those kind of things.

Or mission, the mission inside of Sabbath school, anything connected in any way tangentially to the Sabbath School program, we wanna be a resource for you this afternoon.

So the first part again is gonna be our post-game analysis, then we're gonna open the floor to some questions and answer time.

So Pastor Howard, why don't you tell us a little bit more detail, what is this post-game analysis?

All right, well, 1 of the things we spoke about this week was of course our Sabbath school's dwindling.

And I think when we started off, we talked about, at least from my perspective, I've had a lot of people say, I really just don't like the quarterly.

I don't like going through the quarterly.

I don't like, I don't get much out of it.

And so we've given some tips in that direction.

But when I talked to Cameron about initially, I think it was after the quarter on education.

And I said, why don't we, you know, in talking points, we put ourselves on a timer and we're not really a hard line timer, we're right around 30 minutes, and we don't get into giving any of the background of what we deal with going into the lessons.

We've tried to do that more this past week and this weekend.

And when we go through a lesson or quarterly, there are things that we have to navigate around.

There are things in the lesson sometimes that we just don't agree with.

There are things that aren't maybe as interesting.

Or interests and features that were drawn out.

They were like, where did that come from?

And I thought to myself, that's, we ought to do an episode at least each quarter where we do a postgame analysis of the quarterly and some of the challenges we ran into because I think that would be helpful to Sabbath school teachers and leaders.

And the challenge that I had with that is because that man it sounds like we're gonna read go have to understand that I am the department associate.

And the nice thing about the associate is if anything goes wrong, administration talks to him.

So I'm thinking politically, how can this be spun as a bad thing?

And can you imagine if we went through the quarter and each week taught the lesson and then at the end said, look, here's all the stuff we didn't like about this quarter, you know, and just kind of tore apart the lesson quarterly, which is not the goal.

There are a lot of conversations that people have offline that won't be, that we won't discuss in the program where people say, you know, this quarter, I don't understand why they were talking about this, or where was this trying to go?

Or it seems like the whole quarter was it, and.

Because I was the 1 that came to him with it, and at first he's like, okay, so we're gonna basically do an episode to trash the quarterly every quarter.

And that's not what we're gonna do today either.

But we do also at the same time want to be forthright and honest that there are challenges people run into and how do you deal with them?

Our goal is that more people would be using the quarterly.

And so my pitch to Pastor Cameron was, a lot of people aren't using it because they don't know how to navigate around certain things.

And if we can teach them what we do to navigate around our problems, because you have to understand something that's really awesome about the, and I'm going to call it the Quarterly Forever, even though we told you that's not the official name, everybody calls it that, it is the adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide.

Which is published every quarter, so thus the name.

But the beauty of it is that people around the entire, Seventh-day Adventists around the entire globe are at least studying close to the same topic.

And the further we get away from that, the more potential there is for the devil to divide us.

And so there's a real benefit in going by the quarterly lesson.

But there are some things we've learned in navigating through it that we wanted to share with you.

So that's what we're talking about this afternoon.

And what we didn't want to do is pretend that there weren't any challenges, and then people would just quietly be frustrated, and then jettison the whole thing.

Because the goal isn't to get rid of it, the goal is to get the most out of the great resources the general conference has put together but the goal ultimately is not to prop this up it's to use this to get us deeper into this and that's our objective this afternoon and we haven't even had an opening word of prayer yet here so we're gonna do that but I just wanted to let you know that the goal of what we're talking about here isn't just to highlight particular problems or issues or something like that.

It's to be a resource for all of us to think about what do you do when you run into these obstacles and to let's not pretend that they're not there, but how to navigate them appropriately.

Yeah, well, let's just- Let's begin with a prayer.

Yeah, let's begin with a word of prayer and then we'll get into our material.

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much for another opportunity to visit together on this Sabbath day.

Thank you for the congregation that's assembled here in person and online.

And Lord, as we look at the Bible study guides that have been so well prepared, we want to get the most out of this hard work, and at the same time recognize that they're put together by fallible human beings, and we need the leading of the Holy Spirit so he can lead us into all truth.

So Lord, we would ask that you would fulfill that promise in our hearing today, for we pray it in Jesus' name, amen.

We had talked about doing this recording about the same time that Advent Hope contacted us.

We're going to put this on our YouTube page and on our website, which again, that website is michigansspm.org.

But we thought we ought to just hold off and record this while we're out at Advent Hope.

And we want to talk about, first and foremost, I want to talk about some of the challenges we've run into in quarterly lessons and how we've navigated around them, but before that we just had, you know, there are things we also learned from our own leading out of talking points that have been educational.

For example, the lesson we did this morning, that I taught this morning, lesson number 6, we record several weeks ahead, and up to even 6 weeks ahead we've been at some time.

And so we were actually, we had outlined lesson number 6, we recorded lesson number 6, and once we had done it, we were ready to publish it for Talking Points, And Cameron and I talked about it, and we realized that we were getting away from the whole original intent of talking points.

And I'm going to explain what I mean by that.

Lesson, as I mentioned this morning, lesson number 6 covers 15 chapters in Isaiah.

I don't care how good a teacher is, you're not covering 15 chapters in your 45 minute or 55 minute or even if they give you an hour and 15 minutes for Sabbath school class, which doesn't happen.

And so what I found myself doing it and it became more, you know, when we started talking points We were working with the education quarterly It was topical and so it was in some ways easier to draw out different points that we wanted to dwell on But then when we got into Isaiah, it's a narrative.

You're going through the book of Isaiah and you kind of feel guilty like leaving out a part of the Bible in the in the corner.

So here we've got 15 chapters and after we had recorded that I found that what I did and in fact the last few lessons, I was trying to basically bullet point every point that could be made from the lesson so that those who came to Sabbath school class wouldn't miss anything.

Now I'm going to ask you what at least 1 of the faults of that kind of thinking is.

Series

Talking Points: Advent HOPE Sabbath School Training Series

04 Post-Game Analysis and Q&A

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

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