A. TIME SPENT THIS WEEK: 4 hours total
Sunday school: 1 hr
Worship Service: 1.5 hr
Youth Parent Meeting: 1.5 hr
B. MY CLASS THIS WEEK:
Mike opened the Sunday school class up a little differently this week. Asking for one good thing and one bad thing that happened during the week, Mike began going around the room from student to student. A common answer came up for the good thing of the week as many students shared their weekend thrills of participating in an all youth ski trip. Kids that were unable to go on the trip enjoyed getting paid, going to a sleepover, and spending time with their friends. The bad things of the week included falling while skiing, fighting with parents, staying home alone, going to the hospital, and losing a basketball game.
Maintaining the question and answer theme, Mike followed his first question with an introductory question to the lesson. I do not think he expected their discussion to take up the rest of the hour, but that is exactly what happened.
Mike’s big Q:
“Are riches ever a sign of God’s favor?”
Class Responses:
What are riches?
Does favor = privilege or blessing?
Is God’s favor earned or is it random?
We can’t comprehend God
- Sometimes
o Reference to the life of Job
o God blesses people in different ways
- No
o Wisdom is a sign of God’s favor, not riches
o Reference to Solomon
- Yes
o If they use the riches for good
o God awards people according to what they can handle
o If you have faith
- Both
o It depends whether you use riches for good or evil
With five minutes left in class, Mike squeezes James 2:5 into the lesson, “God has chosen the poor to be rich in faith and to inherit the Kingdom of God.” Going from this verse, he leaves the youth with a final thought to ponder throughout the week:
- The more wealth we have, the harder it becomes to hear and follow God. -
I think Mike did well at allowing the students to respond. Although he was taken away by the initial confusion with the opening question he was sensitive to the Spirit in permitting the youth to discover the truth. He was finally forced to read some scripture in the final five minutes, dismissing the multiple hands flying in hopes of continuing the discussion.
C. QUESTIONS OF THE WEEK:
1. How should you respond to the Spirit in a highly interactive ministry setting? Is it more important to complete the lesson or to send people away with a questioning soul?
2. As an intern in the Sunday school class, what is the appropriate manner to contribute to the class discussion? I do not want to shut anyone down or kill a time of searching for the truth by blatantly throwing it out there. Is it best to be quiet or speak up? How should I do that?
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GREAT POST and great dialogue and great questions... c'mon team comment on these questions
ReplyDeleteResponse 1/28/09 To Phillip
ReplyDeleteRe: Question about a questioning spirit vs. concrete answers. I believe that Mike did a really good job of sending them off with a questioning spirit. I think that he maybe should have given them a challenge to find out some concrete answers over the week. I would have liked to seen the passion of this question extended to try to develop some personal study in the kids. It’s nice that Mike is flexible enough to be willing to continue the discussion next week, I would bet he wasn’t expecting that. The Spirit was definitely producing some questions in the hearts of the youth, and I hope that Mike successfully quenches the questions in their souls next week.
Re: Acting respectfully in the discussion as an observer. Phil, I also was having trouble deciding when was the right time to join in. I found myself holding my tongue a lot, because I wanted for the youth to get the answers they were looking for. I felt it was alright to throw a new aspect of the question out there with what I had said about faith in relation to God’s favor and riches, to give them something else to think about. I think as long as our answered or contributions are deep and few, that we will be able to contribute, but if we start giving stuff away that they want to deal with themselves, or start to be one of the kids who always has their hand up, then we can be detrimental. Hopefully we can contribute to the discussion, to help the youth expand their own thoughts.
In a highly interactive ministry setting, I think there are multiple ways to respond to the Holy Spirit’s moving among the people, it just depends on how appropriate your response is, in my opinion. In 1 Corinthians Paul lays down the footwork regarding how a worship service should be set up: healing, speaking in tongues, prophesying, etc. In that same vein, there are a lot of ministry courses on this campus that teach us how to conduct ourselves as ministers of God. With that being said, when we are prompted by the Spirit to react, we should ask some preliminary questions and move on from there:
ReplyDelete1. Is the request of the Spirit an immediate one or will it take time? Sometimes the Spirit prompts us to move in a certain direction or talk to a particular person and it needs to happen right this instant. In other cases, the whisper of the Spirit simply calls us to make a life change that we will not notice ourselves for years to come?
2. Is my action going to edify the body of Christ, or will it cause others to stumble? Paul says prophesy is for the edification of the body of Christ, and speaking in tongues is for the edification of the person. You never know when something you say or do might kill the time of worship for another person.
3. What is God doing amongst the other people in the room? This fits right along with being sensitive to what may or may not make another person stumble. If you are participating in a quiet, acoustic worship set and you feel inspired to jump up and down, yelling your head off, you will probably disrupt and otherwise make it impossible for other people to hear from God.
I don’t think there is a set way to “respond to the Spirit in a highly interactive ministry environment,” but there are always some guidelines to follow. I hope these help a little bit.
As an intern in the Sunday School class, your top priority is to contribute to the students that are attending there. When you get to the church where you are serving in ministry, establish right what you are there for: are you there to help feed or be fed? I am not so arrogant as to say we have the right to condescend on those who are there to learn, but we are in a different position than they are. Again it comes down to whether you are serving the other person or yourself. For the most part I would let the students struggle until I felt like it wasn’t productive anymore. If they stop focusing and start changing the subject, that would be a pretty good indication it is time to move on. Don’t just throw the answers out all the time, but keep the ball rolling.
These are hard questions and I think they can only really be dealt with through experience. When you are in Sunday School, always debrief and ask your supervisor for some tips on how to do better next time. I appreciate your vulnerability in your questions. Good luck!