My Lesson Week!!

Kara Tomaszewski
Teaching Report I
Time Spent: 4.5 hrs (SS-1, Worship Practice-.5, SService-1, Lesson Preparation-2)
A. My Lesson
This week, we were continuing our series on Ephesians, and my lesson landed on chapter 4. I chose to select only a small portion – verses 1-15 – so we could really focus in on what it means to serve God and discuss how to live a life like Paul told us to: to be a prisoner for God.
9:30 – 9:40 Arrival: The 20s group is almost always right on time, so we leave the first ten minutes for fellowship so everyone can catch up with each other. Every week, someone from the group brings breakfast, so people are also gathering their food at this time. When everything was wrapping up, I had pastor Stephen list any announcements that he had for our group for the week

9:40 – 9:55 Prayer: At the beginning of this time, I asked for the group to provide any prayer requests they had, any praises, or what God was doing in their lives. For each prayer request, I asked if someone from the group would be willing to pray for each specific request at the end. When all prayers were covered, I closed the prayer.

9:55 – 10:30 Lesson: Our class is a very discussion oriented class, so after we read the scripture, I basically guided the group along with discussion questions. I began by asking someone to read Ephesians 4:1-15.
1. As we can see here, Paul is telling us we need to live lives “worthy of following Christ,” how do we do that?
-A life of total surrender.
-A life so full of Christ that each person is unified with God and eachother.

2. One thing that I found interesting was that Paul makes this statement “as a prisoner for the Lord”. What do you guys think that means. I’m not sure myself, but I just found it interesting. What do you think this means? Is Paul the example of living a life worthy of the call or is he just listing criteria needed to live a worthy life for the call?
-Giving up everything to follow God.
-Making a choice to be fully committed to Him.

3. There are 5 criteria listed, 5 applications for us, to be people who live a life worthy of the call. What are they?
-I wrote these 5 points on the whiteboard and we discussed their
meaning:
1.) Be completely humble
2.) Be completely gentle
3.) Be patient
4.) Bear one another in love
5.) Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the
bond of peace. (which is explained in verses 4-5)

4. What do you think completely means?

Keep the unity by every means possible. The first 4 points in the formula give us the means to be unified in Christ. If we are humble, patient, loving, gentle, we will be able to work together better and strive for Christ better. This is the main message. We need to be unified.

5. What is meant by unity?
-Being one in the 5 points made above.
-If we carry all these things out, we will be united as a body of Christians.

6. How do we do this?
-We must first carry out the 5 points of criteria within the church, and then take it out into the world.

7. Do we need to combine denominations or keep separate to love each other better?

8. How do we become more humble as Christians to other Christians?
-Put God above all things, we must treat each other as Paul described within the church and outside.
-People see how we treat each other as Christians.

B. Response: The 20s group usually has really great discussions. Here is what people said:
Being “worthy to follow Christ” means that we are all worthy to do so, but the way to do it well is to follow the guidelines of the verses. They saw a connection between this and being unified with and outside the church.

Michelle Mowat said that being a prisoner of God meant fully surrendering to God – Paul was a model of what this meant. Paul in a way was saying, I can do this, so can you. Nathan Strobel said that this was an encouragement from Paul and that we’re not in those terrible circumstances, what’s stopping us?

Pastor Steven made sure to note that the word “completely” in the list of criteria was a big word with a lot of depth. It is not something to be taken lightly, but means something like totally, or fully! Also, Zach was saying how the “5 criteria was not just to be carried out with the church but with the whole world. Mike Ferwerda said that unity is accomplished by doing the things in the list. I mentioned that it seems if we carried out each of the 5 things 100%, unity would come naturally.

Pastor Stephen said that many people are still debating if unity means under one authority, as in actually one church, or if it is fine if we remain separate. He did, however, say that if we all have the same goal, to serve God with our whole hearts, the church will still be united.

C. Supervising Teacher’s Evaluation
After class I met with Pastor Stephen and he said that overall things went well. He is always very encouraging, and said that for my first Sunday School lesson it went very well. He did want me to go deeper though, because even though our discussion lasted the whole class, he really likes to dig into things. He said it was age appropriate, and it was good that no one fell asleep this week. He did say that even though our group is very talkative, I should always be prepared for people not to talk.

D. Things I did well
1. I think I did well at preparing a lesson that was relevant to today.
2. I think I did well at bringing up questions that the group either also had questions about or could wrestle with the answers.
3. The lesson flowed well, there were really no awkward pauses, or times where I didn’t have anything to fill in.
4. I did my research as to the historical-cultural background of the passage.

E. Things I need to improve
1. I should prepare for a class where no one will respond.
2. I can work on going deeper into the text, relating it to other areas of the bible, maybe a word study as well.
3. I could transition better between topics.
4. I could share a story, mine, or someone else’s that relates to the lesson.

F. Questions:
1. How do you prepare a lesson as if no one will respond?
2. What do you do if no one is responding?
3. The people that usually sleep in our class weren’t there this week, what do you do with people that fall asleep in Sunday School?
4. How do you get people to respond with their lives after a lesson like this one?