Click below to download the Cornerstone Connections leader’s guide and student lesson. This week’s resources also include two lesson plans and a discussion starter video which offer different ways of looking at the topic. Each lesson plan includes opening activities, scripture passages, discussion questions, and real-life applications.
Place a collection of various kinds of balls inside a container up front that your participants can’t see inside of. Choose a volunteer and ask them to come up and stand next to it. Explain that when they’re ready, you’re going to start tossing the contents of the container to them one at a time. Their goal is to catch (and hold onto) as many objects as they can. It doesn’t matter exactly how they manage to hold them in their arms, as long as they collect as many as possible. (Feel free to adapt these rules however you want for your group.)
The volunteer has five seconds to catch a ball and get themselves ready to catch another one. If they aren’t by the time five seconds is up, throw another ball anyway. They have 60 seconds total. The game ends either when the total time is up, or they drop a total of three balls.
If you have time, you can ask another volunteer to come up and try to beat this total by going through the same process themselves. Be sure to gather enough balls to use for this activity ahead of time (even if you need to buy very cheap ones, like rubber balls). It’s also ideal to have several different varieties and sizes of balls as well.
With our topic being greed this week, the meaning of activity should be obvious!
The larger your group, the better this activity can be. A group of 15-20 people is ideal, but you can still do it with a group as small as five people as well. Less than five probably won’t work.
Start by choosing one volunteer and asking them to come up front and juggle two balls. If they are successful at that, try having them juggle with three balls. If they aren’t able to do that successfully, you could keep choosing volunteers until you find someone who can. If so, have that person progress to juggling four balls next—which it’s likely no one will be able to do at all.
Next, have everyone in the room join in so the activity becomes group juggling. Ask your participants to stand in a loose circle with everyone facing toward the center. Explain that each of them just needs worry about keeping track of two people: the person who’s going to pass the ball to them, and the person they’re going to pass the ball to next. The reason for this is that when everyone has been assigned these two people, they can pass several balls around the group at once!
Give the participants just one ball to pass around at first. Time them to see how fast they can send the ball through the circuit (it will be challenging to get a good time if anyone drops the ball). Once they’ve successfully repeated this process a few times, add in a second ball for them to move through the group. Then throw a third, and a fourth, until your participants are juggling more balls together than anyone could by themselves!
You can also use the original song we’re recommending in our list of music options this week to show a countdown leading up to the start of the program. Start this video exactly five minutes before Youth Sabbath School is set to begin (and make sure you’ll be ready to start when it’s done!). The first half of this song will provide some instrumental music for the participants to listen to as they come in, but at 2:27 the singing will begin. Hearing these lyrics will help your participants sing it better later, as sometimes it can take a lot of repetition for people to learn new songs. As the leader, feel free to hum or sing along so your participants can get familiar with the song faster and take it to heart.
As you consider our lesson for today, be careful not to assume right off that none of it is relevant to you! You may not think you’re struggling or have ever struggled with greed before, but everyone does at some point. It’s so natural for humans to feel it that we sometimes don’t realize it’s motivating us at all! If it is a problem for you and you just aren’t aware enough of it yet, hopefully our lesson this week will open your eyes.
Create a video clip that illustrates our lesson for this week. Remember to create a list of follow-up questions based on the video as well.
This 2:09-minute video clip stands in contrast to this week’s theme of greed.
This very short clip (just under a minute long) is from the 1987 movie Wall Street, and features a character making the claim that “greed is good.” This idea stands in contrast to our lesson this week, which holds that greed is a bottomless pit—not a good thing.