Week 2: The Synoptic Gospels
Goal: Review the synoptic gospels and discuss the purpose of Luke’s gospel
Notes for the Teacher: For our younger children, we focused on learning who wrote the gospels and a little bit about each saint. For our older kids, we are wanted to build an understanding that the gospels compliment each other. We have a fuller picture because we have four accounts of Christ’s life.
GOARCH Online Chapel
You can find the daily gospel reading and read it to your children.
Song: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
How do we teach our children the Bible?
St. John Chrysostom provides us specific instructions. Read about them in the family guide we sent to all the parents at the beginning of the year.
We cannot understand our worship without knowing the Scriptures. Yet the same is true vice versa: The meaning of the Scriptures is disclosed in worship.
Early Elementary Lesson
We continued to sing and learn, “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” The song is available in the YouTube video above.
Upper Elementary Lesson
The idea behind the activity for this age group to help them understand that St. Luke was a historical writer. He also wrote in the style of his time, which provided us with some important details about when Christ was born.
Middle / High School Lesson
With this age group, our goal was to help them understand that the evangelists were telling about the same events, but they had different purposes in how they wrote their gospels based on who they were writing it to.
Additionally, if four of us were to write about the Divine Liturgy, we are going to write it slightly different based on our experiences and who we’re trying to teach. Our priest would write a theological explanation. (John’s Gospel) The choir director or chanter would write their explanation from a musical perspective. Two lay people would write their explanations from yet another perspective. One might be explaining to those who are not Orthodox and the other to those who are Orthodox. All four people are writing with the same goal of explaining the Divine Liturgy, but they might emphasis different parts of it.