Thinking about Teaching

As I was walking the dog, I was thinking about how I have had to utilize different teaching techniques with my congregation.

With youth, having a variety of teaching techniques is both easy to carry out and necessary. I tended to always fall back on a small group discussion model with peer groups of about the same size and if big enough, also gender. But I also felt it important to have a variety of different learning experiences. They included devotional talks, debates, working on projects, multimedia presentations, and imaginative prayer exercises, to name a few.

With our young adult small groups, we kind of had this free form inductive bible study. I did most of the inductive study on my own, and wrote discussions that helped the young adults bring their lives alongside the work of God and lives of his people in Scripture. The goal was to see their story as a part of the story of God, and to get to know the Bible in a way where it really connected with what was going on in their lives. It was not so much steps to better living as it was trusting the Spirit speak through the group with me as the expert and tour guide.

I started out with the plan to do this same kind of dynamic bible discovery with the adults here in Fowler. Things have not worked that way.

Our Sunday School curriculum, in my opinion, is dreadful. It is a quarterly written by David C. Cook. It is primarily reading a very narrow and didactic text that is a simple commentary on a part of Scripture. Its approach is to ask a few content questions, and then write a page or two of text. Repeat. But our ladies are attached to it. I try and spice it up and make it interesting--but I struggle with both the style and content of the curriculum.

On Wednesday night, I started with my usual kind of discussion. What I found was, our Bible Study people found discussions difficult. They wanted more content and lecture. Or something like our Sunday School curriculum. I knew I needed to adapt.

So lately, we have been doing a combination of teaching Inductive Bible Study tools, the pastor sharing insights from study, and the ladies being able to ask questions. It works well for what I want because the folks in class are invested in being studiers and not just consumers. And they are having to bring some things into this discussion. It also allows me the flexibility to read the people and situation, and adjust my teaching to it. This flexibility is very important to me, and has been for years. They get their telling kinds of stuff as I share some extra points that I have learned from my study. And, they are not having to deal with so many discussion questions. We still need to work on the application piece of the Bible study a little bit, but so far so good.