Teaching the Next Generations

A Comprehensive Guide for Teaching Christian Formation

Linhart, Terry

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781493405817
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

How Ministers Can Be Excellent and Effective Teachers Effective teaching is important not only to the Christian faith but to the success and impact of Christian ministry. This book champions the role of teaching as a necessary skill for ministers to develop, equipping them to work effectively for the spiritual growth of young people. Terry Linhart, who has more than twenty-five years of experience training youth workers, brings together expert Christian educators representing a broad array of evangelical institutions and traditions to show how teaching connects to discipleship and the church in current contexts. Designed for the classroom, the book covers a wide range of topics and includes helpful illustrative diagrams, tables, line drawings, and charts.

SECTION FOUR

METHODS FOR CHRISTIAN TEACHING

The most visible aspect of teaching is at the point of contact between teacher and student, commonly called methods. Effective Christian teachers possess and use a wide array of methods to better teach the full range of learners and to better integrate application and learning transfer beyond the lesson. In recent years, the emphasis has been on lecture as the almost exclusive method for teaching young people. However, the interactive and visual social media world and a critique about youth ministry’s outcomes are forcing Christian leaders to seek various methods that immediately connect with the lives and interests of students.

This section covers the most prominent methods for teaching the next generation and gives particular attention to simulations and outdoor learning, which have a long history of effectiveness but are often underutilized. Teaching the Bible, discussing, and speaking to large groups remain the primary methods for teaching the next generation. The chapters in this section help readers understand these methods and establish guidelines for their effective use in ministry contexts.

Marlene LeFever’s Creative Teaching Methods: Be an Effective Christian Teacher (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 1997) is a helpful resource for the many methods not covered in this section that are worth further attention.

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Teaching the Bible So Young People Will Learn

DUFFY ROBBINS

The Smosh.com website called it “22 Ridiculous Name Misspellings That Prove Starbucks Is Just Messing with Us,” and their photo gallery of Starbucks cups with customers’ names horribly butchered by overly busy baristas made the headline seem entirely plausible. A quick survey showed some fairly amusing and creative renderings of common names: “Alan,” spelled as “Alien”; “Oliver” spelled as “All Over”; “Whitney” as “Whiney”; and “Margaux” as “Marabcdefg.” But surely one of the best was the picture of a coffee cup showing the name “Cark” scrawled with the standard Starbucks Sharpie pen and a caption explaining that the customer had given his name as “Marc with a ‘c.’”

If nothing else, by this point in our text, it has surely become clear to any reader that communication is difficult—whether you are a coffee addict giving the barista your name or a youth worker trying to communicate to teenagers the Name above all names. Teaching the Bible to the next generations is a challenge; it’s not impossible, but it is difficult. Even when one thinks it clear and obvious and the truths self-evident and “so obvious that even a child could understand,” it’s quite stunning how often the message is garbled and lost in translation. Creative, thoughtful youth workers, sincere and passionate Sunday school teachers, learned and articulate preachers on a regular basis offer what they believe is a clear proclamation of the name of Jesus. But what their youth groups, Sunday school classes, and young congregations hear is muddled and confused. Were there a photograph and a caption, it might well read, “Jesus, with a ‘Gee, this is hard!’”

This is not a new problem, newly emerging on the youth ministry horizon, and—spoiler alert—it is unlikely that reading and carefully applying the principles of this book will make it an old problem that we no longer need to worry about. It’s an ongoing challenge that has to be taken seriously. Many a Christian worker has launched into ministry thinking, “How hard can this be? I love young people, I love Jesus, I love the Bible, I sort of feel like I have the gift of teaching,” only to crash back to earth when they decide, “I still love teenagers, I still love Jesus, and I still love the Bible, but my young people don’t seem to have the gift of learning.”

Reading, Writing, and Redemption

That’s not to say that teaching the Bible is precisely like teaching every other random academic subject. To begin with, the last comment most Christian workers want to hear from a fifteen-year-old in the youth group is: “Wow, the way you do Bible study reminds me of how bored I get at school!” But, more important, there’s a substantial difference between the types of content we teach when we’re teaching God’s Word and the types of content we teach when we’re teaching about participles or medieval history. It’s possible to live a long and happy life without knowing how to calculate the area within a trapezoid. Being ignorant or ill-informed about Jesus Christ is a neglect that misses the Source of life itself (John 4:13).1

When teaching the Bible to the next generations we’re talking about a unique subject matter—Jesus, the Son of God—drawing from a unique source—the Bible, which is the Word of God (2 Tim. 3:16). We’re talking about goals that are unique: the goal in teaching the Bible is not just education, memorization of facts, or accumulation of truth; it’s the transformation that comes in response and application of those truths (Rom. 12:2; James 1:22–25). And we’re talking about a spiritual agency that goes beyond the teacher, the teaching space, the curricular resources, and the student, an agency that comes through the work and person of the Holy Spirit (cf. Isa. 59:21; Luke 12:12; John 16:7b–8, 13; 14:26; 1 Cor. 2:11b–14; Titus 3:5–7; 1 John 2:20).2

In short, what we are talking about is a strategic and critical alliance between the Christian worker and the Spirit of God. It is the teacher who teaches, but without the Spirit to “guide [our students] . . . into all the truth” (John 16:13), to convict our students of sin (John 16:8), and convince them of righteousness (John 16:13), our effort is bankrupt, no more capable of igniting the fires of passion for God than plastic logs in an electric fireplace. The lesson may look good, and it may even provide a little light, but don’t expect a lot of warmth from it.3

John Milton Gregory was not just the president of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he was also a Christian who showed a deep burden for effectively communicating biblical truth. Indeed, it was that burden that led him to combine his keen mind as an educator and his warm heart as an evangelist to write a book originally published in 1856 that he called The Seven Laws of Teaching.4

Good communication is good communication, and one could argue that certain principles of effective instruction are universal. In fact, it’s not difficult to find clear examples of all of Gregory’s Seven Laws of Teaching in the pages of Scripture. Whether it’s Nathan’s use of story to bring David to repentance after his adultery with Bathsheba (2 Sam. 12:1–7), God’s use of the potter’s house to help Jeremiah understand his dominion over Israel (Jer. 18:1–6), Jesus’s use of parables and questions to provoke the minds of his audience (Matt. 10:10–13; 17:25), or Paul’s appeals to the witness of his own personal lifestyle to testify to the truth of his teaching (1 Cor. 11:1; 1 Thess. 2:5–8), all of it can be vividly linked to one of the Seven Laws. While it may be that effective youth workers will go beyond the Seven Laws in their Bible teaching, if they are truly wise, they had better not stop short of the Seven Laws in their Bible teaching.

Seven Laws of Learning

This chapter, then, is offered as a primer, an introduction to those seven basic principles, with some attention to practical application in the context of Bible teaching and youth ministry.

The Law of the Teacher: “The teacher must know that which he would teach.” 5

This is the first and most basic of all the laws of teaching. And, in some ways, it’s the most intuitive. The first question we ask of any teacher is, Do they know what they’re talking about?

There is a reason John begins his pastoral letter with a word of personal testimony.

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us—that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. (1 John 1:1–4, emphasis added)

We can’t teach what we don’t know any more than we can give what we don’t have or return from some place we’ve never been. We must know that which we would teach.

What does that mean in practical terms?

1. Be authentic. First of all, by God’s grace and through the power of his Spirit, seek to practice what you teach. Our students need to believe that, in some sense, we have heard, we have seen, we have looked at, and we have touched. Ultimately, the power of the apostle Paul’s ministry was not that he said, “Listen to me,” but that he could say, “Imitate me” (1 Cor. 11:1). That doesn’t mean we have to be perfect, but it does mean we have to be in pursuit (Phil. 3:12–17).6

2. Do your homework. Do good, sound biblical exegesis so that you can speak with confidence about what the Word is teaching. Be sure you’ve considered some of the tough questions that might be raised by a text and are ready to address them should your students ask. Know how to pronounce names you will need to pronounce, for instance, biblical place names and proper names.

3. Be organized. Have a clear sense of your lesson plan. You’re taking your students on a journey. If you want them to trust you as the guide, you’ll need to communicate that you know where you’re going. If you have media, check it in advance, and then double-check it. Make sure it works properly and that words are spelled correctly. We all make honest mistakes, but it doesn’t enhance your credibility when the PowerPoint slide invites students to “Be filled with the Holy Spit.”

The Law of the Learner: “The learner must be interested in the truth to be learned.”

The hardest part of teaching the Bible isn’t teaching the Bible. The hardest part of teaching the Bible is getting teenagers to listen and engage when you’re teaching the Bible. Remember the old question: If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it really make a sound? In one sense, that’s the point of the second law of learning. If a youth worker leads a Bible study and no one hears it, did the youth worker really lead a Bible study?

Most of us are familiar with the old proverb, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” The Law of the Learner reminds us that even living water will be refused unless there is first of all thirst. Imagine answering a question that nobody’s asking, preparing a feast for people who aren’t hungry, coaching someone on the proper way to do a when they’re perfectly happy with their b method, or giving the answer to the knock-knock jok...