As I visit churches and Sunday School classes or small group Bible study classes, I am often dismayed at the number of knowledge and information dispensers we have leading our classes. Knowledge is good, and biblical knowledge is wonderful and great to acquire. However, if biblical knowledge is all we are teaching in our classes it is my opinion that we are missing God’s plan and purpose for our teaching.
In a recent conversation with an Minister of Education, I noted that some of his teachers (information dispensers) are teaching the only way they know. In some cases it is the only way he/she has ever seen demonstrated. In many situations it is the easiest, most comfortable to the teacher and it seems reasonable to pass on what I read and understand from scripture.
Teachers (and preachers) spend several hours each week studying and preparing for the lesson to be delivered on Sunday (or their particular meeting time). We study reading scripture, gleaning from our 27 commentaries and the thousands of resources available on the internet. Teachers are to be commended for their time spent in study and preparation. The reward is theirs for studying and learning more about God and His plan. The problem comes at the end of our preparation when we walk into the classroom carrying with us all the information we have been able to glean in 3, 5, 7, or even 10 hours of study, and we set out to expend all of our newly acquired knowledge on those sitting in front of us – in 30 minutes.
In Teaching That Bears Fruit, I call this the Dump Truck method of teaching. We spend all week loading our dumptruck up, back it into the classroom on Sunday morning and dump the whole load on our listeners. The drawback is it is unusable to our listeners, unless we are attempting to build Bible trivia buffs. Information dispensed in this manner can become an obstruction rather than an aid in living the Christian life.
An experienced dump truck driver carrying a load of gravel knows how to raise the dump bed gradually as he drives along unloading the gravel in a smooth and immediately usable manner. The first time I attempted to unload a truck full of finely ground limestone, it all came out in one pile. Needless to say it was not usable. It took an entire crew of workers with shovels and rakes to come behind me and smooth out limestone so it could be used. I was not the MVP on the job that day.
In Bible study, we do not have the luxury of having a crew come in behind us and work our information dump into a usable road for our listeners to travel. It’s time to put a for sale sign in the dump truck and begin teaching the way jesus taught. If we want our listeners to become life changing learners, we must teach for life change. We must move from being knowledge dispensers to agents of life-change, and initiators of learning experiences for our listeners. This is teaching the way Jesus taught. This is teaching that bears fruit.
For more information about Teaching That Bears Fruit visit http://soncare.net