ADVICE TO SUNDAY SCHOOL / BIBLE STUDY TEACHERS: PART 2

Continuing with my advice based mainly on mistakes I have made in the past as a teacher, here are some additional areas of potential pitfalls to be aware of:

Stay on Top of Technical Issues

When you are presenting an informal talk to a home Bible study, there are really no technical issues you need to worry about unless it is nighttime and the power goes off or you have left all your lecture notes at home. The only thing you really need is a chair to sit in and preferably an empty chair or table next to you to hold your Bible, handouts, and/or notes. But giving a presentation in any other setting can be more of a challenge.

Often when I had to give a Bible lesson in a few days, I would have what Freud called the Examination Dream. That is the type of dream where you are headed for a final exam in a class and your alarm clock didn't go off on time, you get a flat tire on the way to class, you can't find the right classroom, the exam is written in a foreign language you don't understand, etc. etc. But for a teacher instead of a pupil, the dream takes the form of forgetting your lecture notes, having to change classrooms in the middle of the class period, finding that there are not enough chairs for the students, no one shows up for your lecture or they are chatting among themselves during your lecture, etc. etc.

At last I began to realize that I wasn't really nervous at all concerning the content of my lesson or my ability to present it adequately (although perhaps I should have been worried), instead it was concerning the actual logistics involved in teaching. In other words, would there be a lectern on stage of the proper height for me to read my material, was it big enough to hold my notes and my Bible, would the computer system for the projector system work that day, was there a fresh battery in the light pointer / slide controller, had I turned on my microphone and adjusted the volume properly, etc. etc.

Therefore I resolved to not use a microphone unless absolutely necessary, dispense with visual aids if they weren't needed, carry spare batteries with me, and show up for class very early to make sure everything was ready. And on occasion, even that would not keep me out of trouble, which leads to my next piece of advice.

Be prepared for all eventualities.

When I was a research manager at my company, twice I had to give a one-on-one presentation on our department's work to our company president. He had the well-deserved reputation of being a rather sadistic man who loved to humiliate people in public. A fellow manager and I were both giving our talks using an old fashioned transparency projector. He was first to speak, and the light bulb burned out in the middle of his talk. After a fruitless search to locate a replacement bulb, the president told my colleague to go ahead and finish his speech without the overheads. However, unfortunately that manager was relying on reading directly off the transparencies to give him the necessary information, and so the rest of the talk was less than it could have been. I had thought ahead, and when it came for my turn I could easily read from the paper copies of each overhead I had brought with me.

Before the second talk I had to give to this same president, I had been told by someone that one favorite trick this sadist had was to stop a speaker before he had even started and say, “Show me your fifth slide and give your whole talk using only it.” So each slide which I had prepared told a complete story just in case he pulled that trick on me as well (which he didn't).

Of course, you can never anticipate what will happen to derail your plans, but it never hurts to wear suspenders as well as a belt just in case. Turning back to a church setting, here are two examples that happened to me decades earlier due to another sadist (or at least one who had a rather wicked sense of humor) that illustrate the importance of being well prepared.

This particular person was a friend of our church elder and attended some of our activities although he was a member of another church in town. He once offered his house for us to use for a Wednesday evening Bible study led by our elder (Yes, we only had one since it was a very tiny congregation). Soon after the lesson began, the doorbell rang and two men at the door were ushered in by our genial host. It turns out that he had purposely invited two Mormon missionaries to come over on that particular evening just to watch the sparks fly. Our quick-thinking elder ushered them into another room and subjected them an impromptu apologetics lesson. But before he left, he turned the class over to me to teach. So both of us had to wing it at the last minute.

I should have learned from that experience not to trust the elder's friend, but I didn't. He approached me about two weeks before Easter and asked if I would be willing to give a little five-minute devotional after a meal his church was having. I agreed, but when I showed up at the church, I saw my name on a big poster listed as the featured speaker at their large annual fund-raising dinner. So while I was eating (and I didn't have any appetite at that point) I had to devise a way to turn my little devotional into a full length presentation other than just talking very, very slowly. I survived the experience barely, but I can't vouch for the audience that had to hear it.

Never indulge in sarcasm or try to fool your class.

This is another lesson that I have been rather slow to learn. Once when I was trying to convince my class that the most popular view of the future was probably highly unlikely, I purposely led them along by taking a randomly chosen Bible passage and subjecting it to all the worst techniques of biblical interpretation that I had detected in a best-selling book on prophecy. I did it with a very straight face and ended up, understandably, with a totally ridiculous conclusion. To my dismay, no one in the class caught on to what I was doing even at the end of my nonsensical rambling. I then had to admit to them that I had actually been parodying the technique used by others in order to expose it. They all knew then that they had been fooled, and only a few laughed. One women in the class actually refused to talk to me or even look me in the face until I apologized to her, and later to the whole class for my behavior.

Know how to deal with comments or questions from your listeners.

As part of my training at work, I was sent to a Presentation Skills Class. It actually helped me in my Bible teaching in dealing with the above situations. One of the lessons that it taught was to always repeat the question before attempting to answer. The reasons are many, including the fact that some in the audience may not have been able to hear; it gives you time to formulate an answer while you are repeating it; and you can reword the question (or comment) slightly to bring out the points you want to emphasize while eliminating the aspects of it that do not bear repeating. Then, after making your answer, immediately turn away from the questioner and ask the rest of the audience if they have any other questions, purposely ignoring any additional comments or question from that same person. That will keep attention-hoggers from asking you more and more questions or even accuse you of not really giving them a satisfactory answer.

Then, there are times when you really are caught off guard and don't know the answer to a question. The temptation is for the speaker to wing it and give a less than accurate reply. It is far better to just admit your ignorance openly and either (a) ask the rest of the class whether anyone has an answer or (b) simply say, as I have done on several occasions, “I will have to do some research during the week and get back to you next week.” If you chose the latter option, be sure to keep your promise.

Never humiliate someone who asks a question or makes a comment.

The most important reason to obey this advice is that it is the Christian way to act. The second reason is that the person you do it to will probably never open up again and may even leave the church entirely. Thirdly, it will probably be obvious to many in your class that the reason for your action is that you didn't have a good answer to the question and didn't want to admit it. I have only seen this happen in a church setting once, and I pray that I will never see again.

My wife and I were vacationing in New England, and we stopped at a church where we were shown to the college age class taught by the pastor of the church. He was going through a very difficult and controversial Bible passage and afterwards asked if there were any questions. One young man made a very innocent comment concerning the text, and the pastor pointed his finger at him and shouted at the top of his voice, “You've been reading Catholic books, haven't you!” I thought that the poor student was going to burst into tears. Even mild criticism may cause someone to feel humiliated.

Know how to receive praise.

Sometimes it is better for a teacher to receive gentle admonition than praise. In my case, I have realized that my naturally inflated ego needs a little puncturing on occasion. I do, however, appreciate kind words given to me by those who have heard me speak and I let them know that. But I often deflect the praise by saying truthfully that without my home library of Bible commentaries, I would be totally lost.

There are two types of praise that I appreciate the most, and this is advice to those of you who are more often listeners than teachers themselves. The first is when I happen to accidentally overhear two people discussing my class in positive terms or I get that information second-hand from someone who has heard it from another source. The other occasions, and I wish they were more, are when a person comes up after class and thanks me, not for my sterling presentation, but for some new spiritual insight they have received from it.

Keep it interesting.

This can be a real challenge at times, but one technique I have used successfully in the past is to incorporate acting into your lesson. This can be done by scripting and reading a monologue, writing a sort of four-part play involving a Bible passage and getting volunteers from the class to perform it, proposing a real life type of scenario and explaining it to a few other willing participants in the class ahead of time who agree to play the various parts and then throwing them a loop in the middle of the action by acting in an unexpected manner to see what they will do, and having the whole class read and act out some of the Psalms responsively to duplicate the original liturgical setting. Our teaching team even spent one semester on famous Christian leaders of the past and had the teachers dress up in costume and act as the person in question.

But one technique which I employed for a long time was highly successful in keeping our class members coming back year after year without getting bored. That was to get their collective buy-in on the subject of the the coming semester. I would solicit ideas from all the class members and include those possibilities along with my own suggestions in a confidential questionnaire I would hand out the subsequent week. I would tally the results, adding points to the subjects people really liked and subtracting points if anyone ranked it very low. I announced the results the following week and would begin getting to work organizing lessons. We carried out a regular rotation in the types of subject to cover: Old Testament one quarter, New Testament the next, and a topical subject for the third. That was another way to keep the interest level high.

Consider Team Teaching.

Another way I found to keep your presentations interesting is to assemble a teaching team with a team leader in charge of dividing the semester into individual lessons in order to cover the whole subject adequately. Then at a team meeting, the leader would go over the theme and describe the various lessons. The group would jointly agree on which lessons would be handled by which teacher, ensuring that everyone had an equal opportunity to be a presenter. Besides team teaching giving built-in variety to the class, it eliminates the possibility of getting stuck with a poor teacher for a whole quarter, gives all the teachers the chance to be a learner as well as a teacher, and is a great way for those who have never taught before to see if that might be their ministry.

As a side benefit, if there is someone in your class who always tries to hog the spotlight by droning comments on and on or continually acting as a devil's advocate, it provides a good way to disarm them. On two different occasions at different churches we had someone like that in our group. But I found out that all it took in both cases was to ask them if they would like to teach one of the lessons the following quarter. They both accepted and, as predicted, stumbled through their whole presentations and started to realize first hand how hard it can be on the other side of the fence. In both cases, it had the effect of totally silencing them for months to come. And from a positive viewpoint, it became obvious that they were really just looking for some sort of recognition from the rest of us. We gave them that validation by treating them as someone whose worth we valued enough to trust them as a speaker.

Beware the pitfalls of employing a team teaching technique.

Despite the many advantages of using this method, including the obvious one of giving each teacher more than enough time to adequately prepare for their lesson and not get burned out in the process, there are potential problems that may crop up also.

Being unequally yoked: Twice I was asked by our pastor if I would meet with someone who wanted to start their own Sunday school class to see if I would check him out and agree to co-teach. In one case, it turned out that the man primarily wanted to utilize the class as part of a sociological study to determine why young folks left the church. In the other case, the potential teacher wanted to start out studying the question of hell, not the nature of hell but whether it even existed. I opted out in both cases.

Try new teachers out gradually: As I explained above, you may on occasion end up with a co-teacher who is a very poor presenter. That is why our teaching team would always chose the summer time when class attendance was down to try out a new teacher. Another problem that we encountered with one man was discovered when it turned out that he invariably showed up too late to class after all the announcements and prayer requests had been made. And one time he failed to show up at all since he said he had the wrong date down on his calendar. He did not last long on our team.

Favoritism: Those in your class will always have their most and least favorite teachers. So we quickly learned never to announce in advance who would be speaking the following week. Otherwise, it was quite embarrassing when only half the class showed up the following week. On one occasion a class members even called me during the week to make sure that a particular person wasn't going to be speaking.

Tag-team presentations: A variation on team teaching is to have more than one presenter split the teaching duties during a given class period. This really adds audience interest to the class but is rather hard to do in practice. The major pitfall involves time restraints. Presenters must adhere closely to their individual allotted times. That is why it is best, if possible, to assign the last time slot to an outside speaker or one on your team who cannot always be trusted to limit his words.

One week I was scheduled to give the bulk of the lesson, prefaced by a few words from a man who did not attend our class concerning his ministry. I told him to keep his talk to under 10 minutes. He totally ignored what I had told him and proceeded to slowly ramble on and on longer and longer. Since I had spent about a month carefully preparing my own presentation, I admit that I fidgeted nervously through his speech waiting for him to finish. And I had to continue chopping down my prepared words more and more in my mind, trying to figure out how I could finish on time.

But about two-thirds through the class time, I started to relax and resigned myself to the situation by deciding that for some reason God did not want me to talk that day. Our guest speaker ended up taking the whole class period and he was never again invited back to speak.

Use good materials for your class presentation.

The starting point is generally the quarterly study guide that your denomination may provide. But it should always be supplemented by your own ideas and experiences. In addition, the bare minimum for every believer's home library, whether or not they are a teacher, consists of a reliable study Bible (such as the NIV or ESV editions), a couple of different Bible translations to compare with one another, a one- or two-volume Bible Commentary, and a one-volume Bible Dictionary. In addition, there are numerous small, inexpensive study guides available for each book of the Bible and many Bible topics as well. You can search for them in Christian Book Distributors' on-line catalog. There are even older commentaries and recent sermons available on the internet.

If you want to go even further into your Bible preparation, I would suggest sticking mainly to commentaries and other valuable resources from the following reliable evangelical presses: Zondervan, Eerdmans, Baker Books, and InterVarsity Press. More on this subject is found in my post “Bible Commentaries and Dictionaries.”