ADVICE TO LISTENERS IN BIBLE STUDIES

 

                    Letter to a Dead Church (collage and acrylics, 2011)

I have previously posted three short essays giving my unsolicited comments to Sunday school teachers (see “Advice to Adult Sunday School/Bible Study Teachers: Part 1, “Advice to Sunday School/Bible Study Teachers: Part 2,” and “How to Lead Bible Discussions”). The rationale for this emphasis came from James 3:1: “Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.”

However, it is instructive that there is more emphasis in the New Testament on the proper way to listen to what is taught spiritually. For example, Jesus' admonition “He who has an ear (or ears) to hear, let him hear” actually appears no fewer than 16 times in the Bible (Matthew 11:15; 13:9,43; Mark 4:9,23; 7:16; 8:18; Luke 8:8; 14:35; Revelation 2:7,11,17,29; 3:6,13,22; 13:9). In addition, Jesus constantly upbraids both his opponents and followers for not properly listening to his words.

Since I have taken part in both the teaching and listening aspects of Bible studies for more years than most of you have been alive, I should be as aware as most Christians of the failures on both sides of the communication issue – especially since I have been personally guilty of most of the problems I will describe below, given in random order.

Not being alert

It pretty much goes without saying, but I will say it anyway, that you can't get anything out of a teaching if you are physically asleep or constantly trying to fight off sleep during a lesson. As a Bible teacher myself, I have observed my share of nodding heads in the audience as I talked. Sometimes I tried to combat it by raising my voice suddenly, but on other occasions when I knew that someone in the group had had a very busy and trying day, I would lower my voice so as not to wake him.

There was one young man who would faithfully show up for one of my evening classes after he had had a long day at work. He manfully fought off sleep as long as he could, but would always succumb at last. He ended up being a missionary in China, so I guess he didn't suffer much from missing half my lessons.

Of course, we have the striking example of Eutychus in Acts 20:9. Luke lists the contributing factors that went into that poor man's drowsiness: a hot, stuffy room and an overly long sermon by Paul. I find it comforting that Paul rushed downstairs to save him and did not criticize him at all.

My wife and I try to always make sure that we get plenty of sleep the night before a church service. We also purposely avoid the early morning service if we have a choice between it and a later one.

Obviously, being physically awake is only the first step in getting the most out of a teaching. You must be mentally alert as well.

Listening with a critical spirit

I will admit that I have been guilty of this sin for most of my life, especially before I began to teach Bible classes myself and found out how hard it is on the other side of the fence. My solution to this attitude problem was to purposely listen very carefully to the teacher or preacher through his or her whole presentation to see what new spiritual insight I could learn. It is amazing that if you start out with that receptive mindset, you will usually find that even the most dull, uninspiring, untaught speaker will come up with at least one good point to ponder.

Unfortunately, I had a highly critical attitude towards some of the pastors in our church while growing up. I can still recite one after another laughable mistake made by one particular preacher, without ever remembering anything good he had to say. But I am sure there was a lot of useful teaching that I didn't even bothered to notice.

The poster children for this negative attitude were the scribes and the Pharisees who followed Jesus around everywhere and heard his wonderful teachings and saw his miracles but viewed everything through a critical lens. So Jesus' warning to them after they witnessed his restoring a blind man's sight is also pertinent in the context of listening to teachings in church: “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, 'We see,' your sin remains.” (John 9:41)

Speaking out of ignorance

But not all negative reactions to teachings in a church setting are as blameworthy as the example above since sometimes our comments during Sunday school discussions are made out of sheer ignorance. I have three examples to share in this regard, all in relation to the subject of our views of heaven and the last days.

The first one concerns my own ignorant view of eschatology when I was much younger. I didn't realize it at the time, but the churches I had attended all my life up to that time taught what I later learned was called amillennialism. But I later found myself in a different denominational congregation in which the subject of life in the millennial period was being discussed in our Sunday school class. It turns out that these people believed in what is called historical premillennialism, but I thought that I must have gotten mixed up in some sort of cult by mistake. I tried my best to correct their “errors,” but they had a great deal of trouble trying to understand what in the world I was talking about. I would have been much better served by just keeping my mouth shut and waiting until I could have a private talk with the pastor so that he could enlighten me on the whole subject.

Another pastor I had much later in life shared with me his quite opposite experience when he first entered seminary. He had been only taught dispensational premillennialism up to that time. So when his professor began explaining amillennialism to the class, he felt it was his duty to immediately speak up and correct the prof's obvious errors. Looking back on that experience, my pastor was still quite embarrassed by his lack of knowledge on the subject.

I ran into this identical problem in two other churches where I taught. I was explaining the concept of amillennialism as one of several eschatological views when a visitor to the class stood up and loudly proclaimed, “I don't see how you can possibly call yourself a Christian and believe in that!”

This last example also comes under the category of ad hominem attacks, of which I have witnessed the aggressor sometimes being the teacher and sometimes a person in the class.

One-upmanship

This is a type of problem listener I have rarely run into except in competitive business and academic circles, but I know they are out there in churches throughout the land. These are people in a congregation who go beyond having a mere critical or superior attitude toward the pastors and teachers at their church, and seem to make it their mission to put those church leaders in their place with critical questions or snide comments. Of course, the scribes and Pharisees provide us with appropriate role models here too.

The root problem for these people is often one of jealousy – the fact or suspicion that someone else is getting the attention that they feel they rightly deserve instead. So to build themselves up in their own mind and that of their acquaintances, they have to bring any rival parties for attention down to their own level or lower.

We did have one teacher in our Sunday school teaching team who subtly, and probably unknowingly, practiced this constantly. He was not overtly critical of the others on the team. However, whenever it was his turn to give a lesson, he felt it his duty to first go over all the lessons taught previously by the others in order to present the material according to his own high standards and correct any mistaken impressions we may have made.

Attention Grabbers

This category of behavior is somewhat related to the last one above but is often much more excusable in terms of motive. I remember two especially prominent examples during my time of leading teaching teams. One man in our class would make it a habit of interrupting the teacher and proceeding to ramble on and on somewhat aimlessly about some subject or other that was not really directly related to the subject at hand. It got so bad that everyone would groan whenever he raised his hand or began to talk.

Then there was someone at another church who was apparently from a very strict Calvinist background. And whenever a teacher would get talking about practical applications of the Scripture for the day, he would start in with the same speech about how we were denigrating the role of God by talking about our own actions instead of God's sovereignty.

As leader of those two teaching teams, I came up with a simple way to get rid of the problem, at least temporarily. During the summer sessions, our Sunday school team would often approach someone in our class and ask them if they would like to teach one of the lessons during that semester. That way we got more active participation within the class and could see whether those persons might be good ones to add to our regular teaching team. Both of the gentlemen I described above jumped at the chance. But they both floundered horribly during their attempts to teach a coherent class. They realized that teaching was not nearly as easy as criticizing a teacher. And also, I am convinced that all they really were looking for was a little bit of recognition of their worth in the eyes of others. In any case, both of these men went almost a year after their teaching experiences without interrupting again.

Lack of Discernment

As in many cases, one extreme is often just as unhealthy as the other extreme. Thus, I have run into several cases where those in the congregation had apparently never been encouraged to think for themselves. For those people, their faith was often a second-hand one at best.

As an example, I attended a church where I rotated with others in our Sunday school and mid-week classes as a teacher. After one lesson where I had presented several possible ways to interpret a particular passage of Scripture, I was approached by two women in the class who looked concerned. They explained that I had confused them by giving them more than one option to ponder. They asked that in the future I just tell them which belief was correct.

I hardly knew where to begin in answering them, but I did manage to tell them that the particular issue was not cut-and-dry. It was the sort of thing that they would have to use their own discernment to sort out. Then I said, “What if I tell you one thing this week and another of our teachers tells you something completely different next week?” Their immediate answer, with which they apparently had absolutely no problem, was, “That's OK. We will believe you this week and the other teacher next week.”

The second time I ran in to this same complete refusal of members of the congregation to think for themselves was when I was asked to teach a few classes to some of the slightly older congregants during a special summer session. I first read the Scripture we had been assigned and talked about it for a bit before dividing the people into discussion groups with different questions for each one to talk about. I was dumbfounded when I was met with a room of totally blank stares followed by utter silence from each of the groups until at last I relieved their agony by giving them the answers myself. They had obviously been trained to sit and quietly listen to a more knowledgeable person do their thinking for them.

Some of this problem is generational. At one church, I occasionally filled in to teach our regular Sunday school class. I enjoyed it because the class was always alert and participated actively by adding their own comments. But then I was asked to fill in on times at a class populated by older members. I found that however much I tried, I could only get one or two of them to participate when I would ask them to share comments or questions. One of the members later told me that it was because I intimidated them with my learning. That was in spite of the fact that I had been purposely trying to avoid doing so. Again, this was a group of people who had been trained for years into the habit of looking up to the preacher and teachers as the only knowledgeable ones in the congregation and that their own opinions counted for little or nothing in comparison.

Disconnect Between Knowledge and Practice

Then there was another church I attended for years in which the preachers we had were extremely learned and the Sunday school classes had the reputation of being taught on a high level of competency.

However, in practice, the combined clique of elders, pastors and their children for the most part failed miserably in living out a Christian life of service and love for others. And actually, several of them were out-and-out rude to those who didn't fit into their small club of professionals and businessmen. By contrast, I moved from that church to another one where without a exception there was an obvious servant heart among those in the congregation and staff even though one would have to fairly admit that the intellectual level of teaching was at a fairly elementary level.

As James asks in chapter 2 of his epistle after denouncing the audience for their prejudice against the poor in their midst, “What good is it, my brothers, if you say you have faith but do not have works?”

Itching Ears

This is a term Paul uses in II Timothy 4:3 to describe those Christians who will abandon sound doctrine and surround themselves with leaders who cater to their own desires. This is not a mere hypothetical possibility today since many of the megachurches in America attract their members by promising them material wealth or by pandering to their fears concerning satanic opponents who are coming to take away their religious freedoms. And those congregations who remain faithful to the Bible are at the same time being branded as wishy-washy, naïve, or too demanding in their moral expectations.

Conclusion

I must apologize for this lengthy diatribe, but I just wanted to get across the inescapable fact that we have just as much responsibility to listen to God's word being taught as teachers have in doing the teaching itself. But I can certainly sympathize with Paul when he wrote to one congregation: “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?” (Gal. 3:1) or when he pleaded with the Corinthians to stop falling for all the false teachings being circulated in their congregation during his absence.