PITFALLS TO ADULT EDUCATION IN THE CHUCH: PROBLEM TEACHERS

Almost every congregation which offers adult Sunday school classes will have difficulty finding qualified teachers to conduct them. About the only exception to that rule is a tiny start-up church in which the pastor himself will likely take on that role. For many decades I have either taught such classes in a number of churches or attended adult Sunday school classes taught by others. From such experience, I would like to say that I have personally experienced just about every sort of mistake such teachers can make in conducting these classes, but I am sure that there are plenty of additional horror stories others could tell.

Let me start out describing the variety of such problem teachers (including myself) before going on to possible correctives to the situation.

The “spiritual” teacher We had one such self-appointed leader in our adult class who looked down on the rest of us as being totally beneath him in every way. On occasion he would deign to lower himself to our level and lead our class. But since the only preparation he bothered doing before class was to go into a private room with a like-minded friend and ask for guidance from God, it is no accident that every lesson was centered around his insights into life he received while gardening in his back yard that week. And then after a few weeks of that he decided not to cast his pearls among swine any further and just stopped showing up for class without any comment.

The consensus “teacher” Rightly speaking, such a person is not a teacher at all, but merely a moderator. Such an approach to teaching adults is not bad in itself because it encourages class members to add their own insights into an overall discussion. But discussions in Sunday school need some sort of control over them or they can run amok quickly. Therefore they must always be prefaced by the teacher first setting the scene and clearing up any vital points regarding the Bible passage such as its genre, dating, author, intended audience, translation issues, and setting within the biblical book in question. It is only with that sort of background that any intelligent discussion can start taking place. And certain passages pose so many difficulties that there may be little time left for audience participation.

Against that background, consider one Sunday school class I attended while looking for a church home. In the first place, the sole adult class available met in the large main auditorium but consisted of only six members. That was my first tip-off that something was drastically wrong, and I soon found out what it was.

The “teacher” told us what the passage for the day was, and so all seven of us turned to it in our Bibles. He then read the first verse, out of the King James Version of course, and turned to the first person in our pew asking, “What does that mean to you?” After that person's reply, he asked the same of each one of us in turn, while tabulating the results on a piece of paper. Then he would summarize the results by saying something like “Two of you voted for X as the meaning, three chose Y, and two picked Z.”

At that point, we were free to go on to verse 2 in the passage and repeat the same procedure.

I am afraid that I rebelled against this nonsense at one point by saying that each individual verse meant very little if it was considered alone in the absence of the immediate context, let alone the overall context. The “teacher” patiently explained to me that my approach broke all the rules he had set for his class and that I would have to abide by them. The obvious problems with a consensus approach to the Bible are that it often results in merely polling the ignorant and it results in coming to no conclusion whatsoever as to what the passage meant.

The teacher who thinks on a different plane from the rest of humanity From that title alone, it might seem as if I am again describing the “spiritual” teacher, but what I have in mind is a much rarer specimen. To explain, I co-taught with one man with whom I became good friends. But his thought processes were always quite strange to me; perhaps a psychologist could explain them. Like me of late, he just couldn't turn off his mind at night, and ideas kept whirling around in his head. But the problem was that he couldn't make rational sense out of them in the daytime.

For example, our teaching team usually had about two weeks to divide up teaching responsibilities for the new semester, and I would present them with the verses for each week as well as some notes on possible ways in which to approach each lesson along with appropriate resources to use. But this teacher wasn't at all concerned with any practical issues such as a looming deadline. Instead, he would start bringing up several ill-conceived ideas as to how each lesson should be totally coordinated with each other ahead of time so that we didn't contradict or confuse the class during our presentations. In addition, he wanted each teacher to prepare a detailed outline for each of the classes for which they were responsible along with appropriate discussion questions. These were to be handed in to him and he would compile it all into a small book to be given out at the start of the semester. He somehow expected this to be done in the next two weeks. I gently but firmly pointed out that this might possibly be accomplished in about two months time but all we had was two weeks.

And then when it came his turn to teach, his many quirks continued. In the first place, he rarely stuck to the verses he had been assigned since he always had problems with the previous speakers in our team who hadn't, in his mind, done a thorough enough job with their own assignments. So he would re-teach their class to correct misconceptions he felt needed correcting, leaving no time left for the verses he was supposed to be teaching.

In addition, he would break every rule in the book on how to lead a discussion. When posing a question of the class, he only had two modes. The first one was to play guessing games in which only he had the “correct” answer, which was usually so off-base that we couldn't have guessed the answer he wanted if we had been at it all day. Then when we failed that test, he told the class that it looked like he would have to lower his expectations for us in the future. He would then kick into his second mode – asking questions that were so blatantly obvious that no one wanted to bother answering them for fear of looking like teacher's pet. As one example, he would read a passage such as “God is love,” and then ask the class “What is God?”

One-note teachers Fortunately I never personally ran into this sort of teacher in any classes I co-taught or attended, but I know they are out there. For example, one person at our church was deeply involved in missions, and so he taught a small class for years on that same subject. Another class had as its sole subject the raising of children according to biblical principles. And a third one was designed as a basic introduction for those who had recently become Christians.

Actually, there is nothing at all wrong with any of these teaching concepts, and such classes can be very successful in accomplishing their individual goals. But note that each one of them is designed to instruct class members for a limited amount of time only before those members move on to classes which teach on a variety of necessary subjects. Thus, do you really need to attend a class on raising children for people after their children have grown up and left the nest? And how many years should one devote to the rather limited subject of missions before attending a class that will give you a better foundation in Bible understanding, without which mission and evangelism efforts will be fail?

Lastly, a class designed to give the basics of belief to a new believer is only helpful if it is in preparation for the members to take their place in a more general Sunday school class where they can participate along with the others on a more or less equal basis.

The teachers in these examples are obviously well intended; the failure lies in failing to recognize that once a group of church members bond together over a common concern, they become extremely reluctant to “leave the nest” and go out into the broader world.

Teachers who are bullies This is perhaps the worst possible type of Sunday school teacher. I have fortunately only encountered a few of them in my life. It often occurs when that teacher is also one of the pastors of the church since in that scenario he can act just about as obnoxiously as he wants without serious consequences to himself. For example, my wife and I visited a small country church which also doubled during the week as a “seminary” run by the pastor, who in addition taught the only adult Bible class on Sunday. One of his students asked a rather innocent question regarding a Bible passage only to be screamed at by the teacher-pastor who said, “You've been reading Catholic literature, haven't you!!!” The poor teenager hung his head in shame after weakly denying the accusation, and no one else dare ask another question. Sometimes, it must be admitted, there are problem members of a class who need occasional correcting, but that will be the subject of the third and last post of this series.

Cult leaders I have known of two occasions at the same church in which a particular Sunday school class went rogue due to its teacher and began to form a church-within-the-church. One such extreme example before I joined that congregation was led by a teacher who felt that the church needed to get back to all the Old Testament teachings and practice Jewish rituals. Then later when I had belonged to that congregation for some time, a Sunday school class for men only was begun by a man who was a management coach. He convinced the young married man in his class that they should take over leadership now and not wait until they got any older. That class caused absolute havoc in our congregation when our senior pastor turned in his resignation to pastor another church.

There are several other notable types of problem teachers, but that should give you a taste of what I mean. The real problem comes in when trying to eliminate such class “leaders,” or preferably avoiding the situation in the first place. That can be done by simply vetting potential teachers in advance. Thus, at one congregation I began as one of several teachers along with others who had been in the church longer than I had. Apparently I passed the test since I soon taught a class on my own.

At another church, I volunteered to teach a limited series of lessons in the evening on a particular subject. That time it was the pastor himself who attended the whole series before deciding that I didn't need a babysitter any longer. And later on two different occasions that same pastor asked me to be the one to check out church members who wanted to begin teaching a new class under the guise of possibly team-teaching with them. My opinion was a firm NO both times since one potential teacher had quite obvious heretical beliefs and the other one was only planning to use the class as an excuse to check out some half-baked sociological theories of his.

But on occasion one is stuck with a problem teacher and it is hard to get rid of him gracefully. That is why I strongly recommend whenever possible having multiple teachers for each class. It is a lot easier to gently shove a poor teacher aside by adding new people to the teaching team while assigning that person fewer and fewer sessions to teach. The use of team teaching is also an excellent way to test out potential new teachers by giving them one or two sessions to teach during the summer. Depending on how they do, they either can or won't be asked to rotate teaching assignments during the more populated sessions of the year.