PITFALLS TO CHURCH TEACHING: PROBLEM STUDENTS

Pitfalls to Church Teaching: Problem Students

As if dealing with logistical issues and problem teachers in a church setting were not enough, there is still the problem caused by difficult class members. I will only mention the types I have personally run across since there are probably as many ways to disrupt a class as there are people in your church. Sometimes I have found ways to deal with such “problem children” successfully, which may prove helpful to any budding Bible teachers in my audience. By the way, quite often these class attenders may actually exhibit a combination of the behaviors described below.

Those with personality disorders

It would take a trained psychologist to adequately deal with any of these people who might find their way into your class. For example, there was one gentleman who attended our Sunday school class with his family for several years. As an amateur psychologist, I would diagnose him as having a bipolar disorder. Most of the time he just sat there staring at the pew ahead of him. However, for a few weeks in a row, he appeared to be quite excitable and was constantly interrupting the teacher by agreeing with him at the top of his voice or volunteering irrelevant information. Our regular teacher at last said to him, “Are you done talking so that I can get on with the lesson?” The man's reply was, “No, I can't tell you I am done talking.”

Well, the next week it was my turn to be a substitute teacher and, sure enough, I would express my opinion on a given verse of Scripture and he would pop up and begin agreeing with what I said in a quite excited manner. I said enthusiastically that I was so glad he agreed, and if he wanted to talk to me more after class we could have a discussion as long as he wished. Surprisingly, that seemed to quiet him down for the rest of the class, and at the end he had forgotten entirely about my offer.

Attention Seekers

There was one poor soul in our class who was not the sharpest mentally and also talked more slowly than anyone else I have even met. He was generally ignored by most of the other class members. He had a habit of interrupting the teacher and droning on and on about nothing much that was pertinent to the subject at hand. I tried an approach on him that seemed to work on similar people later on. I made sure that he was assigned to teach one of the lessons in the series we were conducting at the time. He stumbled through it trying vainly to get even the slightest idea communicated to the class and eventually sat down rather mortified at his own failure. There was hardly a peep out of him in class for over a year afterward, and it was accomplished without having to bawl him out openly or counsel him.

Monomaniacs

The same technique as above was quite successful in dealing with a man in our class who obviously came from a strongly Calvinistic background. If the concept of God's sovereignty was not mentioned at least a few times by the teacher each Sunday, he would interrupt him and point out that all-important doctrine to us each time, no matter what the subject of that week's lesson was. By assigning him to teach one week during the less-attended summer session when he couldn't do much harm, he realized how hard it was to stick to that one subject for a whole hour, especially when the Bible passage of the day did not easily lend itself to discussion of that topic. After barely making it though that one session, it was almost a full year before he mentioned his pet subject in class again.

By contrast, one of the members of our regular teaching team lost patience with this man during another session and bawled him out in front of the whole class. The unfortunate conclusion was that the man was utterly humiliated and he and his wife didn't show up again for almost a month. Also, the teacher who had acted in that maner was looked upon as a bully by many in our class.

Obnoxious Types

This description could fit a number of people I have encountered. One of them attended another church at which I was one of the leaders and was upset when his wife decided to attend ours instead. To address the situation, he tried several underhanded tricks, one of which eventually accomplished his goal:

He invited me to give a short devotional at his church. I prepared a 10-minute talk and showed up only to find out that it was their yearly find-raising dinner and I was the featured speaker at the event. I managed to escape unscathed but it is doubtful whether any of those in attendance felt they had received their money's worth. I am sure he got a good laugh out of it.

He once invited us to conduct our weekly Wednesday evening Bible study at his house, but just as our teacher began speaking, the doorbell rang and two Jehovah Witnesses walked in since they had been invited to show up that very evening by our host. Our teacher took them into another room while I had to substitute for him at the last minute.

Lastly, he convinced the elder in our small church (a friend of his) that his wife had been offended by the way my wife had treated her, which was not even remotely the case. Our elder was not swayed by our story, and we were forced to leave the church without comment to any of our friends there rather than cause a church split. In a much larger church, this sort of obnoxious person would have had a little more difficulty in accomplishing his goal.

Forceful Personalities

After living in the Northeast for years, I became quite accustomed to meeting people who would impress those from the more laid-back portions of our country as extremely rude. But I soon realized that it was just their usual way of expressing their opinions to others, and they were not at all trying to become argumentative. I have run across two of these sort in church settings in which I was a Sunday school teacher.

One such person joined the teaching team I was leading and seemed to want to take over the class entirely. He argued with almost every idea I came up with regarding the way we should deal with the coming semester. Most of the others on our team were afraid of talking back to him because they didn't want to make waves. But I had dealt with such people before so I just replied to this man's ideas in the same forceful manner, and he immediately backed down and meekly accepted my ideas without further comment.

At another church I filled in for two weeks as substitute teacher for a small Sunday school class. One of the class members immediately started peppering me with a series of test questions before I had even begun the lesson of the day. It turned out that he really wasn't interested in learning the answers; he just wanted to see if my answers agreed with his before trusting anything new I might have to say in my prepared lesson. He acted in the same way later by confronting me with a popular Christian book he had just read and gave me a copy for comment. Instead of being enthralled with this author's concepts as he hoped, I proceed with a litany of reasons as to why this author was all wet and gave him a copy of a much more trustworthy book on the same subject. After reading it, he admitted that he now saw the matter a lot more clearly.

Know-It-Alls

You will run into these personalities in practically every congregation. Often they have read one book on a particular subject and were so taken with it that they judge everyone else by whether or not they agree with it. For example, one woman in our class countered a detailed explanation I had just been presenting regarding the problems with a particular brand of eschatology. Her comment to the class was, “Well, that certainly isn't what Mr. X says!” In her mind, that settled the whole question without any further discussion needed.

In the same vein, years earlier I had been browsing in a Bible book store in our town when I overheard a customer talking to the sales clerk. She began telling the clerk all the wonderful truths contained in one of the books in the racks. The clerk gently reminded her that those truths really weren't in the Bible. The customer's reply was, “Well, I don't know much about the Bible, but you really should read what this author has to say.”

And at one congregation, I was in the middle of my lesson when a young visitor to the class stood up and began shouting, “I don't know how anyone who believes that can call himself a Christian!” He proceeded to march out of the class, never to return (thankfully).

At a third church I attended (By the way, I don't make it a habit to jump from one church to another. But over the years I have moved to different towns and have been forced to find a new one in each area.) the associate pastor started a new initiative whereby a mentor would pick one student at a time to instruct more fully on the Bible so that the student could then be capable of teaching independently. There is nothing at all wrong with that concept, but the problem in this particular case was in the man who volunteered to do all the mentoring. It turned out that he didn't even have a college education or really know much about the Bible. Since our pastor wanted me to teach some classes, he asked if I would mind first going though the new required “training” under this man. I dutifully agreed and met at this man's house weekly for about two months. I parroted back all the correct answers to the rather elementary lessons I was given until the final week when I decided to rebel a little bit. Instead of spitting back the expected answers, I told my “mentor” a more correct understanding accepted by most Bible scholars. He was so taken aback that he told our head pastor that I was totally unfit to teach in the church, an opinion which our pastor completely ignored.

After being similarly irate at a class taught by a friend of mine, this “mentor” left the church in a huff, as it turned out he was in the habit of doing on a practically yearly basis until he had pretty much run out of churches in the area to attend.

I will give only one more example, this time of a fellow chemist who worked for the same company as I did. He attended a special film series one of the members of our church brought to show on Sunday evenings. One of the episodes poked fun at scientists in a very unfair manner. My friend became so irate that he stopped attending church from that point on even though I tried vainly to explain to him that he shouldn't judge the whole church by one episode of one film series given in the evening to a small group since the church leaders probably had no concept of the content of that series.

When I saw that episode on a later occasion, I must admit that the series was not that well done or thought out and was quite demeaning toward all scientists. But I handled it by calmly pointing out to the discussion group I was in the flaws in its reasoning.

Note that several of the “know-it-alls” described above have a concomitant personality trait – they are easily offended.

Know-Nothings

That used to be the label of an early political group in America, but in this case it applies to those class members who are the exact opposite of the know-it-alls described above. These are people who are not used to thinking for themselves, but are quite willing to agree with whatever a teacher tells them. I encountered two such ladies in our Sunday school class who confronted me one Sunday after I had taught class that morning (It was a team-teaching situation). They told me that I shouldn't confuse them by giving them alternative understandings of a given subject or Bible passage. One of them (who was actually a college graduate) told me, “Don't give us more than one option; just tell us what to believe.” My reply was, “But what if I tell you one thing this week and another one of our teachers tells you something totally different next week?” Her simple reply was, “We will believe you this week and him next week.”

In other words, they had totally co-opted their right to think for themselves and were more than satisfied to follow like sheep.

To some extent this is a generational problem that is thankfully encountered less and less with time since women today tend to be more educated and better integrated into all levels of the work force than their mothers and grandmothers were.