never forget that the crowd running the show in Washington truly deeply believes that they are smarter than you and care more than you do about things.
from Drudge here is exhibit A in the condescension lalapalooza:
Energy Secretary Chu: A teaching moment (AP)
When it comes to greenhouse-gas emissions, Energy Secretary Steven Chu sees Americans as unruly teenagers and the Administration as the parent that will have to teach them a few lessons.
Speaking on the sidelines of a smart grid conference in Washington, Dr. Chu said he didn’t think average folks had the know-how or will to to change their behavior enough to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
“The American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act,” Dr. Chu said. “The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is.” (In that case, the Energy Department has a few renegade teens of its own.)
aren’t you glad that your betters are willing to teach you?
Continuing to read Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, we arrive on pages 95-97 at his description of the ministry of meekness that Christians owe to one another:
Only he who lives by the forgiveness of his sin in Jesus Christ will rightly think little of himself. He will know that his own wisdom reached the end of its tether when Jesus forgave him. He remembers the ambition of the first man who wanted to know what is good and evil and perished in his wisdom……Because the Christian can no longer fancy that he is wise he will also have no high opinion of his own schemes and plans. He will know that it is good for his own will to be broken in the encounter with his neighbor. He will be ready to consider his neighbor’s will more important and urgent than his own.
……
Finally, one extreme thing must be said. To forego self-conceit and to associate with the lowly means, in all soberness and without mincing the matter, to consider oneself the greatest of sinners. This arouses all the resistance of the natural man, but also that of the self-confident Christian…..There can be no genuine acknowledgment of sin that does not lead to this extremity. If my sinfulness appears to me to be in any way smaller or less detestable in comparison with the sins of others, I am still not recognizing my sinfulness at all. My sin is of necessity the worst, the most grievous, the most reprehensible. Brotherly love will find any number of extenuations for the sins of others; only for my sin is there no apology whatsoever. Therefore my sin is the worst. He who would serve his brother in the fellowship must sink all the way down to these depths of humility.
emphasis added
compare this to Jesus speaking to his disciples in Mark 10:
42 q And Jesus called them to him and said to them, “You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles r lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. 43 But s it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant,[4]44 and whoever would be first among you must be t slave[5]of all. 45 For even the Son of Man came not to be served but u to serve, and v to give his life as a ransom for w many.”
I found this bit on marks of a good teacher especially interesting since I have spent a lot of time teaching.
9. Able to Teach
It is not surprising to me that some of the great leaders at Bethlehem Baptist Church have been men who are also significant teachers. According to 1 Timothy 3:2 anyone who aspires to the office of overseer in the church should be able to teach. What is a good teacher? I think a good teacher has at least the following characteristics.
A good teacher asks himself the hardest questions, works through to answers, and then frames provocative questions for his learners to stimulate their thinking.
A good teacher analyzes his subject matter into parts and sees relationships and discovers the unity of the whole.
A good teacher knows the problems learners will have with his subject matter and encourages them and gets them over the humps of discouragement.
A good teacher foresees objections and thinks them through so that he can
answer them intelligently.
A good teacher can put himself in the place of a variety of learners and therefore explain hard things in terms that are clear from their standpoint.
A good teacher is concrete, not abstract, specific, not general, precise, not vague, vulnerable, not evasive.
A good teacher always asks, “So what?” and tries to see how discoveries shape our whole system of thought. He tries to relate discoveries to life and tries to avoid compartmentalizing.
The goal of a good teacher is the transformation of all of life and thought into a Christ-honoring unity.
But the whole thing is well worth a read and a reread. His bits on a leader needing to be Restless, Intense, Articulate and a Hard Thinker were also quite good. :->.
The gift of teaching is the God-given ability to understand and communicate biblical truth in a clear and relevant manner so that there is understanding and application.
People with the Gift of Teaching
Learning, researching, communicating, and illustrating truth are qualities that an individual will manifest when exercising the gift of teaching. These people enjoy studying and learning new information, and find great joy in sharing it with others. The format of teaching varies from one-on-one discipleship to formal classes, informal Bible studies, large groups, and preaching, which is a form of teaching.
….. Do You Have This Gift?
Do you enjoy studying and researching?
Do you enjoy imparting biblical truth to others?
Do others come to you for insight into Scripture?
When you teach, do people “get it”?
When you see someone confused in their understanding of the Bible do you feel a responsibility to speak to them about it?
Do you enjoy speaking to various sizes of groups about biblical issues you have strong convictions about?
Truth cannot be ducked or minimized in any way, but it must be softened with compassion. It is not compassionate to downplay or minimize or disregard truth.
The homosexual rights movement understands that the evangelical church is one of the last resistance movements committed to a biblical morality. Because of this, the movement has adopted a strategy of isolating Christian opposition, and forcing change by political action and cultural pressure. Can we count on evangelicals to remain steadfastly biblical on this issue?
Not hardly. Scientific surveys and informal observation reveal that we have experienced a significant loss of conviction among youth and young adults. No moral revolution can succeed without shaping and changing the minds of young people and children. Inevitably, the schools have become crucial battlegrounds for the culture war. The Christian worldview has been undermined by pervasive curricula that teach moral relativism, reduce moral commandments to personal values, and promote homosexuality as a legitimate and attractive lifestyle option.
Our churches must teach the basics of biblical morality to Christians who will otherwise never know that the Bible prescribes a model for sexual relationships. Young people must be told the truth about homosexuality–and taught to esteem marriage as God’s intention for human sexual relatedness.
The times demand Christian courage. These days, courage means that preachers and Christian leaders must set an agenda for biblical confrontation, and not shrink from dealing with the full range of issues related to homosexuality. We must talk about what the Bible teaches about gender–what it means to be a man or a woman. We must talk about God’s gift of sex and the covenant of marriage. And we must talk honestly about what homosexuality is, and why God has condemned this sin as an abomination in His sight.
but with compassion:
And yet, even as courage is required, the times call for another Christian virtue as well–compassion. The tragic fact is that every congregation is almost certain to include persons struggling with homosexual desire or even involved in homosexual acts. Outside the walls of the church, homosexuals are waiting to see if the Christian church has anything more to say, after we declare that homosexuality is a sin.
Liberal churches have redefined compassion to mean that the church changes its message to meet modern demands. They argue that to tell a homosexual he is a sinner is uncompassionate and intolerant. This is like arguing that a physician is intolerant because he tells a patient she has cancer. But, in the culture of political correctness, this argument holds a powerful attraction.
Biblical Christians know that compassion requires telling the truth, and refusing to call sin something sinless. To hide or deny the sinfulness of sin is to lie, and there is no compassion in such a deadly deception. True compassion demands speaking the truth in love–and there is the problem. Far too often, our courage is more evident than our compassion.
via challies, here is John MacArthur talking about the importance of a sound doctrinal foundation prior to learning specific applications of scripture.
Of course, practical application is vital. I don’t want to minimize its importance. But if there is a deficiency in preaching today, it is that there’s too much relational, pseudopsychological, and thinly life-related content, and not enough emphasis on sound doctrine.
The distinction between doctrinal and practical truth is artificial; doctrine is practical! In fact, nothing is more practical than sound doctrine.
…
Practical insights, gimmicks, and illustrations mean little if they’re not attached to divine principle. There’s no basis for godly behavior apart from the truth of God’s Word. Before the preacher asks anyone to perform a certain duty, he must first deal with doctrine. He must develop his message around theological themes and draw out the principles of the texts. Then the truth can be applied.
James 3:1 says that not many of us should be teachers because we who teach will be judged more strictly. Teaching the word of God to the people of God is a huge responsibility and should be approached with an intense awareness of this responsibility and the constant need for assistance from the Holy Spirit to rightly divide the word.
The activity of theologians and priests described by Anne Hendershott in this article is chilling in light of James 3:1. check this out.
In some cases, church leaders actually started providing “cover” for Catholic pro-choice politicians who wanted to vote in favor of abortion rights. At a meeting at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Mass., on a hot summer day in 1964, the Kennedy family and its advisers and allies were coached by leading theologians and Catholic college professors on how to accept and promote abortion with a “clear conscience.”
The former Jesuit priest Albert Jonsen, emeritus professor of ethics at the University of Washington, recalls the meeting in his book “The Birth of Bioethics” (Oxford, 2003). He writes about how he joined with the Rev. Joseph Fuchs, a Catholic moral theologian; the Rev. Robert Drinan, then dean of Boston College Law School; and three academic theologians, the Revs. Giles Milhaven, Richard McCormick and Charles Curran, to enable the Kennedy family to redefine support for abortion.
Mr. Jonsen writes that the Hyannisport colloquium was influenced by the position of another Jesuit, the Rev. John Courtney Murray, a position that “distinguished between the moral aspects of an issue and the feasibility of enacting legislation about that issue.” It was the consensus at the Hyannisport conclave that Catholic politicians “might tolerate legislation that would permit abortion under certain circumstances if political efforts to repress this moral error led to greater perils to social peace and order.”
Father Milhaven later recalled the Hyannisport meeting during a 1984 breakfast briefing of Catholics for a Free Choice: “The theologians worked for a day and a half among ourselves at a nearby hotel. In the evening we answered questions from the Kennedys and the Shrivers. Though the theologians disagreed on many a point, they all concurred on certain basics . . . and that was that a Catholic politician could in good conscience vote in favor of abortion.”
There are important lessons here, to be sure. One lesson must be this: There will be theologians who seem ever ready to find a way to subvert the teachings of their church, even as they seek to remain in its employ and trust. The second lesson is like unto the first: There will ever be politicians who are looking for political cover, and will gladly receive this cover from those willing to subvert their church’s teaching. These lessons are by no means limited to the Roman Catholic Church.
Yesterday Todd Burus put up a post regarding his church’s general lack of receptivity to learning deeper theological points. let him explain what he means:
As someone who teaches frequently across several ages in the church, probably the largest complaint I have, or at least the complaint that I most frequently bother my poor wife with, is the fact that I often times feel I cannot go too deep with the material without losing a majority of the audience I am speaking with. This is not an indictment on their intelligence or desire to glorify God, but is just a general frustration at the fact that when several people are gathered in a room on Sunday morning or Wednesday evening for “Bible Study,” the overriding expectation to which they have been conditioned by years of church culture is one of discussion and venting about what is on their mind and not necessarily of mining out with precision and care the finer, deeper points of Scripture. Not only am I bothered by this, but I think it is symptomatic of much that is wrong in contemporary modern/post-modern American Christianity.
…..
Theology, as they’ve been taught, is boring, stuffy, and, this is the kicker, it often times leads to arguments. Therefore, it is much better to just avoid it then to run the risk of splitting the room over whether Romans 9 is corporate election to physical blessings or individual election to eternal life (it’s the latter, by the way).
go read all of it to see why learning theology is important for every believer.
In my experience teaching adults, I found there to be a hunger for learning deeper scriptural truths about God. that is why I shucked the Lifeway curriculum and just did straight expositional teaching. If anyone wanted to go to a “safer” class without occasional arguments like the one Todd mentions, then there were plenty of traditional model classes available.
what is your experience in your church? do you teach theological truths? Does your pastor from the pulpit? Are the people receptive to learning/wrestling with these things?
The question I have is about church planting. Mark Driscoll talks at length about the Acts 29 church planting network here. it is a fascinating and low key talk that is quite enlightening. He discusses the “marks” of an Acts 29 church plant and what kind of gift set is needed to qualify for their program. In passing he mentions that the church plants in the network that are doing well have strong bible teaching with sermons typically lasting 45 minutes to an hour.
By contrast, Dan Kimball is having some doubts about missional churches that have been planted lately. In case you don’t know, Dan Kimball is considered to be one of the beginners of the emerging church movement. I read his book, the Emerging Church, back in 2003 when I was beginning my own exploration of what church is and should be. I thought his diagnosis of the problems in churches was spot on but that his prescription for change was superficial and silly.
Dan’s current article is enjoyable because it is honest and self aware in a way that most people avoid most of the time. For instance, this is how he begins:
I hope I am wrong. For the past few years, I have been observing, listening, and asking questions about the missional movement. I have a suspicion that the missional model has not yet proven itself beyond the level of theory. Again, I hope I am wrong.
He then goes on to give some examples of missional churches, house churches and traditional attractional model churches and checks their actual results in lives won to the Kingdom of God and people’s lives reflecting that goal. Fascinating.
Go check out these two items. compare and contrast the approaches and results. Do some research on your own. Think about why a church would succeed in reaching the lost and effectively discipling them and why one wouldn’t.
It occurs to me that the power of God flows through his word and the honest effective straightforward expositional preaching thereof. Once the preaching ingredient is in place, then the rest of the church’s success in reaching and changing depends on the effectiveness of the shepherding plans in place. people need care and guidance as they shift their frame of reference, their worldview from self advancement to the advancement of God’s glory and kingdom. Everything else involved in a church plant are negotiable details.
what do you think?
I have to tell you that my experience is as a sunday school teacher in adult Bible study. I began by using the regular Southern Baptist curriculum. I used a couple of different kinds over the first few years. Both of them were absolute jokes. They were dumbed down, foolish and insulted the intelligence of my class. I eventually began using them as starting points for text and did my own lessons and finally discarded them altogether after a few years.
When I abandoned curriculum altogether, I started teaching the Bible expositionally. We did Daniel, Revelation, Romans, Philippians, Hebrews and I Peter that I can remember right now. We also did some quicker looks at minor prophets, Joel, Jonah, Haggai, Habakkuk, and Hosea. Some Sundays we would cover four or five verses and other Sundays we might cover a dependent phrase in one verse. We took as long as it took to cover the material effectively. We took some Sundays off to cover special events like holidays or something that came up and needed attention in a more topical manner, but then we returned to the text of whatever book we were studying. It took more than a year to make it through each of Romans and Hebrews. But what wonderful years well spent.
Numerically, our classes did well and, more importantly, there was evidence of life change occurring in our class members. What I learned is that God uses and blesses the straightforward honest expositional teaching and preaching of his word. Gimmicky lesson plans that don’t challenge the learner are not valuable.
I don’t watch the show Desperate Housewives so I only have a passing familiarity with it or its characters. But thanks to the Vision Navigator, I saw this clip and it struck a chord with me.
watch this right quick (excuse the mild expletive)
parenthetically, do you get the impression that this was the most memorable church service ever in this particular big room?
is your church like the one in the clip? are you supposed to just sit and listen to sermons with answers and hope that sometime (hopefully soon) a sermon will have the answer you need for your question?
Or do you go to a place where questions are encouraged? Do you think questions should be asked? questions of the preacher? of God?
Let me be very clear about my bias on this issue. I love questions. I eat live and breathe questions. the idea of not asking a question because “we don’t do that here” breaks me out in hives.
I think that packed into the idea of the Bereans examining the scripture for themselves to see if what Paul said was true in Acts 17:11 was the idea that these folks heard something Paul said and they thought to themselves some version of “wait just a cotton-picking minute, what did he just say? I sure never saw that in scripture before, let me check that out.” For this type of questioning, Luke commended them as “more noble” than the Thessalonians who apparently didn’t do such examination.
I think the clip above demonstrates two different types of questions.
This first type of question involves the lesson being taught.
Feedback from the group about the lesson in the moment when there is an opportunity to correct mistakes and clear up misunderstandings is absolutely invaluable. We should have sermon time with a feedback loop involving questions in every service. This is the way I have taught for years and I assure you that it can be done in even large groups. Many times, I have been flagged down in mid sentence to explain exactly what the heck I was just trying to say. This type of questioning must occur. Language is a difficult way to communicate and it is fraught with the potential for being misheard and misunderstood. Only with questions in the moment can the teacher have some assurance that what he or she was trying to say was heard and understood.
The second type of question is of the substantive type that Lynette was asking in the video above.
This is a question about the nature of God and reasons that He does the things he does in the world. Regarding the questioning of God, attitude is everything. Daniel was commended as a person highly treasured by God after he humbled himself and sought understanding from God. Daniel 10:10-12 cf Daniel 9:22-23. See also Psalm 25:14 where we are assured that God’s friendship is with those who fear him and that he will make his covenant known to them.
Considering a human father for a moment, we can recognize two different ways of questioning his ways. The first way would be to rest secure in his love and fatherly care, but to express confusion over his ways. Even the most faithful and trusting children wonder about their parents at times. What are they up to? Why did they make that decision rather than the other? What was the purpose of that action? As close as children are to parents, parents often perplex children by acting like adults. In this mode of questioning, the child never questions the father’s love and faithful disposition, but does admit confusion — and perhaps even disappointment.
The other way of questioning a human father is to question his character, his faithfulness, or the authenticity of his love. This is an altogether different mode of questioning. In this second pattern of questioning, the child questions the father’s heart, not merely his actions and ways.
Now, move from considering these two different modes of questioning a human father to a parallel set of approaches to questioning our heavenly Father. It is not unfaithful to admit and to articulate a sense of perplexity and pain in observing the ways of God. There are times when we cannot offer an explanation of God’s ways. At times, we cannot even detect any possibility of a purpose. We can admit this to ourselves, to our brothers and sisters in Christ, and to our heavenly Father.
The other mode of questioning God, on the other hand, constitutes sin and implies unbelief. We cannot remain faithful and question God’s own faithfulness. His love for those who are in Christ is beyond question. His character is a constant and his love never fails. He is not loving and gracious toward believers at one moment, only to turn into a malevolent deity the next. He never changes.
In this light, it would be sin to question God in this second sense — the sense in which we might question whether God really loves us, or if He is really faithful to his promises. This is not the questioning worthy of a believer, but of an unbeliever.
Do you see the difference? We should never question God’s motives. We can, in faith, have questions about His methods if we maintain our respect for God’s ultimate sovereignty and goodness.
Here is Doug’s response to Nathan’s third argument which was definitely the best one he had:
3. And last, Busenitz presents what he believes to be his most important argument — that Driscoll is privileging Old Testament examples over the explicit teaching of the New Testament. This argument fails, not because the verses that Busenitz cites are not authoritative — they are — but rather because this entire discussion can be contained within the New Testament. The same man who said to lay off the coarse jesting is also the one who called his previous Pharisaical righteousness dogshit (Phil. 3:8). The man who said that we were to be sound in speech is the same one who wished that the Judaizers would, in their circumcising zeal, cut the whole thing off (Gal. 5:12). And in the next breath, he tells the Galatians to love one another. So when Calvin calls his opponents barking dogs, and we write journal articles refuting “an esteemed colleague,” who is closer to the language of the New Testament (Phil. 3:2; Rev. 22:15)?
All in all, a very good discussion.
I have to say that part of the reason that I speak bluntly is because I feel the need to be heard. I believe that the way Mark Driscoll speaks to his people communicates to them. They hear what he is saying. He shakes them up. When he talks about the judgment of God, he talks to them about God’s boot coming for their head. that is a quote from this message which I very highly recommend to anyone who wants to understand why Mark preaches the way he does.
Blunt direct unvarnished language penetrates the fog in the listener. It causes a reaction. It demands a response. It provokes pushback. Pushback requires thought. Thought on the topic is my goal as a teacher. When pushback occurs a discussion follows.
John Piper said in one of these messages that he says things the way he says them in order to be heard. He said that if he says things the same way that other preachers say them, then nobody would hear it. When he rewords it and makes it shocking then it cuts through and gets heard.
when I have a room full of adults thinking and engaged and pushing back, then we are all learning.
I love reading the gospels and seeing the way that Jesus took people by surprise with His words. He was a master at saying the unexpected and provoking thought.
Obviously, I am not Jesus and neither is Mark Driscoll, but there is nothing wrong with trying to emulate His masterful teaching style.
Paul said that since we know what it means to fear God, we seek to persuade men. Then he said, “we implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” In his earlier letter to the same group he said that he was willing to become whatever he needed to become so that by all means some more people might be persuaded to follow Christ.
I bring all that up, because our goal when we teach or preach (to a group or to our friend over coffee) is the same as Paul’s. Our goal is to persuade people to accept Jesus Christ as their savior and Lord.
We must always be ready to give an answer when asked about the reason for our hope, with gentleness and respect.
Todd Hiestand has an exellent post up about persuasion in sermons. His illustration is the speeches given at the political conventions that just occurred. He believes that most of those speeches at both conventions did nothing more than cement previously held beliefs by the respective partisans. (I would disagree slightly on this point. Lieberman’s speech at the Republican convention [and even John McCain’s, to a certain extent] was not primarily targeted at Republican’s. He was deliberately asking for security conscious Democrats to put that belief above party for the sake of the country.)
Todd wonders how much of his preaching is the same thing. His goal is to provoke thought and consideration by someone who disagrees with him.
as Todd puts it:
Now, I have nothing wrong with believing and speaking things with conviction. In fact, if I did, there would be no point of me continuing to preach. But, a huge challenge to those who preach (and dare I say those who speak in political settings) is to make your case for your side in such a way that allows the other side to begin to see why it is important that you think the way you think.
…….
What I am talking about a difference between being a bully with your words and carefully shepherding with your words.
When I get done preaching, I would honestly rather hear someone say to me, “Your sermon was very thought provoking” than to hear someone say, “your sermon was awesome.”
When someone says, “your sermon was awesome” it usual means they already agreed with me and I just reinforced their previously held belief.
When someone says, “that was thought provoking” it means I really communicated well and made them think about the topic a little differently.
It’s easy to effectively communicate with those who already agree with you.
It’s a whole other challenge to communicate effectively with those who disagree with you.
And pissing them off isn’t necessarily effective communication.
Todd’s post is convicting. Ephesians 4:29 requires that we use our communication to minister grace to the hearer and build them up. Let us endeavor to do so.
In a way thiswholediscussion seems weirdly artificial. All of our life as Christ followers is the gospel. Everything we do or say is because of the presence of God in us.
I am not a preacher (vocational pastor of a congregation). I am a lawyer who teaches (and yes I do preach some) the Bible. Standing in front of a class I feel the weight of James 3:1. I also feel unworthy to teach or preach anything out of my own power. the only reason any of us (seekers, as well as Christ followers) are in that room at that time for that lesson is because of the Grace of God manifested toward us through the provision of His son as the perfect lamb that was slain on our behalf so that we could be reconciled to God.
My goal as a teacher is to wake up within each listener a hunger for God’s glory so that they will pursue Him on their own every day. Teaching the scripture is always an exercise in learning the height and depth and fullness of God’s love toward us. That is why it seems artificial to be having this discussion about evangelism in church services.
The gospel permeates and undergirds every lesson, every song. It is the reason for our hope. It is the reason for our joy. It is the reason for our love of the Bible. It is the reason we assemble together to encourage one another and provoke one another to love and good works.
God’s wonderful magnificent sovereign grace is what makes sense of the senseless and it is what gives hope to the hopeless.
What else would we have to talk about in our gatherings?
Mark Driscoll has a new book out explaining difficult theological words. (words, by the way, that the ESV generally uses, which is one of the reasons that I use it.)
I wish that I could embed the video, but every time I hit “save” with the code on here, it disappears.
In the article, Charles Lipson talks about the fact that professor Pausch’s lecture was also a lesson in great teaching. Lipson makes the point that good teaching must impart the necessary substantive material. In addition:
The best teachers also serve as models for students. Good teachers bestow their love of learning, their willingness to work hard and their ability to think imaginatively to unravel the mysteries. Those lessons can launch students on their own paths—the real goal of any teacher.
Good teaching points students toward important questions, gives them the tools they need to inquire and inspires them to continue exploring for themselves. Ultimately, every teacher lets go and hopes the students can proceed on their own—and hopes that they will want to.
While we were in Arkansas, our church’s education staff gave teachers and wannabe teachers the opportunity to watch a video series on teaching from Seven Laws of the Teacher by Howard Hendricks. It was really very good.
Lipson’s description of a good secular teacher’s main purpose and goal in the quote above sounds almost exactly like what Howard Hendricks said as well. As a bible teacher my main goal is to assist in creating the thirst in my class members to pursue scripture on their own outside of class. To give them the tools they need to pursue their own answers with their own Bible and their own walk with God.
If you haven’t ever heard Randy Pausch’s last lecture, I encourage you to watch it. It has some mild language, but is entertaining and challenging.
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