1 Powerful Question Trumps Pages of Pithy Statements

The Bible calls us to teach in church. It's a core purpose of the church. But the Bible doesn't mandate a particular method of teaching. Content, yes. But it leaves a lot of room for us be creative and strategic about how we teach.

The simplest and most basic method of teaching is to tell them the info you want them to know. It's also the least fruitful approach. There's nothing wrong, per se, with a consistent 30-fold harvest from your efforts. But if you could get 100-fold harvest, then why would you settle for 30-fold?

One method shift that will enhance the impact of your teaching is to craft powerful teaching questions, not just statements.

A typical pastor spends 10-20 hours each week crafting messages. And about .05% of that time (in my totally unscientific evaluation) is spent on crafting questions. Hours and hours are spent on getting the right sentences--distilling life changing principles into memorable and meaningful statements.

Don't get me wrong, I love doing that. I believe how you say it matters. I won't post on this or my other blog until I've spent a lot of effort crafting powerful statements.

But leading a member-driven church has shown me that one powerful question stimulates more growth than pages of pithy statements. I do prepare an intro and an ending for the teaching time at our church. But most weeks the core of our 45 min study time is a set of 3-5 questions. And those questions consistently spark deeper conversation and learning than I get by talking alone.

Let me take my own advice: Think back about experiences in your life that you have learned the most from--what do they have in common? Seriously, take a moment and create a list--even if just a mental one.

What themes do you see? What's the most common type of experience? Who else was involved? What was your posture (i.e. mental attitude, physical situation, etc)?

How can you recreate these kind of experiences (and similar levels of learning) in your church?

Don't Confuse Teaching Your church With Leading Your Church

[from Awake From Atrophy, Chapter 19...]

“I don’t understand,” Jessica said. “Are you saying spiritual leaders are supposed to stir up conflict so they can have hard conversations? I thought pastors were supposed to be teachers and guides—making sure we stay on track. To borrow a metaphor from my medical world: isn’t an ounce of prevention—good teaching—worth more than a pound of correction?”

“Oh, I’m all for good teaching to prevent errors,” Jacob replied. “That’s why we study the Bible intently every other week. I’m just saying that most spiritual leaders design services so that the members can’t disrupt their careful plan. These leaders are actively avoiding one of the roles they’re supposed to play as spiritual leaders. In an effort to keep out incorrect content, they’ve shut down their members. They end up reducing Christian leadership to teaching and administrative oversight. To be hard on my own kind—and, yes, I used to do this, too—many pastors dodge the hard work of dialogue and settle for predictable monologue. Leading is not the same function as preaching. There are some similarities. But they are not the same.”

Jacob had remained casual talking about the confrontation with Ted. Apparently that wasn’t a big issue to discuss. But church leadership was a topic that stirred him.

“Well, I suppose that you can lead an organization without being a preacher,” Drew said reluctantly. “But clearly preaching is among the most significant ways that pastors lead people, spiritually speaking.”

“You can exercise leadership by preaching,” Jacob conceded. “But speaking to a group doesn’t mean you are always leading. If you look at the biblical passages on spiritual gifts, like 1 Corinthians 12, you see that leadership and teaching are listed as distinct spiritual gifts. Most typical pastors don’t have a biblical definition of church leadership. What they have is a medieval definition of church leadership. Leading the church, they believe, requires being the primary teacher. And that assumption has really damaged the church—including harming the pastors themselves.”

Drew had a sudden flash of concern. “I can see what you’re saying about the need to do more than preach,” Drew acknowledged. “But you can’t abdicate your role as the primary teacher without your leadership suffering. Doing that damages the church. You asked about concerns earlier, I do have one concern about your church model. When you turn over the pulpit to your members at large, then you end up weakening your spiritual authority. You can’t limit the authority of the leaders of the church like that without the church suffering. Take this guy you corrected on prayer! Yes, when you corrected him in front of the group, he backed down. But what if he hadn’t?! When you give up control of the pulpit and let others speak to the church like that you risk someone undermining your authority and creating real division in the church. What if a clever, charismatic speaker with bad theology grabbed the attention of the room and didn’t allow you to quiet or correct him? You have to be careful who you allow to teach the church. You have to be careful to whom you hand that kind of influence.”

Jacob met Drew’s charge with an uncharacteristically blunt reply, “Drew, you’re still stuck on Christian leadership being defined primarily by teaching. You think that when I’ve reduced teaching time, I’ve reduced the leader’s authority. But I disagree. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that those leaders who are uncomfortable with members disagreeing with them—who feel that their authority needs to be protected by not allowing dissenters to speak—those are leaders who are insecure about how much authority they really have. Spiritual authority does not mean you’re the only one who gets to speak. Spiritual authority means you have the respect and wisdom to exhort and even rebuke others when they wrongly speak. Avoiding hard conversations not only keeps the members’ immaturities hidden, but robs the leader of the chance to exercise real spiritual leadership.

“Drew, it requires more leadership to develop authentic relationships, to coach people to become better ministers, and to confront people about inappropriate behavior, than it does to prepare a solid three-point sermon.”

Drew expected Jacob’s usually gentle manner and was taken back. Jessica had gone quiet, both fascinated by the sight of a man on fire and a little intimidated by it. But Jacob’s passion was not spent yet...

How To Immediately Double--Or Triple--Your Teaching Impact

How many of the 52 sermons you hear each year can you remember? How about last week's sermon (a week before yesterday's sermon)? What were the three points your pastor shared two sermons ago? Three sermons ago?

You're not the only one coming up blank.

A majority of pastors put in 10-20 hours a week preparing those sermons. But only a very small percentage of what is said will be remembered even two weeks later.

Professional educators often use a graph such as this one (below), referencing Edgar Dale's Cone of Learning, to discuss how to improve their students ability to recall lessons.

Where is your church on this graph? How far down did you have to go to find your usual teaching approach?

Option 1: Work even harder to make your spoken-word-only presentation the most compelling and exciting spoken-word experience possible. Go for the full 20% possible (yes, of course the chart shows broad averages and there can be people who are exceptions).

Option 2: Change the format used and go from 20% on average to 50% on average, or even 80-90% recall--without a major change in content or charisma.

Think back about the experiences in your life you've grown the most from--that your remember most vividly. Taken a few seconds and list them. What type of experiences were they?

Remember, the Bible calls us to teach, not to fixate on one format of teaching. Jesus used multiple formats and so did the early church. We only got stuck on sermons in the middle ages.

If you have some input on teaching in your church, whether on Sunday or a side ministry (e.g. small group, youth group, etc), can you get all the way out of passive into active participation? If so, you could more than triple your impact. At the very least, what could you do to move one or two steps higher up the middle column of this graph?

What's the Point of Preaching?

Why do we teach in church? Why have sermons? If you don't know the purpose, then how do you know if you're accomplishing it? How will you know when you've been successful?

For many, the answer might be: The Bible commands us to do it, so we do it. That is true and important. But that's also unhelpful when it comes to evaluating how well it's being done. Maybe we could ask, "Why does the Bible call us to teach?" What is God's purpose for having teaching in His church? Some might answer: To inform and educate the people of God. But that's a circular answer. That's like saying we teach so people will be taught.

Here's my answer: We teach biblical truth so people will think and act more biblically--through the Holy Spirit for the glory of God, of course.

You know your teaching is successful when the people you teach are living differently. Put another way, we measure application, not awareness. Information is essential to growth, but not sufficient. People must translate your ideas in to specific changes in their lives (whether internal or external changes) for your teaching to be sufficient.

That doesn't mean every sermon has to be a topical, "4 steps to a better..." sermon. I'm a huge fan of exegesis sermons (where you go through a Bible passage line by line to see what we can learn). But whatever your format, your members need to have the chance to translate those biblical ideas into their lives--even if the "behavior" is better thinking. So, not only does your teaching need to at least finish in some tangible way, your people need the time to try to apply it in their lives before you dump the next big idea on them.

Are the sermons at your church more geared to be spiritually inspiring and impressive, or to help the people think through how they'll live differently in the next few days? How much time are you allowing for people to process the ideas being shared?

Kids & Parents Together?

Some churches have become passionate about including kids in the entire service. But there are problems with this (we tried it in the first member-driven church we started). You basically have two options. 1: train your kids to be quiet (much easier for some personality types than others) while running an adult-oriented service; or 2: alter at least of portion of the service so kids can learn something.

Bottom line: kids don't learn the same way adults do. There's so much research and evidence supporting this that no one questions this. It's not just that adults are more disciplined, they literally have different brain structures. Teaching kids and adults like they're the same is at best naiveté and at worst indifference to the spiritual growth of children.

I even know some families that have had to stop attending their church because their kids were too rambunctious to sit in the service. They didn't have bad kids and they weren't bad parents. They simply had kids with very extroverted personalities (who think by talking) who probably also have a kinesthetic learning style (learning best by doing, not hearing or seeing). Oh, and by the way, I was totally that kid. I still can't sit quiet and still for more than a few minutes!

But, proponents say, kids benefit greatly from seeing their parents exercise their faith. (I'll refrain from going off about how typical church services leave little room for regular members to exercise their faith.) Doing church separately, they argue, doesn't build the family and can even promote an isolating spiritual mentality.

And they're right.

So we include our kids in the meal--the whole family together. We sometimes include kids when we have a worship music set (more on how we do music in other posts). But when it's time for the bible study or open ministry, we give the kids a separate space and a customized lesson to help them learn more about God and practice interacting with Him.

It doesn't have to be all or nothing. And we certainly don't include our kids only to make them sit still. We don't want to teach them that good Christianity is being quiet and motionless. We show them a church engaging each other and God--a church in motion.

Oh, and the Bible doesn't say anything about how kids are supposed to be organized (together/separate). This is a practical strategy matter--not a spiritual rule. There's great danger in making a "spiritual rule" out of something the Bible is silent on.