6 Shifts To Go From Preaching To Facilitating Bible Study

As I've mentioned in several other posts (like this one), we don't do traditional preaching (a sermon/lecture) as much as we have Bible studies during the service. Facilitating a productive Bible study requires a different approach than preaching. 

A pastor I know well--who has a sincere love for God and for his congregation--decided to include this Bible study idea in some Saturday night services. We set up the round tables. He prepared a study with handouts that had questions on them. And then he proceeded to preach a sermon, week after week, with people sitting around round tables and taking notes on the handout.

He loved the concept of getting his people more engaged, but he didn't know how to shift out of preaching mode. He didn't understand the six shifts he needed to make from preaching to facilitation:

Preaching	Facilitation
Goal: Communicate truth in a memorable way	Goal: Encourage everyone in the group to talk about the truth in the verse
Your Words: Make Powerful Statements	Your Words: Ask Stimulating Questions
Flow: You decide final point before you start, then lead them to that thought	Flow: Stimulate them to come up with ideas, then summarize their thoughts
Skills: Organizing your thoughts logically, finding and using illustrations well, choosing words well	Skills: Reading the people in the group, asking neutral, open questions, summarizing others’ thoughts well
Initiative: You are the first to speak—you speak the most	Initiative: You are the last to speak—you speak only when required
Success: Measured by the quality and quantity of your content—what you say	Success: Measured by the quality and quantity of the discussion—what others say

  

What mode is your default mode? What shifts would be hardest for you to make?

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?

Don't Confuse History With Theology

Many of our mistakes in church life come from missing the difference between how we should use sections of the Bible that are primarily history vs. theology. (Yes, there are other categories, like poetry and prophecy,  with their own distinctive features--that's another conversation.)

History books and doctrine books should be read differently. There is overlap in them, of course, with events being mentioned in the epistles and teaching points cataloged in the history books. But in general, historical passages describe what happened and are a poor source for determining what ought to have happened.

In histories, we get details on how Sampson thumbed his nose at God's rules for his life, one by one. We aren't spared learning of the adultery and murder plots of King David. Just because it's mentioned in the Bible doesn't mean God's endorsing it. History is crucial to Christianity. We base our faith on a real person who did specific acts. We believe in far more than abstract philosophies.

However, when we're establishing patterns for our lives, habits for our churches, bare history leaves us guessing.  This is where theology books come in. They tell us the reasons behind the particulars and help us interpret the histories.

Just because Paul traveled by ship didn't mean all missionaries must. Just because the first church met in homes doesn't mean God prefers homes for church services.

In short, it's sketchy to made a rule for living based on a historical example only. Know the history, but put extra weight on theology books (like the epistles) for deciding controversial issues.

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.

The Risk of Weekly Teaching--Teaching at Practice Speed (Part 12: Values & Practices)

How do we find the time for a meal, Bible Study, and Open Ministry in our Sunday services? If you've read the last few posts on our defining practices (Eating MealsTogether, Bible Study, and Open Ministry), you might be doing the math and trying to figure out how we fit this all in one hour on Sunday morning.

We don't. And we're better off because we do less.

Seriously. Your math skills are on the money. First, we meet for much three hours (and it's not in the morning). But even still, we don't do all of those practices every week. Even with a longer service, we don't have time to do it all every week. We do eat a meal every week--it's the first hour of the service--and then we alternate with our after meal ministry theme for the day. One week we do Bible Study and the next week is Open Ministry, then Bible Study…you get the idea.

But I thought you had to have a teaching every week for it to count as a church service!

Show me the verse that says that, because I've never read one. What's I have seen calls us to study the scripture. But a deep dive into the scripture every week isn't required. In fact, engaging in powerful, life challenging teaching every single week can actually be counterproductive.

Yes, I said counterproductive. And it's not about sermons versus interactive studies (see earlier post on that). The more powerful the content, the more this applies.

See, people can learn more and grow more when we teach them less often.

Typical pastors spend hours and hours crafting powerful sermons--sometimes as much as twenty hours a week! I used to do that myself, when I worked at more typical churches. And on Sunday they deliver a message that grips your heart, stirs your soul, and convinces you to change your life.

It's awesome.

Then, seven days later, while you're still working on changing, he brings up another area of your life and does that same thing. Now you have two deep changes your convicted about. Then another challenge the next week, and another, and another, week after week, year after year. It's like trying to drink from a furiously gushing fire hose.

  Truly changing something in your life takes a lot longer than seven days to accomplish. Time and emotional energy and serious persistence are required. People need to process the ideas fully. People need to practice multiple times to move from sloppy to smooth execution.

But every Sunday, members in a typical church are masterfully persuaded that if they really love God they need to change this new area, too. It's overwhelming and discouraging and after a while can make people numb to the need to change.

So churches end up with over-educated and under practiced Christians. (Sound familiar?) They know all about dozens of changes they could make it their lives, but they gave up implementing them all years ago. They no longer plan to change after most of the sermons they hear.

Instead, in our member-driven church, we deliberately slow down our teaching pace to give our members more time to process and implement. We usually have themes we stay with for a few months, to give us all time to practice properly. Remember, we believe in Growth Through Practice.

We call this teaching at practice speed.