So, You Want To Teach Or Preach The Word Of God

The more you study and learn about the Bible, history, and doctrine, the better you will get a teaching and preaching the word of God. That does not mean that you won’t stumble here and there, maybe say the wrong thing, but the more you study, the less often that will ever happen. We must ensure that we get the right information in people’s hands.

One of my pet peeves about the church is the lack of proper education for the people. Jesus' great commission is to go out and make disciples and teach them about the faith. The mission of the United Methodist Church, in which I am ordained, says that their mission is to go out and make disciples for Jesus Christ to transform the world. That sounds very nice, however, they forgot about the fact that we have to educate people about what the faith is all about. That is where the church fails.

In my 25 years of pastoral ministry what I have discovered is that the teachers of the church’s Sunday school is anyone who will pick up the book that goes with the lessons, read the lessons, and try to run some kind of discussion about the lessons. I sat in on a Sunday school class at one of my churches and I watched this happen. When the discussion time came, I raised my hand and asked about a question that was not in the book but was pertinent to the subject being discussed. The leader of that Sunday school group stopped me and said we only discuss the questions that are in the book. By doing that, you limit yourself to only discussing what some author has put in a book. You assume the author got it right? And that is not good for education.

We need to allow people to expand their thinking and to explore questions that they might have about Scripture that are not in the books. That is one of the scariest things to most preachers and teachers of the word of God. Even when I was in seminary, I would ask questions that went past the bounds of where the PhD instructors were.. In the middle of my experience seminary, I had to sit in an evaluation of how I was doing. The leader of that inquiry said that teachers that I had in the seminary all said the same thing about me. Well, what was that I inquired? The answer was you asked too many questions and you try to expand the topics. I asked what was wrong with that? I never got an appropriate answer about it.

Exploring the Scripture beyond what a single book tells you is important that you get a much better and clearer picture of what God’s word is all about. Therefore, if you’re going to preach or teach about a passage or a narrative in the Scripture, you need to look into several sources and merge it together and present it coherently. I enjoyed presenting multiple points of view because there are many things that the church believes in and has doctrine about that Jesus never spoke about.

In one’s Sunday school class on theology, an older gentleman stood up screaming at me. He demanded that I needed to tell him what to believe about the Trinity and then stormed out of the room. I refused to tell them what to believe about the Trinity and said they need to pick which doctrine they think, is correct or blend any of them together. This older gentleman just could not handle that and that got him unbelievably angry.