Teaching

We're having a discussion about teaching adult Sunday school at my church. Here are some notes on what I think is important. It comes from a seminary course I listened to this last year from Covenant Seminary, a preaching class taught by Dr. Bryan Chapell. These notes are based on Lesson 2, which I encourage you to read (or listen). The whole audio and print series is here. While these notes are about expository preaching, they have important ramifications to how we teach Sunday school. One of the important things is to keep the Big Idea of scripture in mind. Bryan Chapell says it this way:

"The purpose of the text is to deal with us as fallen creatures in our fallen condition with the knowledge of what God can do about that."

Bryan calls this the Fallen Condition Focus (FCF). It is the gospel. It is the gospel applied to every area of our lives. Again, Chapell puts it this way:

"The common denominator of all great preaching is that it gives hope, not that it gives information, although all preaching gives information to some extent. The common denominator of all great preaching is that it uses the information in the text to give hope. Why are we dealing with fallenness? So that I will recognize that 'there is no temptation taken you but such as is common to man.' What you are struggling with, the people in the Bible were struggling with. And God gave them aid."

In teaching with a Fallen Condition Focus, there are three important things to ask:

• "What does the text say?"
• "What concern or concerns did the text address?"
• "What do we share in common with those for or about whom this was written, or the one by whom this was written?"

Our teaching needs to be specific. Again, Bryan writes:

"it is not just the mutual condition that makes powerful preaching, but the more particular you make the FCF, typically the more powerful the sermon will be. This is again a difference between an essay and a sermon. For an essay you typically write a large principle. 'Today, I will talk about the problem of sin in the world.' Great, but what does that have to do with me? Typically, the more personal and particular you make the FCF, the more powerful the sermon is. 'Today we will talk about how you can be faithful when your boss is a sinner.' Is there anyone in Scripture who had to be faithful even though his superiors were pagan? That subject is addressed in numerous places. I have to become much more particular about what the FCF is in order to deal with it in general."

I have a concern about teaching Bible study and then teach application topics. If Bible studies turn out to be only information then we are missing the gospel of hope in them. If we break the application from the books in the Bible (or develop a disjointed series of proof texts for an application/topic study), we run the danger of developing rules without gospel (with the corresponding dangers of thinking we can do these, or being caught in hopelessness of realizing we can't without the hope of God's power). When it comes to teaching books of the Bible, I want to see the gospel and it's Fallen Condition Focus taught with the text of the book that is present right there. I would like to see the 3 principles of FCF conducted in the study making it specific to the people in the class. You will then have gospel application as the book of the Bible is studied.

As we work through class topics and curriculum, I would like us to remember the specific gospel focus which should address the application in these classes.

My preference is to slant the curriculum towards books of the Bible with the FCF and gospel application, not ruling out topic-oriented courses and stand-alone classes. In all of this I want to see a gospel orientation.

Dying Computer...

My primary computer, a Dell laptop, is in the process of ungracefully dying. It has served me well for over 5 years. The video hardware goes bad after a few minutes. I have migrated most of my stuff off the computer over the past couple of years in anticipation on this moment. My biggest pain is QuickBooks. QB 2007 worked well on XP, but not on Vista. I want to finish off a few details in QuickBooks for taxes, but I can't find a PC to install and run it. Arrgh!

But it is all in the providence of God that this would happen. For my best possible good, no less. There are many irritations and pressures in life. On the scale of things, this is small potatoes. There are many more things more horrendous and difficult than a computer failing. We all can think of friends and family who've endured much worse than bad personal computers. That I even got irritated over this shows my lack of trust in God on simple things in life, and a serious lack of gratitude for God's gracious gifts that he floods my way. I'm adopted into God's family. Christ died for me so that I would never experience eternal death. These infinite, precious gifts are infinitely amazing "by themselves" -- by themselves where God spent his infinite being in all three persons of the Trinity to secure these things for me. And then God pours out amazing blessings of a wonderful family, an amazing extended family, of very delightful friends, and so many other things that I cannot begin to enumerate in this post.

A bad PC, during tax season. That's small potatoes compared to the vast rich ways God has blessed me.