The Teaching Program of the Local Church in an age of Biblical illiteracy
Introduction
We believe that the Bible is God's Word. It is what God wants to say to humanity, in written form. If this is so, one of the main aims of any local church should be to help people to understand the overall thrust of what the Bible says, why they should believe it (apologetics) and how it applies to their lives (evangelism and teaching).
This means that the purpose of any message, or series of messages, should not be to get our ideas over to people, but to help them to understand what God has said in the Bible.
In the past, it was safe to assume that most of the people in any given congregation had at least some understanding of the Bible's message. Many had been to Sunday school; even those who had not had been taught significant amounts of the Bible in religious education lessons. Committed Christians were very likely to read the Bible every day in their individual 'Quiet Times'. Although there will still be individuals for whom any of the above assumptions are true, they are becoming a minority. As Don Carson points out in 'The Gagging of God,' we live in an increasingly 'Biblically illiterate' society.
When people had a level of Biblical background, it was safe to assume that they could put an individual message - or even a series of messages - into the context of the Bible's overall message. It is no longer safe to make this assumption. This means that a large part of the job of the teaching program is actually to provide the context of what Vaughan Roberts calls the Bible's 'big picture' and Don Carson calls the Bible's 'plot line.' It is a major responsibility of those who plan the teaching program to make sure that it teaches people this big picture.
The teaching program should be planned in such a way that it covers every part of the Bible. Not that it will cover every verse, or even every book: this is neither necessary nor possible. However, over time, it should give a balanced account of the Bible, precisely because the Bible is God's Word to us, and we will therefore want to ensure that we are faithfully teaching the whole of God's revelation.
Balance Old Testament and New
This means that, over time, there should be a balance between teaching from the Old Testament and teaching from the New Testament. There are many churches today where the Old Testament is rarely heard. There are others where Old Testament narratives become the basis for messages that are little more than moralistic cautionary tales: there is no attempt to show the part they play in the overall sweep of God's revelation.
As a rough guide, it might be appropriate to spend equal amounts of time teaching from the Old Testament and from the New Testament. Since the Old Testament is about three times as long as the New Testament, this would still mean that the New Testament was getting, on average, three times as much attention, pro rata, as the Old.
Balance different genres
It is also important that, within both the Old Testament and the New Testament, there is a balance of teaching from the different genres. In the Old Testament, over time, there should be a balance of teaching from the Pentateuch, the historical books, the wisdom literature (and Psalms) and the prophets. In the New Testament, there should be a balance of teaching from the Gospels and Acts, the Letters, and Revelation.
The message of the individual books
We should be teaching people the message of individual books of the Bible. The ideal is that after a series of messages on (say) Ephesians, people will go away saying 'Now I understand what Ephesians is all about - and how it applies to me.'
Because of this, our basic pattern should be to teach systematically through individual books of the Bible. This does not mean we cannot occasionally teach a thematic series, or a series that extracts part of a book (e.g. the Sermon on the Mount), but it does mean that the core of our ministry should be what is called consecutive expository preaching. There are several reasons for this:
- God gave us the Bible in books. He did not give us a disordered jumble of individual chapters, still less individual verses. Neither did he give us a Systematic Theology or a collection of discussions of thematic issues. God has good reasons for choosing to organize his revelation to us in this way, and the way his revelation is organized is itself part of that revelation. We do well to heed it.
- The book is the basic unit of communication in the Bible. When Paul sat down to write Ephesians, he had a particular purpose and message (or perhaps purposes and messages) in mind for the overall letter. He did not think in terms of the purpose of individual chapters, still less individual verses.
- By taking the books of the Bible seriously as units of communication, we are modeling an approach to Scripture that takes its own structure seriously. So the structure of our teaching, and our thinking, is shaped by the structure of God's revelation, rather than us imposing our own structure on his Word. In a Biblically illiterate culture, the importance of this modeling - this 'meta-message' about how we handle Scripture - is very important.
Of course, going consecutively through a book of the Bible can be done in a way that is bad or boring - but doing it well, and showing its relevance, is part of the task of the teacher (and of those charged with planning the teaching). The fact that it is possible to do something badly is hardly an argument for not trying to do it well! Other kinds of message, and series of messages, can also be done badly, so the argument that we should not take this approach because it is possible to do it badly is not well founded.
I have also heard the argument that these days we cannot teach through entire books - especially longer books - because people do not attend consistently enough to hear the whole series. I have yet to hear this argument framed in a way that is persuasive. Some people will attend irregularly, and will benefit from the individual messages, just as they would if the individual messages they heard came from different series. Others will attend more regularly, and they will have the added benefit of a series that builds up week by week to teach the overall message of the book. The argument that in some sense we 'must' have short series seems to be an unnecessary concession to the spirit of the age.
Longer passages
Another implication of this growing Biblical illiteracy is that we need to think hard about the size of the passages that we teach from. We should, of course, always try to follow the natural units of thought of the Bible itself. These are more obvious in some parts of the Bible than in others. (More obvious: the Gospels. Less obvious: Proverbs). However, in general, we should probably be moving from shorter passages to longer. The sort of practice in the past, where a teacher would teach on a single verse, without giving any attention to its context, often led to flaky exegesis: there is much truth in the saying that 'a text without a context becomes a pretext.' I do not like to take issue with such an illustrious figure as Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, but the kind of approach he used, taking several years to go through Romans, and sometimes dwelling at length on an individual word or phrase, would not be appropriate in our current cultural setting.
Biblical Theology
Because of the growth of Biblical illiteracy, the role of Biblical Theology is becoming more important: we need to be able to show the overall sweep of God's revelation, and how individual parts fit into it. In particular, we need to give more attention to the way the whole of Scripture points to Christ - the Old Testament as well as the New (see Luke's Gospel chapter 24 verses 25-26, Luke's Gospel chapter 24 verse 44, John's Gospel chapter 5 verse 39) For example, many of the Old Testament kings are, in fact, negative examples of what a God-given leader should be like. They are counter-examples of Christ, illustrating what he is like by not being like him.
Regular overviews
There is a lot to be said for regularly having some kind of series which, in a brief space of time, gives an overview of the Bible's message. One church where I have occasionally taught recently did this by going through Vaughan Roberts' book 'God's Big Picture.' Another spent several months on outlines of individual New Testament books, one per week, with the general title: 'What would it have been helpful for me to know before I read…' - for example, 'What would it have been helpful for me to know before I read Hebrews for the first time?' A snappier title for the same thing would have been 'Hebrews in half an hour.' From the point of view of the teacher, it is particularly stimulating to prepare this kind of a message. From the point of view of the congregation, a regular overview of this kind is invaluable.
Plan far ahead
One result of thinking about these issues is that it becomes more important to plan well ahead in the teaching program - three to five years. Planning in this way is not, as some have suggested, opposed to the leading of the Holy Spirit, for at least two reasons:
- Is the Holy Spirit time limited? Is he able to lead us four weeks ahead, but not four years? This seems to be putting an unbiblical restriction on what God can do, and setting up an unbiblical contradiction between the leading of the Holy Spirit and the normal use of the mental faculties God has given us.
- A plan is just that. It is not set in stone or irrevocable. If, six months into a plan, it becomes clear that God is directing the church leadership to teach on a particular subject, or to pursue a different direction from their original planning, there is absolutely no reason why they should not abandon the original plan (or put it on hold for a while) and pursue where God is leading them now. Indeed, it would be wrong for them to do otherwise.
There is more on long-term planning in 'An example of a possible four year plan' and 'About the four year plan.'
Summary:
- Balance Old Testament and New Testament
- Balance genres
- Teach through books, and help people to understand the message of the whole book
- Reasonably long passages - not single verses or words
- Regular overviews of the whole of the Bible
- Biblical theology - 'Christ in all the Scriptures'
- Plan ahead 3-5 years
In a culture of growing Biblical illiteracy, this kind of strategic thinking about the teaching program of the local church is more important than ever before. Sadly, I do not see signs of it in many churches.
(END NOTE: Some of the recommendations in this article may seem strange and radical. It is interesting to discover how many of them were being put into effect by Augustine, the bishop of Hippo, in North Africa, as long ago as the fifth century. For more, see 'Augustine's approach to Teaching the Bible ' on this site.)
David Couchman, April 2004