A Brief Rant on the Gift of Teaching in the Church Today

Blah, blah, blah, blah: The gift of teaching in the church today

A gifted teacher could read his wife's Wal-Mart list from the pulpit and get a chorus of chapelgasms from the congregation. ("Oooohhhh! Aaaahhhhhh! Ohhhhhhhhh!") There's something about the way a gifted teacher holds himself and speaks so smoothly that hides the fact that they often don't have anything to say.

Ohhhhhh, the rant is starting early.

A lot of serious Bible churches are content with someone who teaches week in and week out, often going through books of the Bible from start to finish, or giving comprehensive overviews of topical studies, or doing a steady stream of character studies.

Most Christians need less in their heads and lots more in our hearts!

I think of an Ephesians series that just ended this morning (and that inspired this rant). The high points were our pastor's use of Google earth (many chapelgasms!) and his background on contemporary Ephesian life (really interesting). I don't know where he got that stuff, but after doing three or four good studies on Ephesians, I hadn't heard most of it.

My heart isn't change one iota at the end of the study though.

Gifted teachers need to spend a lot more time reading the word, in large chunks, praying as they read it. And not just the parts they’re teaching on. They should never stop learning how to find God in the pages of his word. Instead, we get a new message on a new topic or passage of Scripture every week, by a teacher (usually not overly gifted) who's got several jobs' worth of work to do in addition to preparing the message.

If I can pause for a moment, I've felt for years that a pastor's primary job should be training and mentoring a number of men of faith in the church so that they can get up in the pulpit every week and share what they've been learning about God and from God. It's not unreasonable to think that one person can come up with two or three or even four God-messages every year. But no one can come up with one every week.

The real point of this rant is my frustration with people who are oozing the gift of teaching but couldn't come up with a focused message that honors God. The church we're at now is between senior pastors, so their go-to guy is a massively-gifted junior pastor who probably aced all his seminary classes but hasn't spent more than required minimum number of hours with broken, devastated people who are trying to crawl toward God. His polished messages, so smooth, so humorous at just the right points, so filled with lines worth repeating--wait, lines that he does repeat, with extremely pregnant pauses between each repetition (chapelgasm!!!)--so interesting, scream this lack of his heart in each message. Our church leaders would rather have polished, neatly-dressed speakers on Sunday morning than someone who is going to bring the God of the cross into our sanctuaries and our lives.

Serious problem!

(Chapelgasm!!!)

And on that happy not, it's time for second digression.

Where is the biblical basis for The Application that so many preachers spend the last five minutes of their sermons on today? Isn't it the Holy Spirit's job to convict us of our sin throughout the service or on our way to the service or in our morning devotional times or when some stinking fat slob walks by us at work? Isn't it the Holy Spirit's job to tell us what God wants us to do every minute of every day? It seems to me like it would be more appropriate for the worship leader to have a few minutes of Application every week. ("Pay attention to these words we're about to sing and APPLY THEM TO YOUR LIFE!!!) It probably wouldn't hurt the financial status of most churches either if the head usher did this before at some appropriate time each week. But I digress into sarcasm so I’ll stop.

What makes up the kind of good message that gifted teachers should be giving?

A good teacher or a good message, has you loving God more at the end than you did at the beginning.

The radio is full of ambitious teachers that we can listen to whenever we want. The internet is packed with instructive lessons on every passage of Scripture in any version of the Bible you could imagine. And libraries and bookstores offer the latest teachings and ideas from a broad range of Christian backgrounds. Few Christians need more messages that make us say, "Hmmm. Interesting."

But we all need to know that God loves us, told to us by someone who’s just experienced that love. We need to know that he's active today by someone who’s just experienced his actions. We need to know how much God commiserates with us when our knees are knocking or eyes won't stop crying or our heart is longing for good things that never seem to come our way. We need messages taught by people who have walked with God through devastating heartbreak, yet can still say, "God is good." We need to know what's on God's heart, taught by people who have let God bring them through the atmospheric re-entry / burn-off that's required of anyone who's close to him. We need our teachers to have trusted God with the dearest things in their lives, trusted God when it cost them everything they had, trusted God when no one else was trusting him.

Our churches are full of such people, and here I get completely off point: they're not often gifted teachers, so they’re rarely invited to give the Sunday-morning message. Church leaders only let the most polished people teach us.

And that brings me to my real hope for this rant: that one gifted teacher would read it and commit to know God better so they can better bring him to the people they speak to. But the words that keep going through my mind as I write this come from Ecclesiastes 9:

" There was a small town with only a few people, and a great king came with his army and besieged it. A poor, wise man knew how to save the town, and so it was rescued. But afterward no one thought to thank him. So even though wisdom is better than strength, those who are wise will be despised if they are poor. What they say will not be appreciated for long. Better to hear the quiet words of a wise person than the shouts of a foolish king.

Or, I might add, the shouts of foolish, gifted teachers that fill our churches today.