TEACHING FROM THE PULPIT

In order to find out what has already been written about the pastor as teacher, I am going to need to do more than a search on Amazon. But that's where I started.

And it does leave me wondering what is out there specifically to help a preacher approach the pulpit as a teacher.

My initial search on Christian teaching turned up plenty of books about "Christian education", but these are focused on teaching faith in a formal school setting:

• On Christian Teaching: Practicing Faith in the Classroom
• Transformational Teaching: Instructional Design for Christian Educators
• Everyday Christian Teaching: A Guide to Practicing Faith in the Classroom
• Teaching for Spiritual Formation: A Patristic Approach to Christian Education in a Convulsed Age

Many others are aimed at an audience of Sunday school teachers. Sometimes pastors are included in the audience.

Teaching to Change Lives: Seven Proven Ways to Make Your Teaching Come Alive bills itself as being for parents, Sunday school teachers, pastors and professors.

And there do seem to be a number of books aimed at "creativity" in teaching about the Bible, but that's not exactly what I am looking for. 

Effective Bible Teaching by James C. Wilhoit and Leland Ryken seems promising. I like the title, anyway.

But the Amazon summary says, "The book offers concrete guidance for mastering a biblical text, interpreting it, and applying its relevance to life. Its methods, which have been field-tested for twenty-five years, help pastors, teachers, and ministry students improve their classroom skills. Readers will learn how to develop the "big idea" of a passage and allow the text itself to suggest creative teaching methods. This new edition has been updated throughout and explores the changed landscape of Bible study over the past two decades. Readable and interdisciplinary in approach, this book will help a new generation of Bible students teach in a purposeful and unified way." (emphasis mine)

So, it's still ultimately about a classroom. I'm more interested in teaching from the pulpit. 

And I still think there's a need to develop pastors who THINK like teachers.

And there's more to that than just coming up with a creative hook.

HABIT FORMATION LITERATURE

One of the basic tasks for an effective teacher is equipping the students with the resources they need to study the subject matter further independently. 

This is why a prominent feature of my youth retreat plan is the sharing of practical information concerning habit formation. 

The literature on this topic is fascinating and has been growing in recent years. 

There's not much that is specifically Christian in this realm though. 

James K. A. Smith touches on habits broadly in several of his books, connecting habits to character development and spirituality. Richard Foster's classic, Celebration of Discipline, has some practical advice concerning spiritual disciplines, but nothing which addresses habit formation as such. A few Christian authors have regurgitated some of the habit formation wisdom from secular books - like Justin Earley does in The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction - but then they sometimes run counter to that wisdom in places.

The gold standard in the study of habit formation is squarely in the secular realm: James Clear's Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones. It has currently sold an astounding 25 million copies worldwide. Obviously, people are finding it useful and passing recommendations to friends and family. Clear's work was built on a foundation laid by Charles Duhigg in the book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Others have contributed bits and pieces to the habit conversation, such as B. J. Fogg in Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. 

I plan to teach the most useful insights regarding habit formation from these books during the retreat (alongside the material on the narrative framework of the Bible) in hopes that by the end of the retreat, the students will have skills which will improve the chances that they will establish a daily Bible reading habit. 

That's the goal anyway. 

METANARRATIVES

One of the chapters in my dissertation will be a "Literature Review". Here's the guidance I have been given on this section: 

"The literature review should summarize the contributions of the key figures working on your topic. This chapter demonstrates your competence in the field by articulating the standard approaches to thinking in your area of research."

For now, my prospectus just needs a single paragraph summarizing what shape I anticipate this chapter will take.

My difficulty in getting started on it is that there are at least three aspects of my project that have their own literature. Maybe I should devote a third of my lit review to each one.

Here's the first:

1. Since one of the main objectives of my retreat is to communicate some key Bible themes to the youth, I've been reading up on the metanarrative(s) of the Bible. Carmen Imes' recently completed trilogy - Bearing God's Name, Being God's Image, and Becoming God's Family - is exceptional. She is the rare biblical scholar who is able to make deep scriptural insights accessible and engaging for a lay audience. Based on her recommendation, I also picked up The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative by Christopher Wright, but I haven't finished it yet. It has some major gravitas and is not a quick read by any stretch of the imagination. In this category, I would also include The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God by Dallas Willard and a couple of Matthew Bates' books, Why the Gospel? - Living the Good News of King Jesus with Purpose as well as Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King. Finally, I think there's a lot of insight in a book I used to frequently dip into while I taught high school English, How to Read Novels Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster.

I am not sure if any of this sounds at all interesting to you, but I have found familiarity with some of the recurring themes of Scripture to be incredibly useful in my own Bible study. Knowing something of the biggies - like image, God's presence, the Knowledge of Good and Evil, covenant, the law, sacrifices, and exile - provides a roadmap for unfamiliar passages. Recurring themes often become the keys to unlocking deeper meaning. 

"Read the Bible like it's fiction" is extremely helpful advice. I believe I first heard it from Michael Heiser, but apparently C.S. Lewis advocated this approach long before Heiser was on the scene.