OUTSIDE THE LECTURE HALL

Upon further reflection on my seminary days, I realized there was one part of my education that really stuck with me - and it was way outside of any in-class lectures.

I spent one January term completing a practicum at a nearby mental hospital, shadowing the resident chaplain. 

It was heartbreaking and fascinating. 

I met people who were nearly catatonic and others who couldn't sit still. I met "Jesus" and I beat him at ping pong. I was suspected of being an alien but then exonerated when my accuser decided my eyes "weren't purple enough". And imaginary voices commanded one patient, "Listen to Steve!" - and I was glad for the support. 

I saw patients who found the right medication to bring a complete 180, allowing them to walk out the door, and other patients who had tried everything for a decade with no change, leaving them permanent residents.  

Those four weeks widened my life experience in dramatic ways - and brought some spiritual wrestling. 

I, like a lot of Christians, had lived a fairly sheltered life up to that point. Was my God big enough to coexist with realities on the fringe?

A lot of people spend their entire life on the fringe, after all. And if God can't live and work there, how real can He be?

Is Jesus capable of meeting people there on the fringe?

And tonight I am left wondering what I could be doing to lead the people of my church outside their comfort zones - into the places where real learning takes place. 

THINKING LIKE A TEACHER

In 2019, Scott Adams published a book called Loserthink. 

On page 1, he defines "loserthink" as "absurd and unproductive reasoning" that you hear "if you use social media, or you make the mistake of paying attention to other people's opinions in any form". 

He laments the fact that "we don't teach thinking in schools" and so people aren't very good at it.

All spot on, but what is interesting about his book is the solution he proposes: getting broadly familiar with the types of thinking that are encouraged and developed in various professions. 

Each chapter explores what the average person can learn from particular professional domains:

• "Thinking like a Psychologist"
• "Thinking like an Engineer"
• "Thinking like a Scientist" 
• "Thinking like an Entrepreneur"
• Et cetera

So, for example, in "Thinking like an Artist", Adams point out that "a defining characteristic of artists is that they tend to have strong powers of imagination". (53) Greater skills in imagination would help non-artists think more productively in daily life by helping them see that "the most likely explanation for many - if not most - situations in life is something you didn't imagine". 

In other words, we jump to conclusions too quickly. And that can be extremely unproductive. With a little more imagination, we'd see more options for why someone did what they did or said what they said. Having a more active imagination could produce a bit more humility in our opinions and conclusions. (And likely disarm a whole lot of drama in the process.)

Anyway, I bring all this up to point out that as useful as I find Adams' book, there is a glaring oversight on his part: There's no chapter entitled "Thinking like a Teacher". 

If I could bring this back to my overall discussion of pastors needing to be teachers just as much (if not more) as they are preachers, I think what is missing in seminary education is exactly training on "Thinking like a Teacher". 

And it leads to a lot of unproductive lecturing. 

THE SEMINARY PROFESSOR'S MODEL

In my twenties, I spent several years at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. The best and most lasting benefit of that time was the friendships I made. I know I was also processing theology and growing spiritually, but I would go on to experience much greater growth on those fronts in the succeeding years.

When I think about the classes themselves, I remember loving a class on missions in particular - although it was long before I considered entering missionary work personally. The professor's name was, somewhat ironically, Whiteman.  And he was one of the better teachers I had there, although it became clear that he didn't really want to be teaching in Wilmore, Kentucky. Or anywhere, really. He wanted to be on the mission field. 

I remember in-class discussions with my peers that would continue long after dismissal.

Beyond that, I remember bits and pieces of other classes - preaching class, inductive bible study, and Greek.

There was a lot of reading and some papers and tests, but 95% of my experience in class was that old tried and true standby: the longform lecture. 

I am guessing that most of the pastors across this country, if not the entire world, have a similar seminary experience. We were all taught by professors whose sole arrow in the educational quiver was lecturing. 

And now we all go out and give a lecture every Sunday morning. 

But teaching is not just lecturing.

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. 

TEACHERS NEED TO CONSIDER LOGICAL ENTAILMENTS

My brain is not functioning well tonight and I need to get up early in the morning - a Saturday! - to help serve at a Men's Breakfast at a church here in town, so it doesn't seem like an ideal time to force myself to think about Literature Reviews and all that sort of stuff.

I will say that I have continued to watch videos produced in the aftermath of Kirk Cameron's switch from the "hell is eternal conscious torment" camp to the "conditional immortality" camp and it's driving me crazy. (Those videos might well be the reason my brain isn't working tonight.) 

There are a lot of self-styled, self-proclaimed Bible "teachers" on YouTube. Most come across way more confident in their interpretations and reasoning skills than they have a right to be. 

One of the things that bugs me the most is that in the midst of all the abstract argumentation, nobody ever seems to consider how, in reality, the presumed eternal torment would absolutely destroy the human psyche. 

Assuming the there is truly fire burning the skin and maggots eating the flesh 24 hours a day, would there be a single occupant of hell whose mind wouldn't turn to jelly by the end of the first month? 

Seriously. 

Most people in the here and now would not be able to endure a month of solitary confinement in a prison cell - even without the flames and worms.

And yet, some of these teachers have the audacity to suggest that the torment will be eternal because those in hell will continue to sin and so will always warrant further wrath.

You might ask, "What sin will they be committing exactly?" And, recognizing it's not likely these folks are lusting or coveting or stealing anything, these teachers say, "They will be angry with God".

You think?

Seems pretty likely. 

But only for a short time. 

I'm guessing by the end of the first year of eternity at the latest, the vast majority of those in hell will experience a complete psychic break and go catatonic. The rest of eternity hell should be pretty quiet.

Am I wrong?

What a crazy discussion!

These teachers of ECT insist that hell will entail real torment but they have no realistic concept of what genuine torture does to people. 

You've got to think through the logical entailments of your beliefs - especially if you take it upon yourself to teach others. 

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.