What No One Tells a New Sunday School Teacher

When you were first handed a teacher's manual, did anyone say this to you? "Be careful. While this is the best curriculum we've found, there may be errors in it." 

Choosing a curriculum is important, but an even greater responsibility lies with those of us who use it. We are the ones who will be held accountable for what we teach. A teacher who is willing to study first from the Bible and then look at the teacher's manual will be able to overcome a less-than-perfect curriculum. 

When you use a curriculum or create your own lesson from scratch, these six points will help you teach a lesson that correctly reflects biblical truth.

1. God is the central character of every lesson. We use drama, excitement, and emotion when we tell the story of David and Goliath. That's good. But who comes out looking like the hero? Is it David? Or is it God? David was clear when he charged the giant. "I come in the name of the Lord." We need to ensure that our students understand that it was not David's courage or his abilities that won over the Philistines that day, but God who enabled Him. If we stop to think of how many things could have gone wrong that day, we will have a better understanding of David's confidence in God. We need to paint a picture of God's abilities with such admiration that there is no doubt Who won the victory for the Israelites.   
2. Subpoints should not take center stage. The story of the feeding of the 5,000 is not a lesson about sharing, but a lesson on Jesus' power. It should fill us with amazement and wonder at how great He is. God may choose to use that lesson to encourage a child to share, but our emphasis as teachers needs to be on Jesus, not the boy who doesn't even get mentioned in some of the gospels' narratives of this event. 
   
3. My emphasis needs to be on spiritual change, not good behavior. Many children understand the need for grace when they initially ask God to forgive them of their sins and to include them in His family. Too few realize that they still need grace in order to grow and live the Christian life. Sometimes it's easy for them to believe that they are accepted by God because of their good behavior. If we do not continually encourage a dependence upon God's grace as they grow in their walk with God,  they may come to believe that their own self-discipline and obedience are making them pleasing to God. This can lead to Phariseeism and legalism. 
4. I waste time if my activities do not aid in teaching the central truths of the day. Activities and games are valuable teaching tools, especially for children. We should employ a great variety of teaching methods. But with every activity, we need to ask some simple questions. How will this help the students grow? Will it increase their understanding? Will it help them apply today's main truth? If I include this activity, will they be more or less likely to remember and apply today's truths?  Will they walk away from my class more excited about God or will they only remember the game? We have so little time with our class. Let's not waste one minute of it on activities that do not help to drive home the main point.
5. I need to be thorough in my lesson preparation? Lesson manuals are wonderful aids for teachers, but they do not replace the study of the Word of God. As teachers of the Bible, we start our lesson preparation with our text, the Bible. We do our best to ensure that we understand the lesson thoroughly ourselves before we try to teach it to others. This requires preparation throughout the week. Some truths are hard for us to understand, but rather than ignoring those truths, we need to spend time working to interpret them to our students. Once we feel we know what the Bible is teaching, then we pick up the manual to help us supplement what we've already learned.
6. Prayer is vital to my lesson preparation. Unless God does something in us and through our teaching, all our efforts will be in vain. As we begin to prepare, we ask God to teach us and help us to apply what we learn. We ask God to enable us to teach it in ways that our class will understand. We ask Him for attentive ears and receptive hearts. We ask Him to take His Word and apply it. We pray for the life situations that our students face. We entrust the our teaching time to Him, asking Him to use it to spread His fame in each of our lives.

God has given us a book.  That book is about Him.  We want to provide a solid foundation that will last a lifetime.

Are you one of those who was given a curriculum without any instructions on how to use it? Were you aware when you started teaching that you might find errors in it? Did you? I would love to hear your answers in the comments below.

Is It Worth It?

Is your ministry model a good one? Wouldn't it be better to use the traditional method of going and staying?

These kinds of questions are usually said quietly to one or both of us but rarely spoken during a public Q&A.  We sometimes see it written on the faces of people who are listening to us present our ministry, especially when it's the first time they've heard something like this. After all, we spend lots of money to travel great distances to spend a short time there.

Yes, we believe it's worth it for many reasons. Here are just a few.

1. The US missionary force is dwindling. This is not necessarily a bad thing because God is raising up missionaries from many other parts of the world. The U.S. is no longer the leader in sending out missionaries. So it is fitting that we allow the nationals to do the work that they do better than a foreigner will do - that of establishing churches.
2. Time to learn the language. When US missionaries go abroad to share the gospel and plant churches, it takes them years to learn the language. Depending on the language, it may take even more years to be able to teach at above an elementary school level to help develop future leaders and teachers in that community. Yet a national church planter does not have to spend time doing that. He already knows the language and can communicate with ease.
3. It takes years to learn the culture. Most likely, American missionaries will never be accepted as one of the people. They will always be an outsider. If their race does not give them away, their inability to speak, look, and act like a national will do it.

Leadership meeting in Peru

Approximately 80% of the world has already been reached with the gospel. Approximately 77% of all US missionaries are going to these already reached places. If we are going to reach the world for Christ, it is better to further equip the nationals to reach their own people and send Americans to places that are still unreached. 

After the iron curtain fell, Charlie attended a seminar where pastors from the former Soviet block were asked, "What can we do to help you?" Over and over again, they answered. "Send us Bibles, literature, and send people to help us train leaders. One person asked, "What about church planting?" The response? "We know how to plant churches. We need Bibles, literature, and training."

We are willing to go wherever God calls us. If He wants us to spend years in a country, we will do it. For now, however, we believe that strengthening the hand of national church planters is God's direction for us right now.

We recognize that a national pastor is better equipped to reach his own people than we are. So we go in, at the request of a pastor, and teach what he needs. Sometimes our teaching provides a "second witness" to their own teaching. As one pastor put it to me recently, "I have already taught my people about this, but they will hear it better from the visiting speaker." 

When we go, we work under that pastor. We are not his boss. He is ours. We respect him as the leader of the ministry and do what we can to assist him in the building and encouraging
of his people. We want to see that ministry grow, and he knows better than we do how to make that happen.

End of 2021 Newsletter

 Dear family and friends,

The year is almost over. After 2020, we are grateful for what we were able to do, even though it was a scaled-back version of pre-Covid years. Looking back, we want to give thanks to you who have encouraged, supported, and prayed for us this year. Most of all, we want this Christmas season to be a season of praise to God for His grace in our lives through this year so we filled in this “Thankful” acrostic.

Trip to South America: For the first time since Covid shut borders throughout our world, we were able to travel. In Arequipa, Peru, I taught about Biblical finances to the Bible Institute students and spent hours with the church leaders going over qualifications for those in leadership in the church. Joan taught the children’s workers how to plan lessons and advised the children’s teachers on developing their own curriculum.

Abigail and Joan

Health: Two years have passed since my stroke. Life changed dramatically that day, but God continues to give grace for ministry. I tire more easily, but the trip to Peru proved that being able to teach invigorates me.

Abigail: Abigail is an eleven-year-old girl in Peru. When she was three, her parents asked us to be her “spiritual parents.” Due to the distance between us, we cannot do much more than pray, but we are delighted to see her growing academically, socially, and spiritually. We look forward to seeing how God will use her.

Next year: We are expecting a busy year in 2022. Right now we are planning five trips abroad: to Bolivia, the Amazon, Luxembourg and Spain, Mexico, and Liberia. Of course, much can change between now and then.

Kindness of neighbors: We were in Maine when we received a call from our neighbor about a tree that had fallen in our yard. We are thankful that they were willing to check for damage to the house (none) and to take pictures for us.

Family and friends: The encouragement we receive from our family and friends helps to motivate us in our ministry despite fatigue or discouragement.

Unreached goals: We still have things we want to do before
God calls us home. We thank God for these unreached goals as they keep us pressing on.

Love: Your love demonstrated to us in many ways has encouraged us many times. However, God’s love keeps us throughout the trials and triumphs of life.

Thank you so much for your encouragement and prayers. We look forward to seeing what God will do in the coming year.

Your partners with missionaries around the world,

Charlie and Joan Farley

Newsletter

Even though we cannot fly, time still does. We usually write these newsletters after trips abroad, but without trips to remind us to write a letter, we have let too much time pass since the last one.

We are in a season of slow recovery in our ministry. At the beginning of this year, we wrote to the people who were expecting us to work with them in 2020 to see if we could reschedule. At that time, things were still too uncertain to schedule anything, but Antonio Jordan in Bolivia asked us to come in 2022. Most of the others told us they didn’t know what to expect.

Slowly the world has started to ease up on restrictions, and we begin to hope that our travel will resume. IPM’s church planters in Liberia, Matthew Troy and Edwin Gbor, have asked us to come in November of this year. We are talking with other church planters in other countries to see if there might be a possibility of a trip in September or early October as well.  

The rocky coast of Maine.

In the meantime, we asked God to give us more opportunities here in the U.S. As a result, I have been preaching more and both of us have been teaching. In early May we took a trip to Maine for a niece’s wedding where I was able to preach four times during the 11 days we were there. At our home church in Georgia, we teach discipleship classes, children’s church, and fill in as needed in other ministries and in doing pulpit supply in other churches.

Recently we received a very encouraging note from a parent. “Thank you for speaking truth into the lives of my boys and letting the Holy Spirit guide your words. Through your teaching, the Holy Spirit convicted my son of a sin in his life. We were able to resolve the issue through tears and prayer. Thank you for being used of God to encourage deeper spiritual growth in my boys.” We are so grateful to see the Holy Spirit move in these young lives.

This summer we plan to spend a week in Wisconsin helping with a VBS. That was an answer to a particular prayer. You see, Joan wanted to attend a writer’s conference in St. Paul, MN and I wanted to attend a class at Central Seminary, but the two events had a week between them. When we prayed about it, we received an invitation to teach at a VBS in Wisconsin during the week between the two events. I will attend my class. We’ll go to Wisconsin for a week and return to the Twin Cities for Joan’s conference. Only God could have lined that up so beautifully.

I am in a season of slow recovery from the stroke that happened 18 months ago. I see progress here and there, but recently Joan became convinced that she should start asking God for complete healing, so that’s what we are doing. Please join us in praying for that.

We are also in a season of slow recovery in our nation. The Coronavirus will probably be part of our lives for the foreseeable future. The economy will wax and wane or maybe even falter, but the need to train national leaders will last until the Lord comes.

Your partners with missionaries around the world,

Charles and Joan Farley

Newsletter

Dear friends,

Our last newsletter found us recently returned from the Philippines. We traveled through an almost deserted Seoul airport and arrived to find the airports in the U.S. running normally. That changed a week later when international borders began to close. We are glad we returned before that happened, though we would not have minded an extended time in the Philippines. As with all of you, the Coronavirus has affected our lives in many ways. Here are some of them.

Church: We worshiped with our church here in Georgia that Sunday, and then for the next six weeks, we stayed home and watched online. Slowly, the church began to reinstate services. Now, most things are back online. People have overcome their fears of being together in a room, and we even sing! The difference is that Joan and I wear masks. We are not afraid for our own health, but we are concerned for the physically weak in our congregation.

Health: I continue to recover from my stroke. One provider told us that when you hit the one-year anniversary, you will not recover any more abilities. During the last appointment, the neurologist told us that he does not believe that. My verbal abilities were the most affected – speech, writing, spelling, and typing. Since those are activities I do every day, the neurologist expects me to continue to recover for a longer period than one year.

In January, doctors advised Joan to have surgery. Since she was not experiencing much discomfort,  the surgery was postponed until after our Philippines trip. Then the Coronavirus shut the hospitals. When they reopened, the surgery was scheduled and performed. She stayed overnight, but I was not able to be with her. However, I had recovered sufficiently so that I was able to drive her to the hospital and pick her up the next day. We even survived my cooking and washing for a while. She has recovered completely and is glad to have that behind her.

Children’s Ministry: Our church has reinstated its ministry to children, and we are grateful to be part of the children’s church team, but there were no special meetings planned this summer because of Covid. We also heard from neighbors that many of their children’s usual activities were canceled. So Joan sent out letters to the neighbors in our little subdivision of 22 houses to ask if anyone was interested in attending an outside Bible club. One of the neighbors contacted her and agreed to host it in her yard and they set a time. It was just three days because of the hosts’ schedule, but 12 children from the neighborhood attended.

Church Visits:

With churches closed, our visits to churches stopped. Now they are starting back up again. In September we are traveling to Maine to speak in churches there. If you live in Maine (or between Georgia and Maine) and would like to see us or have us share our ministry in your church, please contact us.

Through all these changes, one thing did not change. GOD. We rest in His unchanging character and thank Him for who He is and what He continues to do.

Prayer requests:

• Continue to pray for my healing. I am doing most things now, but I tire easily. The more tired I am, the harder it is to communicate clearly.
• Pray that we would be able to get back to our international ministry soon.
• Pray for our trip to Maine. We will need a Covid test before departing for Maine. Pray that it is negative. Pray for safety along the way and for Joan as she will be doing most of the driving on this trip. Pray that we would fill our calendar for our stay in Maine.

Please keep us in your prayers.

Charles and Joan Farley