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.