Some Thoughts on Teaching Bible Study Classes

Some Thoughts on Teaching Bible Study Classes

1. Nourish your own spiritual life within the resources and guidelines of your own faith tradition. Read the Bible devotionally and meditate upon your devotional experiences in ways that are appropriate to your own faith tradition and personal needs. If you do not keep yourself “fed” you cannot provide satisfactory “spiritual food” for others. 

2. Read widely and keep up with current events. No area of knowledge is divorced from matters of faith. All areas of knowledge can contribute to understanding and formulating a person’s faith. Look for and pay attention to articles about the Bible and religion that appear in the news, so as to learn about new findings, how people of various faiths are thinking and working, and to be aware of how people of your faith are perceived by the rest of the world. Read critically. Evaluate opinions expressed. Don’t accept anyone’s statement simply because it appears in print. Especially, read Internet articles critically, but also don’t neglect this valuable tool. Be aware of your prejudices and pre-conceptions and those exhibited by other writers. Don’t allow your prejudices and pre-conceptions to blind you to alternative views that may be more accurate or satisfying to you than the views you already hold. Don’t avoid religious writings about or from other faith traditions, including other world religions. No one faith tradition or denomination has a lock upon all of the truth. Truth, from whatever source, is still truth, and must be dealt with as such, if only because we have a responsibility to be good neighbors with those who differ from us. 

3. Don’t let yourself be tied to a Sunday School quarterly or a teacher’s quarterly, or to any commentary for that matter. Please do not read them out loud to your class! As part of your class preparation read them critically, take what is relevant and useful, but don’t slavishly become dependent upon them. The writers are human, just like you. They may or may not be “experts” on their subject-matter—some of them are quite poor “experts,” actually—but they certainly are not “experts” on the lives of the members of your class. Neither are you, probably, but you should work toward getting to know as much as you can about them—their education, life experiences, vocations, family makeup, joys and concerns, because you are not only teaching a subject—the Bible—but also educating people with real human needs and concerns. 

4. Remember that you, also, are not an “expert,” and are not expected to be, so don’t be too hard on yourself. Do not hesitate to say that you do not know an answer to certain questions or problems. But don’t leave the class hanging, either. Promise (and keep your promise!) to research the problem or question and return next week with your findings—even if they are not necessarily the one and only correct answer or solution. Ask your minister(s) for guidance, search commentaries and other Biblical helps, check out the various (and they will be various!) answers found on the Internet, and critically examine the pros and cons of the various answers, and report your findings. Report the very fact that, on controversial matters especially, there are varying views (they will know this anyway), and that the same answer will not satisfy everybody. Leave controversial matters open-ended. Don’t feel you have to resolve every problem. Your job is to suggest possible or probable solutions and approaches, and to illuminate problematic texts, so that your class members themselves can make up their own minds. Respect the right of your class members to interpret Biblical texts for themselves, even if their answers are not satisfactory for your own situation. God works in mysterious ways, even using contradictory opinions. 

5. And don’t forget that many of your class members will be more educated and more well-informed than you are. Respect their opinions and their expertise and their possession of knowledge or insights that you do not have. Let yourself learn from them. Consider yourself a “fellow-struggler,” and a fellow-learner with them, as members of a “team” of fellow-learners seeking the same goals. Don’t “talk down” to your class as if they were children. (Don’t even do it with children—you can learn a lot from them, too!) Sometimes you have to lecture, just to get across large bodies of information that most of the class members do not already possess, and just to keep everybody on the same page. But don’t pontificate as if all that you present to them is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Share with them what you have been learning (you are constantly learning, aren’t you?) and retain your humility. And try even with your “lectures” to allow for a lot of give-and-take, while not allowing them or yourself to “chase rabbits,” except in rare circumstances. 

6. Remember that your time with your class is limited. Don’t waste it with non-essentials. Try to get past the “preliminaries”—class business, etc., as soon as possible, while not neglecting real human concerns and prayer for them—so as to preserve as much time for teaching and learning as possible. When possible, relate those human concerns expressed by class members to the Biblical texts that you are examining. 

7. Do not feel constrained to “complete” everything about the lesson within the limited time you have. Do not feel constrained to tie everything up with a neat bow and a feeling of completion by the end of the class time. Sometimes loose ends will need to be left to finish next week. Promise to deal with them next week and then do so! Also, it is a healthy thing to leave the class with some unanswered questions and unsolved problems. That gives them something to work on for themselves, to keep them interested, to keep them involved, to make the Biblical texts relevant, and to get them to return next week to contribute to the “next thrilling episode.” Encourage the class members to research the problem areas or continued questions for themselves during the coming week and to return and report their findings, while promising and keeping the promise to do so yourself. 

8. Learn to use, and help your class members learn to use, the many tools for Bible study that are available—Bible dictionaries and lexicons, Bible atlases and maps, concordances, histories, commentaries, encyclopedias, collections of extra-Biblical texts from Biblical times, Gospel parallels/ “harmonies,” even sermons and books about theology, and as many different modern translations of the Bible as you can afford and can lay your hands on. Consider taking a short course in New Testament Greek, or even get a self-help book, just to become familiar with it, not so much to do a lot of translating on your own. Do the same with Hebrew, if possible. A good resource is Edward Goodrick’s Do-it-Yourself Hebrew and Greek: Everybody’s Guide to the Language Tools. Don’t forget, in using all such tools, to utilize your God-given reason to determine what seems reasonable. Don’t let pre-conceived opinions keep you from being open to new truths. 

9. In your use of different Bible versions and translations, remember that every translation is, to a certain extent, an interpretation, because the translator, by the very nature of his or her task, is forced to make many interpretive choices simply in order to come to a sense of the meaning of the words translated. There is no single translation that is in every case better than all the others. A comparison of translations to get a consensus of opinion is usually quite helpful, though there are times when the majority opinion will still not be the correct one. 

10. Learn to use a computer if you have not already done so. Download and use Bible Study software that is available for free download from the Internet: Sword Project; E-sword; Theophilos; Bible Pro; Bible Discovery; Online Bible; Unbound Bible; Bible Explorer; Quick Verse; etc. Most of these overlap a bit in what they offer, and have different user formats, of differing user-friendliness. A lot of the Bible dictionaries and other writings provided in these programs are in the public domain, and therefore likely to be somewhat out of date, yet still somewhat useful. The most important thing these software offerings provide is lots and lots of English (and other languages, for those who know them) Bible translations. Not every program has the same ones, so you will need to get several of them to get all that are available. Some of the more modern ones are not available without paying additional costs, but the free ones are well worth the downloading time. Also, if you are really serious about your Bible study, and have money to invest, you might look on the Internet or in your local denominational bookstore for BibleWorks (for both Mac and PC, I believe) or Accordance (for Mac only), or possibly Libronix (for both Mac and PC, I believe). These programs are quite expensive, but if you have the money, they are well worth the investment. They have much more to offer than the free ones do, if you can afford them. BibleWorks seems to me to be the most user-friendly. 

11. In all of your reading, beginning with the Bible itself, but including all other work as well, ask yourself: 

Who is providing the information or opinions expressed? 

What is his or her background, education, training, life-experiences, presuppositions, prejudices? 

What are his or her credentials? 

Who is (are) the intended reader(s)/hearer(s)? 

What are their background, knowledge, experiences, pre-conceptions, prejudices? 

Where in the world do the writer(s)/compiler(s) and the reader(s)/ hearers(s) reside? 

What is/was their culture like? 

What are/were their living conditions and cultural expectations and ways of reasoning? 

What knowledge and opinions are/were circulating in their world of thought? 

When did the writer(s)/ compiler(s) and the readers(s)/hearers(s) live, and under what conditions? 

What events are/were happening in world and local history that would have affected the understandings and mis-understandings that they would have had? 

How does/did the writer(s)/hearer(s) present their message/ information, and why do they present it the way they do? 

What are they trying to convey/accomplish by the things they say and the way they say them? 

How successful have they been in doing so? 

How has your own faith tradition responded to or interpreted, historically or currently, the writer(s)’ message since it was delivered? 

Does the message of the writer(s)/compilers(s) sound reasonable or far-fetched to you personally? 

Does that message resonate with your personal experiences, concerns or situation, or is it way out in left field? 

You won’t be able to find the answers to all of these questions, but the more of them that you do find, the better you will be able to understand and interpret what you are reading, whether it be the Bible or any other work. Simply keep yourself aware that all of those factors can affect your understanding of a text. 

12. Again, do not feel you have to resolve all problems or questions raised by a text. Leave such questions open-ended, and respect the right of your class members to interpret such matters for themselves. Your job as a teacher is not to provide “all the answers,” even if you knew them, but rather, to provide some useful tools, and to help your class members grow to the point where they can interpret for themselves, and find satisfactory answers for themselves. 

We learn by doing. We do not retain nearly so much from “lectures” that are thrown at us from the outside, as we do from the thinking and decision-making that comes from inside ourselves, and the experiences of living life, of thinking and making decisions that help us to discover and to confirm the information and opinion that has been made available to us.