7 THINGS TO AVOID WHEN TEACHING BIBLE STUDY by Jen Wilkin for Core Christianity
Teach Responsibly
Teaching a passage of Scripture to those who have studied it is far more demanding than teaching one to those who have not. My hope is that by giving Bible study participants homework, it will challenge their thinking enough that by the time they hear me teach, they won’t just take my word for it. Knowing that they will think critically about my teaching holds me accountable to avoid seven common teaching pitfalls.
1. Hopping Around
Have you ever settled in to hear a teaching on a key text, only to have the teacher read through the passage briefly before spending forty minutes ricocheting around the entire Bible? A student who has spent a week parsing a chapter of Ephesians will not be satisfied if the teacher uses the key text merely as a launch pad. She will want to linger there, as she should. She will have discovered that the text at hand is worthy of forty undistracted minutes of the group’s time, that those forty minutes will probably not be enough time to resolve her questions on that text alone.
Good teaching will necessarily involve the use of cross-references, but not at the expense of the primary text. We teachers are prone to wander, particularly when our primary text is a difficult one. The teacher who strives to build Bible literacy needs to stay put. Her primary goal is not to show how the key text relates to a thousand other passages, but to teach the key text so thoroughly that it will come to mind automatically when a student encounters similar themes elsewhere in her study.
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2. Feminizing the Text
Women who teach women the Bible are constantly faced with the temptation to take a passage and overlay it with a meaning unique to womanhood. Any time we take a passage that is aimed at teaching people and teach it as though it is aimed specifically at women, we run the risk of feminizing a text.
This is not to say that we can’t look for gender-specific application points from a text that speaks to both genders. Rather, we have to guard against offering interpretation and application that rob the text of its original intent by focusing too exclusively on a gender-specific framework. The book of Ruth is not a book about women for women, any more than the book of Jude is a book about men for men. The Bible is a book about God, written for people. By all means, teach Psalm 139 as it relates to women and body image, but resist the urge to teach it exclusively so. It is not the job of the female teacher to make the Bible relevant or palatable to women. It is her job to teach the text responsibly. A female teacher will sometimes bring a different perspective to the text than a male teacher because of her gender, but not always. A student who has spent time in the text before hearing teaching on it will know when the text is being feminized.
