Teaching for a Growing Church

The flock of God has one ultimate source of nourishment (the Word) but that feast is served for a diversity of personalities. It is useful to remember that this biblical language of the church as a “flock” and the pastor as “shepherd” is figurative. We are not literally sheep. From the newborn Christian to the seasoned saint, our intake of God’s truth is always a reasonable persuasion. As to that diversity, such members of the church are always at different stages of life and with distinct callings. More than that, all Christians at every level of maturity will always need to be in the Scriptures themselves and also be integrating the truth with their overall life and worldview. Some are new disciples. Others need to be trained as leaders. 

The author of Hebrews says,

“For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food” (5:12).

The inspired author assumes that both the infant stage and the maturing stages are the norm. It is remaining in immaturity that is the vice. The same could be shown from many passages. 

What we are talking about here is a well-balanced teaching for a growing church. By “growth” here I mean not the consumeristic pursuit of numbers for the sake of numbers. Rather, we mean the healthy growth of a living organism such as the church is. That includes both the maturity of each individual Christian, but also the capacity of that local church to bear the burdens of the lost, as well as those various challenges that newcomers will bring with them. We must not pit one of these kinds of growth (upward) against the other (outward). And for that very reason, we must not pit one legitimate teaching emphasis against another. 

Sunday school (Systematic) and the Sermon (Biblical)

I once ministered at a church where one particular couple struggled greatly with anything systematic. Really, anything abstract: any departing from the text to the realm of explanation and integration. Anything that was not a word-for-word duplication in our words of the words in the text. I say this not to belittle them at all. It is actually quite common, although some cases are more extreme than others. Not only did they struggle with doing a book study — say, J. I. Packer’s Knowing God rather than a study of the book of Acts — but on one particular occasion the husband leaned over to me, pointing to one author’s use of an ellipses, and said, “See. That right there. Why do they have to take the words out of context?” No amount of explanation on my part would do. The notion that an author can focus on a part of a verse only, or highlight a connection between one verse and then another further down, skipping some material in between that is extraneous to his present point — all of this was out of court.

I came to understand that for many Evangelicals, the extra-biblical is tantamount to the un-biblical.

It is a long history as to how that view came to dominate the American church landscape. Francis Schaeffer used to say that Evangelicals suffer from “bits and pieces thinking.” In other words, we don’t think in terms of universals but only in terms of particulars. Part of this is the product of living in the modern world, where materialism predominates, overarching meaning is lost, and even the subjects one studies in school are all disconnected from each other. So it is in the study of Scripture. But what adds to this devolution in thought is that we have gotten the idea that it is also more spiritual to treat those bits and pieces as divine specimens “in themselves.” There is a kind of indecency or even dark magic taking place when we start paraphrasing the Scripture words, or examining presuppositions that come before our approach, or logical implications that come out the other end. And don’t even get me started on that most twisted wizardry of quoting authors outside of our own tradition: “You mean to say that you think Thomas Aquinas and C. S. Lewis were saved?” Such were each new low in a small group study that couldn’t really be persuaded of the well balanced approach.

Part of the danger in a generation of theological “retrieval” is that we can swing the pendulum to the other extreme. We can blame the Bible itself for the biblicism of the Seeker churches of the Boomers and Generation X. We can madly throw away biblical theology and expositional preaching because there is a distaste in our mouths from what Fundamentalists thought was the most rigorous forms of God’s truth. In the end, we would trade one oversimplification for another.

What then is the simple remedy?

Here is our first flexible balance in teaching: that of method. Our breakdown here is a bit oversimplified itself. It is not always “system-equal-classes” and “Bible-equals-sermon.” There can always be classes on books of the Bible, or even an Old Testament survey class that gives the introductory big picture. Likewise with the New Testament. And just as surely there can be topical sermon series, which (though they ought to be grounded in a text of Scripture) are like a systematic study. 

However, in the main, classes function as the church’s more overt doctrinal instruction, whereas the sermon more obviously brings up the truth of God directly from the text of Scripture. Now a good sermon will treat the truth of that text in its systematic (whole truth) context, and a good Sunday school outline will “show them from the text” the justification for the shape of the doctrine on display. So there is overlap, but the point is that both emphases must be present. 

Discipleship (All Sheep) and Leadership (Some Shepherds) Training 

Not only must the forms of our theological method be balanced, but also the seasons of life and callings to which Christian teaching is aimed. Leaders will have no one to lead if the flock is not caught up on the basics, and the sheep cannot very well expect there to be shepherds if they are not equipped by a more focused curriculum. Neither one of these demographics can exist without the others. 

As soon as a pastor can, he should be unleashing the truth of God’s word at these four points: the two from our methodological balance and the two from our demographic balance. His gospel speech must bind up the broken hearted and set the captives free. Then, once freed, a more concentrated worldview must deliver the King’s strategy for war or the Master’s blueprints for the city.

Paul communicates the whole flow of this teaching toward maturity to both of his two young protégés. For instance,

“You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also” (2 Tim. 2:1-2).

Some people have gone as far to say that everyone needs to be a Paul to some Timothy, and a Timothy to some Paul, and then a Timothy again to someone from the next generation. While the Lord may very well give us each opportunity to do that, the surer takeaway is that a church needs its “Timothys” and “Tituses” just as much as it needs the elders they raise up. 

Paul is so specific in this matter that in Titus 2, the pastor must cultivate such a community of learning, that older men are instructing younger men in the practical ways of a masculine faith (2:2, 6-8), and the older women are instructing the younger women in the practical ways of a feminine faith (2:3-5). He goes so far into practical Christianity that it instructs all the way into the workplace (2:9-10). But the point is that it all emanates from “sound doctrine” (2:1).  

Lest anyone get overwhelmed by all that might go into such a community of learning, the foundational burden is on the pastor to teach at all four of those points. If he does it well, others will be alongside him to lighten the load in a short time. As Ephesians 4:11-16 shows about the very nature of all of the offices that have ever existed in the church, the teaching is for growing the whole body in unison, so that all of its parts are properly informed by the word. Just as one body part should never say to another “I have no need of you” (1 Cor. 12:21), so none should say of its informing word: What need is there of that? 

Nothing will so kill the potential of a growing teaching ministry like these two demographics set against each other.

Young male zealots expect a 24-7 loop of the most “base” podcast on the market. Anything “less” is a sign of compromise. My ministry memory lane is filled with many a coffee house intervention with the latest young man who couldn’t understand why “the church” wasn’t further up the line in this or that way. To the challenge: “How do you get them there?” there is never anything but the circling back to indignation that they are not. Surely at work here is that old false dichotomy between the church as Zion’s hospital for sinners or as beachhead in laying siege to Babylon. False. It is both, or else we are not mature in our thinking.

There are pitfalls in each of these demographics. Nor is the teacher exempt from admonition. We must all be careful that what we are looking for in the communication of Christian truth is not just another consumer event, a product to suit the fleeting desires of the ones who would handle it only for the good in this life.