Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.
The river of God’s activity is real. You don’t know it really exists until you are there. And when you are there… you just ride the current and smile.
How do you get there? There’s no formula. Just walk humbly and boldly and it seems to find you more than you find it. Like the wandering Israelites found Kadesh, sometimes it takes some hardship to find it.
Photo by Phillip Howard via Flickr (Creative Commons)
Then how are you measuring what people are learning?
As a youth worker I’m always aware of leakage in my teaching. That is, the difference between what I am teaching and what learners are learning.
There is a naughty little educational word called “retention” we need to deal with. If there isn’t, what is the point of my teaching if my pupils aren’t learning?
Questions I ask myself as a communicator of Biblical truth:
Why am I teaching them?
How do I measure if they are learning?
How do I teach all levels of learners, interest levels, and learning styles at the same time?
Those who have sat under my leadership know that I do a lot of repetition and context to my regular teaching.Why do I do that? Because I want some things to stick. It doesn’t matter to me if you write it down in your outline or talked about it in a small group, I believe the Bible has incredible value for believers, we are called to know God’s Word, and we as leaders as told that one of our qualifications for biblical leadership is an ability to teach. I repeat and quiz because I want to burn an image of God’s Word on your heart. It’s not enough to know about the Bible… the teachings of Jesus have to be in your heart to impact your daily life.
I also know, as a leader, I’ll be judged by what people actually learn and what people actually do with what I am teaching them.
As the years have gone by I’ve become less enamored with perfecting my lecture-styled teaching and more enamored with a discussion-based, conversational-style.
Why? Because I’ve found, for me, that method to be a solid way to engage with the middle 70% of my audience. Folks in the top 15% aren’t my target. And folks in the lower 15%… I hope to teach them with other methods that work for them.
Some commenters took the post as an attack on the church, going to church, and those who lead at church. Others seemed offended that I’d even bring up Sunday morning as something we could collectively improve upon.
My intention was to the contrary. It was an attack on doing something that is largely ineffective for the sake of doing what we know in opposition to what might work better. For all of the thousands of hours the average church goer has listened to we should have seen so much more fruit. Let’s not forget that the church is on decline.
That pushes questions to the forefront of my mind:Is it the hearer who is disobedient to the teaching? Or is it the teacher who is failing to teach truth in a way that influences action? Probably some fault lies on either side.
It is my hypothesis that the primary method we are using for educating our congregations on Sunday mornings needs alteration. Church leadership is full of brilliant minds. We should show off our brilliance in our ability to lead people in innovative way: Not just talk about leadership but do it. Not merely preach a message that doesn’t move people, instead allow the message we preach to move us.
At the end of the day results are all that matter. Jesus isn’t going to look at you and say, “Awesome preaching, my good and faithful servant.” He will look at your body of work and judge you by the results & intention of your heart.
Photo by byronv2 via Flickr (Creative Commons)
What are the physical restrictions to learning on Sunday morning?
Nearly all churches are constructed the same way. Rows of seats all facing forward with a person on stage or behind a podium. That person lectures, sometime passionately, sometimes you fill out an outline, sometimes words are put on a screen.
But the Sunday morning experience is typically based on a single teaching method: Lecture.
Is that how you learn best? It isn’t for me. I learn best by hearing, discussing, and practicing. Passive-learning bores me. I need something to do!
And when I look around on Sunday morning I don’t see a lot of learning going on. (Bear in mind, my pastor is off the charts good at what he does, he is my favorite preacher. Week in and week out, he’s just as solid as people who have sold as who we have at our conferences.) Instead, I see a lot of polite nodding, the occasional taking of notes, and virtually no way to respond.
Sunday morning is highly assumptive.
There is an assumption that people in the pews are going to live this teaching out in their lives.
There is an assumption that people are going to talk about what they heard at lunch or with a small group, or somehow try to knead the message into their lives.
There is an assumption that the church staff spends the majority of their work week living that message out.
There are no checks and balances to make sure anyone is putting anything into practice. (Staff and attendee alike.)
The proof is in the pudding. There are hundreds of thousands of churches in America. Most use the same methods, few grow. Conversely, where the church is growing around the world and even here in the United States, different methods are in play.
The “It’s not about Sunday morning argument.“
I’ll be the first to admit that the Christian life isn’t 100% about Sunday morning. But, for most people, it’s the centerpiece of their walk with God. People aren’t just whining about being busy, they are. And they are sitting in your pews, bored, and saying to themselves… “You kind of waste my time on Sunday morning, why should I trust you with more of my time? We don’t need another program. We need this program to work for us.” If it isn’t about Sunday morning than why do we even do it? Of course Sunday morning is very important! Let’s not fool ourselves with double talk.
Are the methods we use on Sunday morning “sacred?“
Sure, Paul preached until a young man fell from a window and died. (Then Paul healed him.) And Jesus preached both at the temple and in public. No doubt, he was taught by rote memory as a boy growing up attending the synagogue. At the same time, oral tradition and discourse were both forms of education and forms of entertainment. We see from the New Testament that Jesus didn’t instruct his disciples to build churches and hold meetings. Instead, he taught them while they were on the road from place to place. Or by sending them out in pairs to do ministry in His name. Or using parables. Or by asking them questions. In truth, we see a variety of teaching methods to communicate biblical truth in the Bible.
While the way we’ve always done church is held as sacred, the methods we use aren’t Biblically sacred. But what is sacred is the simple command to teach.
A challenge
Photo by SparkFun Electronics via Flickr (Creative Commons)
I want to challenge you to try something. Maybe it’ll sound crazy. But maybe it’ll just be crazy enough to change your church. (And maybe you don’t have access to try this with the whole church, so try it with your youth group!)
Conduct a six-week experiment.
Week one: Teach a normal Sunday service. On Thursday, send out a 5 question email (or Facebook) survey for Sunday morning attendees, asking them 4 basic questions about your message, and one open-ended question about how they applied the message on Sunday morning. (What was the passage? What was the main point? Which of the following was an illustration? What’s one way you are applying last week’s teaching today?)
Week two: Teach, again, in your normal fashion. This week, acknowledge after the sermon that they will again receive a survey via email on Thursday. This will tip them off that it is coming, so expect the results to be higher.
Take weeks three & four off from the experiment. You’ll be tempted to peak at the results so far. Show discipline!
Week five: Try a different teaching method on Sunday morning. Maybe teach by discussion. Or get people into work groups. Do anything that isn’t one person up front teaching. Don’t warm people that this is coming! That’ll mess up the experiment. Then send out the same 5 question survey again. (Expect some negative comments, people coming on Sunday might hate any type of change.)
Week six: Use the same method one more time. Send out the same survey. Just like in week two, tell them to expect a short survey on Thursday.
At the end of the six weeks unseal the results and meet together as a staff to look at them. Did retention scores increase or decrease? Did the change in method cause more people to apply teaching? Did the workgroups hold each other accountable? Overall, what was the net change? (Heck, maybe the old method was statistically better!)
Week seven: Send out one last email sharing the full results.
This will serve two purposes. First, it’ll communicate to your congregation that you are taking your biblical role as a teacher seriously and being professional by sharing the results of an experiment which involved them. Second, it’ll invite the congregation into the problem solving. Chances are good that you’ll get a lot of feedback simply by conducting the experiment.
Of course, I’d love it if you shared your results with me as well. Email me a Word document and I’ll share them on my blog.
Have you ever wondered what people are looking for?
Every day I read about my friends who are:
Climbing mountains
Taking kids to camp/retreats
Going on mission trips (guilty, as charged)
Going to the desert to be alone
Moving from one church to another
Changing careers
Reading books or writing books
Going to concerts
On and on…
And I wonder what it is that they are looking for? I look at their stories and think about Pilgrims Progress. “Where are you headed, Christian?” They are going on these trips, seeking something, some find it while others don’t. It’s a mysterious phenomenon that has been going on forever, I suppose. But this spiritual seeking is now on full display thanks to Facebook status updates and Twitter posts.
We are all seekers of something. But why?
I often wonder what I’m looking for. Right in the middle of one of these experiences I’ll have an annoying moment of clarity when I ask myself, “Adam, what the heck are you doing this for?”
Humans are hard-wired to seek religious euphoria
We aren’t usually able to articulate it. But we spend countless energy trying to find it or repeat it.
The first time is mystical… almost magical. For many people, we were going about our daily life and one day an experience got us. (See the list above) Maybe we were sitting around a campfire at a retreat when it happened. Or maybe we were at a Christian concert? Or maybe we were at home, sitting in front of our laptop, writing a blog post, when it happened?
We have a euphoric experience. Something so powerful that we almost can’t explain what it was or what happened that made it so amazing.
It just was.
Some people remember just weeping and they don’t know why. Others remember a tremendous warm feeling overcoming them. Still others talk about an intense peace that washes over them.
The intensity of these experiences defies description. It may have only lasted 5 minutes but those five minutes felt like hours. And we spend weeks on a slow decent back to normal life.
Then, when we come down off of that high moment– we spend the rest of our lives sub-consciously seeking it again.
So we try to go back to the place it happened before.
And we’re a little disappointed when we can’t replicate it.So we try again. And again.
And again. Some find it again while others don’t.
And, in moments of clarity, we are left to wonder: What is it that I’m truly looking for?
Two articles on this experience that speak to the science of it, it literally is a high:
What’s going to be the next cool thing? Of course, I can’t predict the future. But I can see some technologies that are just on the edge of getting to the masses which I think will be game changers in 2010. All are just a price-point change away from radically changing the way we interact with the world.
Here’s what to look for in the coming year:
Location-based mobile everything. Smart phones have taken over the mobile phone world. GPS-enabled smart phones. With the incredible popularity of iPhone 3G3 and the recent emergence of Droid OS phones, I think we’re about to see an explosion in the sophistication and participation of location-based games. Two that are on the market already, Gowalla and Foursquare, have gained traction among early adapters from Twitter and Facebook. While fun, I think in a year we’ll look back at them like we did at Pacman after Nintendo hit the market. Also, once more mobile Twitter clients become geolocation enabled I think we’ll really see some games (and utilities) pop onto phones that are wildly popular.
Augmented reality takes off. This technology is getting increasingly cheaper. And as this comes out of the lab and high-end marketing applications to generally available among web/graphic designers… look out. Here’s a video that gives you an idea of how cool augmented reality is:
Scams are back. Technology has a Wild West feel to it again. And any time you have a wild west feel, you have scammers waiting to cheat you out of money. The interconnectedness that we all love also makes us vulnerable to scammers. As we link more and more of our lives to Facebook and Twitter, we are lured into trusting that those gateways are safe and secure. But they aren’t! Let’s say you connect your Twitter account to your Amazon.com account or Mint.com accounts. Bam, you are a sitting duck. Scammers have proven they can trick you into giving them your Twitter password and from their they can/will gain access to all sorts of personal information. The unhealthy trust we all have that Twitter/Facebook are ensuring that people who access their API will truly adhere to the terms of service has set us all up for scams. This will be big in 2010.
IRL. The first three things on this list point to the need for In Real Life to be a tech trend to watch. Experience is back. Meet-ups, events, and tech free zones are a trend to watch out for in 2010. Of course, those things don’t really provide the intimate relationships our souls crave, but they are legitimate experiences people seeing the world through augmented reality and redefined friendship will seek out in 2010. In the church world I think we’ll see the closing of many online church campuses, satelite-feeds, and other non-IRL “ministry” things as people seek human interaction more than the convenience of church from their laptop or mobile phone.
Interactive storytelling. In 2009, YouTube enabled a feature which allows you to post links to other YouTube videos from within the player. I think we’re just at the beginning of some fun storytelling and “choose your own adventure” types of viral videos. Here’s one that I really like to give you an idea: (enjoy your adventure)
We are all born with a desire for religious experience. God made us this way. Each of us has had experiences in which the only description of our emotions is awe. These are intimate moments between you and God, a person, or a even location or event. While God intended for this awe to be for Him, our humanity doesn’t reserve them to Him exclusively. It’s a human response of deep connectedness. Most often there is a build-up and anticipation to the experience. You want it to happen so bad, it finally does, and the experience overwhelms you because it is better than you’d imagined.
Here are some awe experiences people mention as the highlights of their lives.
– Seeing a bear in the wild.
– Liftoff of the space shuttle.
– Sexual intimacy
– Hitting the winning basket, scoring the winning touchdown, nailing the winning putt.
– Exploring a beautiful coastline in Ireland.
– Worshipping with thousands of believers at a conference.
– Meeting God for the first time at a retreat.
– Starting your own business and earning your first dollar.
Most often, these are intensely personal moments of awe. The experience defies description and is often too intimate to even talk about. Even during the moment your emotions run high.
This is the first edge to the sword. It’s a good edge. The pursuit of this high and the after effects/remembrance of this high produce tremendous energy for people. This religious experience forms a deep bond between that individual and that event, object, or person. It is something they shared that was intimate and powerful.
Industries exist to help people pursue this experience, don’t they? We seek the awe-inspiring moment and wise capitalists provide tours of Ireland and Yellowstone. Religious events build anticipation for these moments knowing that they will draw thousands of seekers. How many clubs, bars, and dance clubs exist for the sole purpose of a common meeting ground for people seeking a sexual experience? On and on.
But that sword has a second, more dangerous edge to it, doesn’t it? Once you have this religious experience you seek to have it again. I mean, if the high of that moment… seeing the bear… crossing the rope bridge to a tiny island… having a killer day with a new business… sinking the putt to win the big tournament… it will never be the same as the first time.
In fact, many industries sustain because they know there will always be people who are seeking the second experience.They are in the exhilaration/disappointment business. They know that a weery businessman will lay down tens of thousands of dollars to go on tours of Ireland again. And then when he doesn’t find what he is looking for he will go to Scotland, Iceland, and the Gallapogos. The sex industry exists because people are seeking a more amazing sexual experience than “that amazing time.” Parents will relentlessly drive their children into sports in hopes that one day their kid will have the amazing experience they did of scoring a touchdown to win the big game. Certainly, many youth groups thrive because teenagers are seeking to repeat an intense religious experience they had at a retreat. Get-rich-quick schemes work because people remember that one time when they made easy money and they want it to happen again.
The truth is this. The secret is this. The learning point is this. Once you have that amazing moment, don’t try to repeat it. It will never be the same the second time. When you take someone back to that spot… it’ll be awesome for them… but a let-down for you. If you can’t handle that let-down, just let that awesome one-time experience live in your memory.
We are all born with a desire for religious experience. God made us this way. Each of us has had experiences in which the only description of our emotions is awe. These are intimate moments between you and God, a person, or a even location or event. While God intended for this awe to be for Him, our humanity doesn’t reserve them to Him exclusively. It’s a human response of deep connectedness. Most often there is a build-up and anticipation to the experience. You want it to happen so bad, it finally does, and the experience overwhelms you because it is better than you’d imagined.
– Hitting the winning basket, scoring the winning touchdown, nailing the winning putt.