But you did not arrive empty. You came from somewhere — a Baptist youth group, a non-denominational church that met in a school gym, a Catholic parish, a Lutheran congregation that had quietly stopped teaching the Catechism, or a childhood of Sunday school flannelgraphs whose theology nobody ever named out loud. Whatever you were given there came with you, and some of it is worth keeping, and some of it will quietly work against the very thing you are now trying to teach.

That is not an accusation. It is the ordinary situation of nearly every volunteer teacher in an American Lutheran congregation, and it is the situation this guide was written for.

Most of the errors in this book are not held by bad teachers. They are held by earnest ones, who learned them from people who loved them, in churches that meant well. That matters for how you use what follows. The purpose of this guide is not to catch anyone. It is to give a teacher a way to recognize a familiar sentence, understand what it is actually teaching, and know what to put in its place — starting with the sentences he has said himself.

Read your own entries first. Almost everyone has one.

What each entry does

Every entry has the same seven parts, and they are meant to be used in that order.

What you may hear — the error in a real teacher’s mouth, in the words it actually shows up in. If you don’t recognize it here, the entry probably isn’t your problem.

Why it matters — what the sentence is teaching underneath, and what it costs the person who believes it. Usually the cost is assurance.

What to do instead — the practical move, numbered, in the moment.

One line you can actually use — a single sentence you could say out loud on Sunday without preparing.

If the student asks — the same error arriving from the other direction, as a question rather than a claim. This is the form you will meet most often, and it is often the more urgent one.

The confessional citation — the ground you are standing on, and where to find it.

What not to do — the overcorrection. This section exists because most of these errors have an opposite, and a teacher who avoids one by falling into the other has not helped anyone.

What this guide cites, and why

This guide was written from within the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations, and it cites under the AFLC’s standard. That standard is defined by what an AFLC congregation subscribes to in its constitution: the three ecumenical creeds, Luther’s Small Catechism, and the Unaltered Augsburg Confession, together with the AFLC’s Fundamental Principles and Rules for Work.

Notice what is on that list and what is not. There is no unqualified subscription to the whole Book of Concord.

So the entries cite the creeds, the Augustana, and the Small Catechism as binding. The Apology, the Formula of Concord, the Large Catechism, the Smalcald Articles, and the Treatise appear where they are useful, always marked supplementary, and never as though they settle a question. They are frequently richer and more detailed than the binding texts. They are still not this standard, and this guide will not quietly upgrade them.

If your congregation subscribes more broadly — many Lutheran congregations subscribe to the entire Book of Concord without qualification — then the texts marked supplementary here are binding for you, and you should use them freely. Nothing in this guide is weakened by that. The marking exists so that a reader always knows which ground he is standing on, not to fence anyone off from the Confessions.

Two practical notes. Quotations are from the Kolb-Wengert edition, and the entries paraphrase with locators rather than quote — the translation is under copyright even though the confessional texts themselves are not, and paraphrase keeps a free congregational resource free of permissions questions. Scripture is the NET, marked (NET), for the same reason.

One thing you may find surprising as you read: the binding texts are usually enough. Several entries turn on a single article — Augsburg XVII rejects the millennial scheme by name, Augsburg II settles the age of accountability, the Small Catechism’s daily answers re-dedication in one word. You will rarely need to reach past the Catechism you already own.

Where to take it

Every entry ends up sending a teacher somewhere. Two rules govern that, and they hold across all eighteen.

Teaching problems go to whoever carries oversight of teaching in your congregation. In some congregations that is the pastor alone. In others he shares it with a board — in the congregation this guide was written from, the deacons carry Sunday school oversight as an extension of the pastoral office, so a teaching matter may go to the pastor or to the deacon board.

Find out which it is where you are, and find out now. This is not a technicality. Pastors take sabbaticals and congregations go through vacancies, and a guide whose only route runs through a pastor who is not currently in the building would fail at exactly the moment it was needed.

Confession and absolution do not travel with that oversight. They belong to the office of the ministry. Where an entry sends someone to confess a sin, it sends them to the pastor, and the deacon board is not a substitute. You may — and should — say the gospel to anyone: Christ died for that, and your sins are forgiven for his sake. That is yours by baptism, and no one needs a call to say it. What you may not do is receive a confession and absolve as one holding the office.

A caution about the room. Nearly every entry says some version of not in front of the class. Correcting a fellow teacher publicly, or correcting a child publicly, produces a memory of the conflict and no memory of the doctrine. Let the hour end.

One word about reach. Where this guide describes a congregation’s actual practice, it is describing one congregation’s — the author’s. AFLC polity says free congregations have no right to demand that others submit to their judgment — and a congregation that acknowledges no ecclesiastical authority above itself cannot coherently claim authority over another. This guide will not do in print what that freedom forbids. Doctrine is another matter: where an entry cites the creeds, the Augustana, or the Catechism, it is not offering a local opinion. It is repeating what the church has confessed, and you may lean on it.

A note on the examples

The teachers quoted in these entries are not real. Every scenario, every sentence attributed to a teacher, and every student question is a composite — written to make a situation recognizable, not reported from a particular classroom.

That is deliberate. Correcting a fellow teacher is delicate work, and a guide that drew its examples from real congregations would be doing in print the thing it tells you not to do in the hallway. Nobody here is being described.

It also means you cannot read these entries as being about anyone in particular — including, if you are wondering, about you. If you recognize yourself in one, that is because the errors are common, which is the entire reason the guide exists.

What is not here

The office of the ministry. This guide does not carry an entry on the priesthood of all believers, the pastoral office, or what distinguishes a lay teacher from a pastor. That is not an oversight and it is not because the question is unimportant — it is the most important question a lay teacher faces, and it needs a chapter rather than an entry. It is treated at length in Under the Word, and if that question is what brought you here, go there instead.

Anything requiring a diagnosis. Several entries touch grief, fear, and long private struggle. The guide tells you where the doctrinal line is; it does not equip you to counsel anyone, and it repeatedly tells you not to try.

A verdict on other churches. Almost every error here is the settled teaching of some congregation nearby, taught sincerely by people who read their Bibles. Correct the doctrine. Leave the grandmother out of it.

One last thing

If you read this guide and come away mainly with a list of things other people get wrong, it has done you harm rather than good.

The teacher this book is for is the one who reads an entry, recognizes his own sentence in it, and changes what he says next Sunday. That teacher is not a liability to his congregation. He is the most valuable person in the building — someone willing to be taught while he teaches, which is the only kind of teacher the church has ever safely had.

Soli Deo Gloria

By Larry Herzog Jr. · Free for congregational use · larryherzogjr.com · Ordinary Means

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