Under the Word

You will meet a number of people in this book. A man folding a chair after class. A woman who asks how you know that. A teacher two years in who has begun enjoying his own reading a little too much. A class that learned something wrong for six weeks before anyone noticed.

None of them is real. Every scene, every classroom moment, and every conversation in these pages is a composite — assembled to show a situation clearly, not drawn from a particular person or congregation. Where a teacher makes a mistake, no one made it. Where a class asks a hard question, no class asked it.

That is deliberate, and there are two reasons for it.

The first is simple: real people in real congregations did not consent to appear in a book, and their difficult moments are not mine to spend.

The second matters more. This book argues that a teacher’s authority is borrowed from the text rather than generated by his own experience — that what makes a claim true in a Bible class is Scripture and the church’s confession of it, not the credentials of the man at the end of the table. A book making that argument should not lean on its author’s stories to carry its weight. So it does not.

Which means you should check it the way this book asks you to check everything. Not against my experience. Against the Word.

L.H.