Always a Disciple

The last session of a ten-week course ends the way they all do. Somebody has to stack the chairs.

There is a particular flatness to that afternoon. You prepared for ten weeks; now there is nothing to prepare. The class was good, or it was uneven, and either way it is finished, and on Tuesday you will notice that you are not reading anything in particular.

That flatness is worth paying attention to, because it will tell you something true if you let it. And what it tells you depends entirely on what you thought you were doing for ten weeks.

You did not graduate

Go back to the word from chapter one, because the book ends where it began.

The ordinary New Testament name for a follower of Jesus is mathētēs — a learner, someone under instruction, attached to a particular teacher. It comes from the verb to learn. And in Acts it is simply the word for Christians: Luke uses it more than thirty times for ordinary believers, not as a title for an inner circle who advanced past the rest.

Then, in Antioch, something happens that is easy to read past. The disciples are called Christians — and the name comes from outside. It is what the neighbors called them. The church accepted it, and it stuck, and eventually it was worn with honor. But the name the church had for itself, before anyone else supplied one, was learners.

Which is worth sitting with. The one word the church chose for itself describes a person who has not finished.

So the teacher who has taught ten weeks has not moved up a category. He is what he was — a learner, under the one Teacher, who told his disciples not to be called rabbi because they had one Teacher and were all brothers. Teaching does not exempt a man from that. It intensifies it, because he now handles the Word in public and the handling is answerable.

There is a third thing the word carries, and this book has been quiet about it. A disciple is one who follows the Master, and the Master’s road went through a cross. Discipleship is not a path to competence and standing; it is a life shaped like his. For a teacher that mostly looks unspectacular — being corrected, being tired, teaching to a half-empty room, saying the same things for years without visible result. That is not the work going badly. That is the shape.

And notice the practical form all of this takes. The teacher who understands it will keep sitting under preaching he could have given. He will keep going to the rail with everyone else. He will keep being catechized by a Catechism he could recite. Not as an exercise in humility — because he actually needs it, on the same terms as the people who were in his class.

A teacher who has stopped receiving has nothing to hand out but himself.

What the class was for

Which raises the question this chapter has to answer honestly: what was it all for?

Not for the class to know what you concluded about James. That is a good thing and it is not the goal.

The goal is hearers who can increasingly receive Scripture themselves. People who could open Philippians without you, notice the argument, hear the promise, and be fed. People who will be better hearers of Sunday’s sermon because they have spent ten weeks learning what it looks like to read carefully.

Paul says the gifts given to the church — including teaching — are given to equip the saints for the work of ministry, so that the body is built up, until all attain to the unity of the faith and mature manhood, no longer children tossed about by every wind of teaching.

Read the direction of that. The teaching exists to produce maturity in the hearers, not to produce a permanent gap between the one who knows and the ones who receive.

Hebrews puts the failure case bluntly: by this time you ought to be teachers, and instead you need someone to teach you the elementary principles again; you need milk rather than solid food. That is written as a rebuke to hearers — but it is also, indirectly, a measure of teaching. A class that has been taught for years and cannot feed itself has been given something other than what it needed.

So the uncomfortable test of your teaching is not how much they liked it. It is whether they need you less.

A class that has become dependent on a teacher — that cannot read a passage without wondering what he would say about it — has been formed into something. Just not the thing Ephesians 4 describes.

Signs you are building dependence

Four, and none of them looks like a failure while it is happening.

Every question routes through you. People stop saying what do you think it means and start saying what does it mean, and you are the one who tells them.

Nobody disagrees. Not because you are always right, but because the room has learned that disagreement is not part of the arrangement. A class where no one has ever said I don’t think that’s what it says is not a peaceful class. It is a quiet one.

They quote you. In conversations outside the hour, your name appears where the text should. It is flattering. It is a symptom.

And they stop looking things up. Why would they? You have read more than they have, and you are right there.

There is a fifth sign, and it is the one that should worry a teacher most, because it feels like success: the class gets quieter every term. Early on, people interrupt, argue, wander off the point. Later they take notes. That looks like maturity and is frequently the opposite — a room that has learned its job is to receive what the teacher has prepared. The mature class is noisier than the new one, because the people in it have opinions about the text and are willing to be wrong out loud.

The correction for all four is the same and it is uncomfortable: teach the method visibly, admit uncertainty out loud, and let the class check you. Say look it up and tell me if I’ve got it wrong. Then mean it, and thank whoever does.

Chapter four said the class absorbs your habits more than your conclusions. This is the payoff of that: what you are actually forming is a way of reading, and it will outlast every particular lesson you ever give.

Ordinary means, over years

The growth this chapter is describing does not arrive in a course. It arrives the way everything in this book arrives.

Colossians tells the church to let the word of Christ dwell in them richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Notice the picture: not a program, but a word living among a people, over time, with them handing it back and forth to each other.

That is slow and mostly unremarkable and it is the whole method. The same texts, the same Catechism, the same Supper, the same absolution, week after week for years, in a congregation where the pastor preaches and the teachers teach and people who have heard it all before hear it again.

Repetition is not failure of imagination. The Catechism is designed to be learned repeatedly by people who already know it. The liturgy repeats. The church year comes around again. This is not because the church ran out of material. It is because human beings do not learn things once, and because the things being handed over are gifts rather than information, and a gift given last year does not feed you this year.

Which means the teacher’s aspiration should be modest and long. Not a breakthrough. Not a class that changes lives in ten weeks. Faithful repetition of the ordinary things, for years, in one congregation, to people whose names you know.

That is what patient teaching is. It is unglamorous, it is the actual work, and almost nothing else in the Christian life produces more over a lifetime.

And it has one further consequence worth naming, because teachers rarely get told it. You will almost never see the results. The lesson that changes somebody changes them four years later, at a graveside or in a hospital corridor, when a sentence they half-heard on a Sunday morning turns out to be the only thing standing. You will not be there. You will not be told. A teacher who requires visible fruit to keep going has attached himself to something the work does not reliably supply — and will either burn out or start manufacturing results he can see.

When to stop, rest, or step back

A book about lay teaching should say this plainly, because nobody else will.

Sometimes you should stop teaching a class, and it is not a failure. Because a season of your life needs the hours. Because someone else in the congregation should be given the chance — and a teacher who cannot be replaced has become a problem. Because you have taught the same course four times and are running on memory.

Sometimes you should rest. Teach a term, then sit in someone else’s class for a term. This is not a demotion; it is the mathētēs thing being taken seriously. You will teach better afterward, and the congregation will see a teacher receiving, which teaches them something.

And sometimes you should step back for a season because of what is happening in your own life. Grief, exhaustion, a marriage under strain, a sin you are fighting hard. Not because a struggling Christian is disqualified from teaching — if that were the standard nobody would teach. But because there are seasons when a man needs to be a hearer for a while, and knowing that about yourself is wisdom rather than weakness.

How to do it: tell the pastor or whoever carries oversight, early, before the term is planned. Do not disappear, and do not manufacture a reason. I need a term off is a complete sentence, and any congregation that cannot hear it has a problem larger than your class.

And the reverse case, said just as plainly: do not quit because one hour went badly, or because someone disagreed with you in front of the room, or because you got something wrong and had to correct it. Those are not signs to stop. Those are Tuesdays.

Four things, none of them new

A rule of life is usually where a book like this goes wrong. It offers a program, the program becomes a measure, and the teacher now has one more thing to fail at — which is the exact opposite of everything in the preceding chapters.

So here are four, with a constraint: not one of them is something to add. Each is something you already do, done on purpose.

Hear the Word preached, as a hearer. You are in church anyway. The only change is that you stop listening for material. Sit under it as a man who needs it, because you are, and because a teacher who has begun mining sermons for lesson content has stopped receiving them.

Go to the Supper. You are going anyway. Go knowing what it is doing to you rather than what you might say about it in class. This is the difference between a teacher who is being fed and one who is describing food.

Keep the Catechism in your week. Not as study — as prayer. Morning and evening, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the commandments you learned as a child and now teach. Luther meant it to be prayed by people who already knew it, which is the whole point.

And say your sins out loud to someone whose office it is. Not because your class needs a teacher with a clean record. Because a man who is regularly forgiven by name preaches differently from a man who is only ever explaining forgiveness to others.

That is the list, and it is deliberately unimpressive. Nothing on it is a discipline you will build; all four are gifts you will receive, and the only instruction is to keep standing where they are handed out.

One warning about it. If reading that list produced a plan, reread it. It is not a plan. It is a description of an ordinary Christian’s life, and the only reason to write it down in a book for teachers is that teachers are unusually good at drifting into positions where they give without receiving — and unusually slow to notice.

The last thing

So: back to the empty room and the stacked chairs.

Here is what that flatness means, and it is good news rather than an ending.

The class is over and the thing the class was serving is not. Those nineteen people are going to hear the Word preached next Sunday, and the Sunday after, and they will keep coming to the rail, and the Spirit will keep doing through those ordinary means exactly what he did during your ten weeks — which was never something you generated in the first place.

Your class was a help to the church’s hearing. It was never a substitute for it. The lectern and the rail were always the destination. The class was a road.

Which is the last thing to say about your own teaching, and it is the same thing this book has said in every chapter. The confidence was never in you. Not in your preparation, though you should prepare. Not in your competence, though you should be competent. Not in whether the hour went well.

The Word is not weak, and it does not need you to be strong. It needs you to say accurately what it says, and then to sit down and receive it with everyone else.

So go back to the text. There is another passage, and another term, and a room with folding chairs, and people who need to hear it — and you are one of them.

You were asked to teach. Keep learning.