When Someone Asks the Question You Cannot Answer

The question comes at 10:41.

You have four minutes left, the lesson has gone well, and a woman near the back asks something you have never considered. The room turns to you. And in the pause — which is much shorter than it feels — you become aware of exactly two options, both bad: say something that sounds like an answer, or admit in front of nineteen people that you do not know.

There is a third option, and it is better than either. But it has to be learned before 10:41, because 10:41 is not when anyone learns things.

Four steps

Clarify. Ask what she means before you answer. Not as a stall — because you probably do not yet know what was asked. Say a little more about what you’re asking costs four seconds and frequently reveals that the question was smaller, or much larger, than it sounded.

Classify. Decide what kind of question it is. This is the step nobody teaches and the one that determines everything after it. Five kinds, below.

Commit. Say what you are going to do about it, out loud, with a time attached. I don’t know. I’ll find out and we’ll start there next week. The commitment is what separates honesty from a shrug.

Close the loop. Do the thing. Next week, early, unprompted.

That last step is where teachers fail, and the failure is worse than never having promised. A class that has been told twice that the teacher will find out and never heard back has learned that the promise is a way of ending conversations.

Five kinds of question

Exegetical — what does this passage mean? This is your work. If you can answer from the text, answer. If you cannot, this is the ordinary I’ll look into it and it should be genuinely easy to say, because nobody expects a teacher to have every verse.

Doctrinal — what does the church teach about this? Sometimes you know and can point to the article. Sometimes you know the general shape and not the precision, and the honest sentence is the Confessions address this; let me get the exact wording rather than paraphrase it badly. And where the question is genuinely disputed, saying which teaching is the congregation’s is not yours to settle — that belongs to the office. I’ll ask Pastor is the right answer, and it is not a weak one.

Practical — what should I do about this in my life? Often you can answer. Often it looks practical and is not. Should I let my daughter be baptized at her fiancé’s church sounds like logistics and is doctrine and probably pastoral care.

Pastoral — this is about a particular person’s situation, conscience, or grief. Chapter six drew the line; this is where you notice you have crossed it.

Safety — someone is in danger, has been harmed, or is harming. Everything else in this chapter is suspended.

The classification is not academic. An exegetical question can wait a week. A safety question cannot wait four minutes.

Saying “I don’t know”

The fear is that it costs credibility. It does the opposite, and it is worth understanding why.

Your class does not believe you know everything. They know you are a member of this congregation with a job and a family who read this passage carefully. What they do not yet know is whether you will pretend. The first time you say I don’t know is the moment they find out — and everything you say afterward becomes more believable, because they have evidence that you distinguish between what you know and what you don’t.

The teacher who never says it teaches his class something corrosive: that this is a subject where confident answers are always available. Then they meet a hard question in their own life, find no confident answer, and conclude the problem is them.

Two ways to say it badly. I don’t know, I’m not a pastor — false modesty that also blames the office for your limits; most such questions are perfectly answerable by a layman. And I don’t know, nobody really knows — which converts your gap into universal fog and is usually not true.

One way to say it well: I don’t know. That’s a real question and I want to give you a real answer, so let me find out and we’ll open with it next week.

Then a composite worth keeping in mind. A teacher three sessions into Genesis was asked where Cain got his wife. He did not know. He said so, said he would find out, and did — and reported back with an answer that was partly here is what the text implies and partly here is what nobody can say for certain. A woman told him afterward that she had wondered that for thirty years and had never asked anyone, because she assumed the question was stupid. It was the most useful four minutes of the term, and it happened because he did not know something.

When you taught it wrong

Chapter eight said a planned correction is a mark of fidelity. Here is the mechanics.

Promptly. Next session, not eventually. A wrong teaching left standing for a month has been learned.

Early in the hour. Not tucked at the end where half the class has stopped listening.

Specifically. Name what you said and what is right. Vague self-deprecation — I probably got some things wrong last week — corrects nothing and manages to look humble while doing it.

Proportionately. Ninety seconds. A misremembered date needs a sentence. A misstatement about how a person is saved needs more, and needs to be said carefully, because someone may have carried it home.

Without theater. No extended apology, no visible wounding. The class should come away thinking he checks his work, not that was uncomfortable for everyone.

And if you learn of it from someone else, thank them out loud and correct it anyway. The teacher who becomes defensive about being corrected has just guaranteed nobody will do it again — and the next error will run for months.

What it sounds like. A composite, ninety seconds into the following session:

“Before we start — last week I told you that James and Paul are answering the same question in different words. That isn’t right, and I want to fix it. They’re answering different questions. Paul is asking what makes a man righteous before God, and his answer is faith apart from works. James is asking what a living faith looks like, and his answer is that it produces works. I collapsed those, and if you went home thinking Paul and James disagreed and we’re papering over it, that’s my fault, not the text’s. Alright — James chapter three.”

Notice the shape. He names what he said. He says what is right. He takes responsibility for the specific damage — if you went home thinking — and then he moves. No preamble about his own limitations, no invitation to reassure him, and no lingering.

Also notice what he did not do: he did not blame the difficulty of the passage, and he did not say some of you may have misunderstood me. He said he got it wrong.

When the hour exceeds the room

Now the part that is not about knowledge.

Sometimes what arrives is not a question but a disclosure. Someone is grieving, or has done something they cannot carry, or is in a marriage that is failing, or is not sure they want to be here next year. Chapter six named four signs; here is what to do about them.

Stop teaching. Whatever remained of the lesson is finished. It was not more important than this.

Do not do it in front of the class. If it surfaces publicly, acknowledge it without exploring it — that’s important and I don’t want to handle it in four minutes; can we talk after? — and protect the person’s privacy at the cost of the hour.

Say the gospel. This is yours. Christ died for that. Your sins are forgiven for his sake. You are baptized. Say it plainly and mean it. Do not withhold it because you are on your way to the pastor’s office; the person in front of you may need to hear it more than anything else that gets said to them this week.

Then route. I want you to tell Pastor. I’ll go with you. Say it as a next step rather than a referral, because “referral” sounds like being handed off.

Do not manage it. Not the follow-up counseling, not the weekly check-in that becomes a private ministry, not the phone calls at eleven at night. That is not caution about liability. It is that you cannot do it, that you were not given it, and that a person who has made you their pastor has been quietly separated from their actual pastor.

And say very little afterward, to anyone. The person did not consent to being discussed. What was said to you was said to you.

Records, follow-up, and privacy

Three practices, and they are shorter than people expect.

Write almost nothing, but write the safety exceptions. For an ordinary pastoral disclosure, keep no notes; a file on a parishioner is not a lay teacher’s to keep, and its existence changes what the conversation was. The exception is a safety matter. If you have called a reporting line or emergency services, write down that same day what you were told, by whom, what you did, when, and whom you notified — plain facts, no speculation, no conclusions about who did what. That record protects the person more than it protects you, and it is the one thing you will not be able to reconstruct later.

Follow up once, then hand it off. Ask how they are, a week later, in one sentence. Then stop. A second and third check-in is how a teacher becomes a substitute pastor without ever deciding to.

And treat the class as owed nothing. If someone was visibly upset and people noticed, the whole answer is: that’s not mine to talk about. Say it warmly and do not elaborate. A congregation learns very quickly whether its teachers hold things, and it learns from one instance.

Safety

One category is different, and this section is short because the actions are short.

If someone is in immediate danger — theirs or another’s — call emergency services first. This is not a reporting question or a pastoral question. It is an emergency, and the sequence is: call, stay, then tell the pastor.

If someone discloses abuse, or that they are being harmed, or that a child is being harmed: you do not need to determine whether the law classifies you as a mandated reporter. That question has an answer, it varies by state and by role, and it is genuinely unclear for volunteer church teachers in many places. It is also not the question you need answered at that moment.

What you need is the number, and the willingness to call it on reasonable suspicion, and the understanding that screening the facts is the agency’s job rather than yours. You are not deciding whether abuse occurred. You are reporting a concern to people whose work is to find out.

Three things not to do. Do not investigate — do not press for details, ask leading questions, or try to establish what happened; that can damage both the person and any later inquiry. Do not promise secrecy, before or after; you cannot keep that promise and should not offer it. And do not wait for permission from anyone in the congregation before making a call you have grounds to make.

Then tell the pastor, and tell him you have called or intend to.

Before you teach — not after — find out three things and write them down: who in this congregation carries oversight of teaching; what the reporting number is where you live; and whether your congregation has a written child-protection policy. Fifteen minutes. Most volunteer teachers have never been told any of the three, and the moment you need them is the moment you cannot look them up.

What this protects

Read straight through, this chapter can sound like a list of things a teacher is not allowed to do. It is the reverse, and the reversal is worth seeing.

A teacher who knows he may say I don’t know is free to take questions. A teacher who has decided in advance how he will correct himself is free to teach confidently, because an error is no longer a catastrophe. A teacher who knows where the boundary is can let a hurting person talk without panicking, because he knows what he will do next.

The alternative is a teacher who is quietly guarded — steering away from hard questions, avoiding the class member who might say something heavy, keeping the hour safe by keeping it thin. That teacher is not protecting anyone. He is just alone.

You are not the last line. There is a pastor, there is a congregation, there are people whose work this is. Knowing that is what lets you do your own work without flinching.

The next faithful step

Three things this week, none of which takes long.

Decide, now, what sentence you will say when you do not know. Say it aloud once so it is available at 10:41.

Write down, on the same page as your lesson notes, who you take a question to and who you take a person to.

And find the emergency and reporting numbers, and put them somewhere you would find them while flustered.

Then go teach, and take questions, and let the room be as large as it turns out to be.