You Were Asked to Teach

The pastor catches you by the coat rack after the late service, coffee in hand, and asks whether you would take the adult class in the fall.

The class meets in the fellowship hall at nine, between services, at the long tables with the folding chairs that never quite face the same direction. Eleven people come most weeks, fourteen at Christmas. They are finishing Acts now. That takes six weeks. After that, he says, the class is yours, and he wonders whether you would consider working through James.

You say you will think about it, which is true, and you think about it all afternoon.

What you think about is not James. What you think about is the room. Harold has been a Lutheran for sixty-one years and can still recite the Fourth Commandment’s meaning without a book. The woman by the window reads more theology in a month than you have read this year, and says almost nothing. Two who come are not members and are not sure what they believe. And in the third row is a widow whose husband died in March, who will be sitting there when the text says something about death, looking at you.

You are not a pastor. You have no degree in this. You have an ordinary job, a family, and about four hours a week that could hold preparation if something else gives. You have read James. You are not sure you have understood it.

Somewhere in the afternoon the thought arrives that has stopped a great many people here: Who am I to stand in front of that room and say what God’s Word means?

Hold onto that question. It is better than the confidence that would replace it. But it is not the last question, and it is not an answer.

The weight is real

James is blunt about it. Not many should become teachers, he writes, because those who teach will be judged more strictly.

Notice first what he does not say. He does not say no one. He does not say only the ordained. He does not tell his readers that teaching is reserved for the credentialed few and that everyone else should keep quiet. He says not many, which means some, and he says it in the first person plural — we will be judged — which puts himself inside the warning rather than above it. This is a teacher warning teachers.

Notice second what the warning is about. The next several verses are about the tongue: how small it is, how much it sets on fire, how no one masters it. James is not worried that lay Christians will be insufficiently impressive. He is worried about what a man says when a room is listening.

That is the weight, and it is worth feeling. When you stand at the end of the table and say what this means is, you are doing something with consequences in people’s actual lives. The widow in the third row will carry home what you say about suffering. If you teach that assurance rests on the sincerity of a man’s own faith, several people will believe you, and some will be awake at two in the morning measuring their sincerity. Words do that. James knows.

So the sobriety is right. What the sobriety should produce, though, is preparation — not paralysis, and not performance.

There is a distinction here worth getting straight at the beginning, because the rest of this book depends on it. Serious preparation is not credentialism. Preparation means you read the text before the class does, more than once, slowly. It means you find out what the hard verse actually says, and check what the Church has confessed about it, and write down the one claim you intend to make. It means you know what you are going to do when someone asks the question you cannot answer. Credentialism means you believe none of that counts until a school certifies it. The first is a duty every teacher owes his class. The second is a way of avoiding the duty by declaring yourself exempt from it.

Two things belong inside that preparation, and neither is impressive. The first is prayer, which is not a pious addition to the work. It is the work; a teacher who has read carefully and prayed carelessly has prepared the smaller half. The second is a book on the table. Put the Confessions where the class can see them — not to quote all hour, but to make visible what is happening in the room. You are teaching under something. A layman with the Catechism open in front of him is in a stronger position than a man with a degree and nothing on the table.

James 3:1 commands the first. It does not license the second.

Two equal and opposite errors

Almost everyone asked to teach fails in one of two directions, and the two look nothing alike.

The first is fearful refusal. It sounds humble. I’m not qualified. I’d get something wrong. Somebody who really knows this should do it. Sometimes that is honesty about a particular class at a particular time, and the right answer is no. But often it is something else wearing humility’s coat.

Underneath it is a feeling most churchgoers will recognize: that reading Scripture is reading someone else’s mail, and the people who really understand it went to seminary. That feeling is common. It is also wrong. These texts were written to be read aloud in ordinary congregations, to fishermen and tentmakers and household servants, and they have not stopped being for you.

Consider the woman asked to lead the Tuesday morning women’s Bible study, who has read Ruth through eleven times and taught her own children out of it, and says no because she has no training. Her congregation loses a teacher it needed. She does not lose her fear; she keeps it, and has now confirmed it. What she has decided is that the Word cannot be taught by someone like her — a claim about the Word, not only about herself, and not true.

Fearful refusal treats teaching as a performance you must be good enough to give. On that standard nobody qualifies, and the people who imagine they do are the ones who should worry.

The second error is self-appointment. It sounds nothing like humility, though it borrows humility’s vocabulary. I have a burden for this. God laid it on my heart. Nobody else is teaching what needs to be taught. Here the felt urgency of a man’s own conviction becomes the authorization. He did not need to be asked, because he was called — and the calling was verified internally, by how strongly he felt it.

This is the more dangerous error, because it is self-sealing. Every objection becomes evidence of opposition, and opposition evidence of faithfulness. A teacher like this does not want a supervising pastor; he wants an audience. He is not serving the eleven at the folding tables. He is producing content, and they happen to be in the room.

Which brings out what the two share. They look opposite — one shrinks, one swells — but both put the same thing at the center: me. My inadequacy, or my zeal. In both, the decisive question is the state of the teacher’s interior life, and the Word being taught, the neighbors being served, and the church doing the asking have moved to the edge of the frame.

Paul cuts across both from one angle. Writing to Rome about the gifts given through the body, he tells no one to think more highly of himself than he ought, but to think with sober judgment. The self-appointed man fails that plainly. Less obviously, the fearful man fails it too: thinking yourself the one Christian whose service God cannot use is not sober judgment. It is the same measurement from the other end.

Peter names what the gift is for: each should use what he received to serve others, and whoever speaks should speak as one delivering the words of God. Not his own words, dressed up. God’s. The work is serious, and its seriousness does not rest on the speaker’s résumé.

Teaching is not content production and it is not self-expression. It is service to particular neighbors with names, who need to hear what God actually says. Harold needs it. The widow needs it. That is the work.

You remain a disciple

There is a word underneath all of this that helps.

The ordinary New Testament word for a follower of Jesus is mathētēs. It does not mean devotee or believer or supporter. It comes from the verb manthanō, to learn, and it means learner — someone under instruction, attached to a particular teacher.

Watch what happens to that word in Acts. Luke uses it more than thirty times for ordinary believers — not as a title for an inner circle who advanced past the rest, but as the plain name for the people in the church. It was what the earliest Christians called themselves before anyone called them Christians.

That is what a Christian is. Not what a Christian starts as and then stops being. When Jesus tells his disciples not to be called rabbi, because they have one Teacher and are all brothers, he is not addressing a category of Christians who never advanced. He is describing the permanent condition of everyone who follows him, including the ones who will spend the rest of their lives teaching others.

So fix this in place before you say yes: teaching does not graduate you out of learning. It intensifies the obligation. The teacher of a class is not a disciple who has finished. He is a disciple who now has to sit under the text more carefully than before, because eleven people will hear what he made of it.

This is why the man who reads James for six weeks in order to teach James will end up knowing James better than he knew it as a hearer — and why that is a benefit and not the point. Preparation is not primarily how you become impressive to the class. It is how you stay under the Word while standing in front of it.

Paul puts the same duty to Timothy as workmanship: be diligent, present yourself to God as one approved, handling the word of truth rightly. The image is a worker with nothing to be ashamed of when the job is inspected. Note who inspects. Not the class, and not the teacher’s own sense of how it went.

It also settles what to do at the edge of your competence, and it settles it early, before the pressure of a live room makes you improvise.

A man teaching Acts is asked, in week three, whether the Christians in chapter 2 who held everything in common mean private property is sin. He does not know. He can feel the class waiting, and how easy it would be to produce a confident-sounding paragraph.

What he says instead is: That’s a real question and I don’t want to guess at it. I need to ask the pastor, and I’ll come back to it next week.

And then he does ask, and he does come back.

Nothing was lost. The class learned something true about how a Christian handles a text he has not mastered — worth more than the paragraph he would have improvised. A teacher who can say I do not know is safer to sit under than one who cannot, and a class can tell the difference sooner than you think.

What to clarify before you say yes

Yes is the right answer more often than fearful refusal admits. But it should be a specific yes, to a specific thing, and most of the trouble lay teachers run into traces back to a vague agreement made in a hallway.

Before you commit, get five things clear.

1. What am I teaching, and to whom? Which book, which curriculum, how many weeks, and who is in the room. An adult class working through James is not the same assignment as a class of new members, and neither is the third-grade Sunday school. Ask what has already been taught, and what the pastor hopes the class comes away with.

2. Who is entrusting this to me? Not do I feel called — who is doing the asking. A pastor, a board, a congregation, a parent. Teaching in the church is something you are given, not something you take. If the honest answer is nobody asked me, that is worth stopping over.

3. Who supervises doctrine, and where do pastoral questions go? Know the answer before you need it. When a question exceeds the class — when it stops being about the text and becomes about a marriage, a deathbed, a guilt that will not lift — you need to already know whose it is and how to hand it over. And when a doctrinal question comes that you cannot settle, you need to already know who settles it. This is the ask the pastor and come back next week arrangement, agreed in advance rather than improvised under pressure.

4. What preparation time is real? Not aspirational. Real. Count the hours you actually have in the weeks you will actually have them, including the week your daughter has surgery and the week of the year-end close at work. A teacher who has promised more than he can prepare will start filling class time with something other than preparation, and that something is usually his own opinions.

5. What are the boundaries? What is this class for, and what is it not for? A Bible class is not a counseling session, not a doctrinal court, and not the place to settle a dispute between two families in the congregation. It is also not yours to redirect: if you were asked to teach James, teaching James is the assignment, and a six-week detour into whatever you have been reading lately is a quiet breach of what was agreed. Knowing the edges in advance is what lets you teach freely inside them.

None of these five is a test you can fail. A pastor who is asked them will not think less of you; he will think you have understood the assignment, and he will be relieved, because the teachers who cause him trouble are almost never the ones who asked too many questions at the start.

Ask them out loud, and get the answers out loud. An arrangement that lives only in two people’s memories of a hallway conversation is not an arrangement.

The next faithful step

Go back to the question from the afternoon: Who am I to stand up in front of that room and say what God’s Word means?

The answer this book gives is not you are more capable than you think. You may not be. The answer is that the confidence a teacher needs was never located in the teacher.

The Word is not weak. It does not become weak in the hands of a plumber, a nurse, an accountant with four hours a week. God gives his Word to be taught, and it does its own work: it kills and makes alive, it accuses and forgives, and it does that whether or not the man at the end of the table is eloquent. Your job is not to make Scripture effective. Your job is to say accurately what it says and get out of its way.

The pastor is not an obstacle either. He is the help that comes with the assignment; a teacher who has a pastor to ask is better placed than a scholar working alone.

And I do not know is permitted. It is permitted every week, for as long as you teach.

What the church needs is more lay teachers, not more reasons to defer.

So the next step is not a leap. It is a conversation: ask the five questions. Then answer.

But there is something you will need before you walk into that room, and this chapter has not given it. You know now that the request is real and that both fear and self-appointment are dead ends. You do not yet know what kind of work this is. When you teach that class, are you doing a smaller version of what the pastor does on Sunday morning? Are you preaching? Are you exercising an office? If not — and you are not — then what are you doing, and what makes it legitimate?

The parallel cases raise it too. The woman leading the Tuesday morning study, the man taking the adult class, the teacher of third graders: same Word, different settings, and the difference between those settings is not accidental. That question has an answer, and it belongs to the church’s order rather than to anyone’s preference.

Priest, teacher, pastor. Those are three different things, and knowing which one you have been asked to be is the whole of the next chapter.