Kingdom Focused Teaching for Discipleship

In todays Church Talk, listen to the conversation with Prem and Shalina on the importance of teaching like Christ did. We get to understand that the purpose of teaching is discipleship and transformation of the hearer.

Transcript:

Pastor Priji: Greetings in Jesus name. Welcome to Church talk Podcast.
This morning, I am delighted to have a couple here with me. They have been with me in the business of teaching people for a long time. They are themselves teachers who train other teachers. I welcome Prem and Shalina. Thank you for joining us here on this morning’s podcast. We would love to get to know both of you in the ministry, in training people up, with the DAI . We would love for our listeners to understand a little bit of your background. Please help introduce yourself in brief.

Prem: I have been with DAI , an organization based in USA. We have centers in different parts of the world. Our work is primarily in training and serving leadership. I have been with DAI for 3 years. Prior to that, I also pastored a Church called Ashraya in Chennai for 7 and half years. Shalina, my wife, she has been teaching as well for a very long time.

Shalina: Like Prem mentioned, I was teaching in the Church for several years and we also ran a service which was aimed at reaching out to people who don’t know Christ. I was involved in teaching, training and mentoring other people who wanted to teach in a public group setting and also in a private group setting alternatively. That’s my background and experience.

Pastor Priji: Teaching is such an essential part of what we do in the Church. Jesus, when He asked us to go disciple people, He also asked us to teach them everything that He taught His disciples. So it becomes very essential for teachers in the church to understand how, what, when to teach. Most of our listeners are leaders or Pastors’ planting young churches. So what would be your advice to them on how to present content and prepare themselves in order to make sure that teaching is effective and is really communicated well?

Shalina: Let me share about a big shift in my perspective. I was always told when I was in the church community that my gift is teaching. For years, I believed that if I delivered a message and I heard from God well, my job was done especially when we take on teaching as a calling or ministry, It’s like a sense of fulfillment.
But I realized that just delivering a message well as God wants you to, is not really the goal. If we are kingdom focused, the purpose of teaching is always discipleship and transformation of the hearer. When transformation of the listener is the goal, then it changes the entire way you prepare. From being a very self centered exercise, it becomes an other centered goal. So unless it is meeting that goal, your teaching is ineffective.

Prem: What I would want to add to that when we communicate to adults in Church and when we speak truth of God to them, intention behind it is transformation. If we look at the great commission, it says not only to teach, but to teach to obey. We want lives to change. The key aspect what we have learnt through adult education is that quite early in your message, you need to impart to the people that there is a need in their life for what is being taught and that they should want the training.

Shalina: To paraphrase what Prem is saying, teaching should not be exercise in answering questions that nobody has asked. So what we do is we give a solution to a problem that nobody has brought to question.. so there has to be a need first.
sometimes, a person is already ready to learn. When we are in crisis, that’s when we learn but we don’t always need to be in a crisis situation for us to start learning. In teaching, you create the environment and desire to learn.
Even if we give an evangelistic kind of message, we give straight in to the solution. But instead, we try to get people to ask those questions and we guide them into a journey of discovering the answers themselves rather than throwing the answers out to them. Proverbs 20: 5 says, “The purposes of a person’s heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out.”
That encapsulates the role of a teacher. There is indeed a role of uni-directional teaching or preaching, but 99% of teaching is according to the verse. If transformation is the goal then generally what you discover is what you remember, retain and learn.

Pastor Priji: I think it’s a journey you have with the person and engaging with them…rather than giving rough truths and walking away. So teaching requires you to be involved in their life, and to understand where they are in life because Apostle Paul says, “I became all things to all men. To the civilized, I became like one…to the barbarian, I became like a barbarian…” and so on. So to understand the context of where your participants are at and to give them help is very important.
How can some of our leaders shift from ‘me focused’ teaching to ‘participant focused’ teaching? How can teachers understand the audience better to communicate effectively?

Prem: One of the questions we ask in our teaching course is how did you learn driving or cooking? Those are practical skills. Usually the answers given indicate their learning style too. Some people prefer reading, some prefer activity, some prefer audio or video and so on…People themselves change behaviors. When teaching adults, we have to learn to incorporate different learning behaviors. 80% learning retention happens when is a person is teaching someone. Data shows that when you are speaking from the stage with people seated on the floor, less than 10% is retained. So these are very important considerations to look at when you are training or teaching. Look at your people, the total size of people training …we need to break them into smaller groups? Even when you are on stage, you give them something to discuss immediately by breaking them out into groups. Even on zoom, you can break them out into different online rooms. When a person shares or what they voice out is what they retain. The retention curve drops considerably when you learn something but didn’t voice it out. When you voice something that you learnt, others who contributed to the discussion, their learning also gets reinforced. Basically, adult learning is an entire mind shift.

Shalina: Yes! In fact, one of the questions we ask is how did you become good at something like cooking. Rarely the answer will be by reading recipes or even by hearing the recipe. It’s usually by cooking ourselves. by receiving feedback, and by positive affirmation by people that we learn cooking. So now I can teach to cook because I know I am good at it. Whenever we think of teaching, we think of speaking and that becomes the horizon. But that’s not how we became good at anything else in life whether it is driving or cooking. Why do we think following Christ will be that way?

Prem : If you look at the history of lectures, it was at a time when book were difficult to print, so expert’s read out to them and there were people who would take some notes. Even when it came to university system, textbooks were expensive. So it was lectured, and students took notes. But now we live in a world where information is essentially free. Anything you want to learn there are various ready-made sources available and those who have a desire for it. For eg: like inverted classroom where they do their learning outside and they meet to discuss on how to apply what they learnt. And people come to do assignments and homework together. Learning is already done through the lectures, audio, video, any source in their free time.
Some of these things can also be incorporated into smaller Church groups and is beneficial. Especially in discipleship training, our intention is to cause people to obey because that is what Lord called us for. People require fairly substantial changes in their lifestyle and worldview which are both difficult to change.

Pastor Priji: In each church, to bring a shift in culture or to change someone from a listener to a participant, we have noticed in our small group discussion, 2 or 3 people are actively involved in talking, sharing, discussing, participating in what we are trying to learn, but there will be others who will be silent spectators who are just receiving but not actively participating. How can we encourage our churches to go beyond just listening?

Prem : One thing which we have observed is if you bring in training before a specific activity, let’s say you are going to go out to the beach for evangelism, you can say we are going to have training for evangelism. So people come in fully expecting and to be prepared for something uncomfortable to them or something outside the comfort zone. So if it’s possible to incorporate that kind of structure, so people are more effective in any activity. For eg: blessing your neighborhood, helping people with what they need, or if you are going out to lay hands on your people in Church healing them, so you are the one who is going out to the people which is what Christ did, He called them, trained them and sent them out. So ‘sending them out’ component has to be first mentioned with the specific date and time. So they are aware they need to train for a purpose, therefore, both the need and the want are vital for learning.

Shalina: Having a small group doesn’t necessarily address to the problem. The fundamental issue is that there are differences between the teacher and the taught. Most people see themselves as the taught. This paradigm can be seen in a smaller group also. For eg: the Discovery Bible Study model, where we split participants in smaller groups and give them a portion of the Bible to discuss with certain broad questions where the answer doesn’t not lie in one person. This model takes away this divide by allowing a group to together explore the Bible.
I have noticed this between a discussion between a leader and a few participants, half of the attention is on the leader always to see if the answer is right! This is the dynamic we need to break. Only then, Christ’s vision of each of us becoming fishers of Men will not come to pass. I am presuming that the people who are meeting in these small groups, each has a desire to do the things of God. But if there is no desire, then there is nothing we can do to create it. In fact, when we were pastoring, there were certain Sundays where we would do the Discovery Bible model in the Church, but there was a big resistance from certain groups within the congregation who said we come to Church for a message! So we need to recognize that since we are product of that kind of learning, there will be internal resistance. We come wanting to be inspired and fed but we don’t want to dig in to get the meat ourselves.
And the goal of teaching is to enable that. I believe if your calling is to be a teacher, we should make ourselves redundant. It is not the goal for others to depend on your teaching but ultimately you have to direct them so that they dig in to the meat themselves. Then they teach somebody else to do likewise.

Pastor Priji: Wow! That’s amazing

Prem: When we used to run training for youngsters of the slums, we used to get a variety of people…some christians, some not..most non christians. We would take a group of people with us and before the program begins we will decide a week prior of who is doing what, each role is divided between our group. For eg: A major problem among the younger generation is that they quit when their boss says something rude or if disciplined. During younger people training, I will not be a primary person speaking instead I will assign it to a younger team. What I would push them for is to guide them in such a way that what they are being taught is aligned with the scripture. Also we would work on ways on how to teach this to somebody who doesn’t see Bible as their foundation. We found that this kind of teaching accelerated growth in people pretty fast in terms of Bible knowledge, ability to apply scripture, confidence level.

Pastor Priji: What are some of the content available for our listeners that they could sign up for?

Prem: In teaching and training, we have several courses free as well as paid. We take in batches according to the number of people. If the organization wants us to train their people, then we set time apart for training. We also have an online institute where a whole range of courses are available for learning anytime you want. Most people are looking for coaches and mentors rather than teachers and trainers. You can connect with us and we will guide you.

Pastor Priji: We will leave your details here so that our listeners can connect with you. Thank you for being on this podcast this morning. We are really blessed.
Could you take a moment to pray for our listeners and bless them?

Prem: Heavenly father, we thank you because you have a plan and purpose for each of us in the commission that you have given us, to be the salt and the light, to be effective in the places that you have put us in and to sow into the lives of people, to have them become fishers of men, to expand the kingdom in the ways that only God wants. We pray for every single person who is listening as they look to become better teachers, trainers, coaches and mentors. I pray that you will walk with us and teach us your ways. In Jesus name. Amen!

Pastor Priji: Thank you friends for tuning to the church talk podcast. We are glad you could learn something from this conversation. Make sure to engage with this podcast. Write back to us with your questions and concerns, doubts or any follow up needed. Share this podcast with someone else in your church, anchor group, etc. Have a blessed week ahead. We will catch up with you next month for the next episode of church talk.

Link for DAI: https://daintl.org/