The Goal of Bible Teaching

The book Creative Bible Teaching argues that:

“The student is at the heart of the teaching-learning process. The ultimate objective in teaching the Bible is not Bible knowledge, though that is very important; it is applied Bible knowledge in the student's everyday life.”[1]

I think that I have always agreed with this statement, but have never really known how to accomplish it in the teaching that I have done. It has seemed like an admirable – but somehow unattainable – goal. Maybe I have thought this because I am a part-time teacher, and thus don’t have the time resources available to improve my skills to the kind of level that would make such a goal possible. Or maybe I just thought that I don’t have the innate teaching “chops” for this goal, even if I had the time to improve my skills.

Most of the teaching I have experienced has either been the lecture-format “cognitive dump” style, or the inductive Bible study approach where it feels like everyone is always sharing their ignorance. Neither of these seems to get anywhere close to the goal – either falling into the ditch of good content with no meaningful application to my life, or tumbling into the opposite ditch of sharing personal applications and off-the-cuff ideas that lack any meaningful connection to the content.

So while I would have agreed in principle that, “The task of the creative Bible teacher is to make the biblical material meaningful to the contemporary learner”[2] and aimed for that in my teaching, I have generally thought that perhaps it is just too hard and maybe something that the Holy Spirit is responsible for rather than me.

Creative Bible Teaching not only contends that this goal is attainable, but actually provides the resources and tools to accomplish it. The first part of the book is concerned with the foundational step - how to study the Bible. It also includes valuable discussions of the need for and nature of the Bible, as well as the message and role of the Bible. This section of the book ends with an excellent sample Bible study to show how a well-informed inductive method can work. The remaining sections of the book are on focusing the message, structuring the lesson, teaching the class, and evaluating the results.

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[1] Creative Bible Teaching, 94.

[2] 116.