Let's overturn these tables

It is clear that sermons are a poor way to teach or to encourage people to be transformed in their faith, despite the fact that pastors and many lay people like them. Discussion and active learning are more effective.

But how to do these in a normal church service?

There are many answers. And a recent service I attended showed one simple way.

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It was on a Sunday morning ….

It was a fairly old congregation and a conservative church service. And a visiting speaker who had developed an approach to non-believers based on story telling.

But because the speaker was an overseas missionary, she was able to do something different than just give a talk, to demonstrate how she approached teaching in a foreign culture.

Tell the story

Rather than read the story from the Bible, she told it in her own words, though keeping close to the text. The story was Jesus and the woman at the well in John 4, which allowed her to stand in one spot as she spoke Jesus’ words, then shift a little to speak the woman’s words.

Even this little movement brought the story that little more alive than would have happened if the passage had been read straight out of the Bible.

Engage people

So far, not much active learning. But then she introduced, one by one, a series of simple questions, and asked us as a congregation to very briefly discuss what we thought with someone else.

The first question was simply: “What do you learn about Jesus in the story?” So simple. the possible answers should surely be obvious. But the First Nations lady I was discussing with thought the notable thing was that Jesus broke cultural protocol.

I knew that Jesus had crossed barriers to talk with this woman, but I found this First Nations perspective helpful, for cultural protocols are important to them. In their traditional lifestyle (now mostly and sadly long gone) in sometimes harsh environments, such protocols can be life and death.

In Jesus’ day, these cultural protocols weren’t life and death, but still pretty important.

A few people were encouraged to speak out their responses to the whole congregation, and the visiting speaker could comment and emphasise whatever she felt was most important. But before this report back process could get bogged down, it was onto other questions.

Other questions followed

2. What do you learn about people in the story?
3. What do you like about the story?
4. Now that we’ve heard this story, what should we DO? (How will it change your life?)
5. Who could you tell this story to?

These questions, too, were quite basic, but they get to the core of what the story can teach us. They don’t get into deep theology or a historical understanding of first century Jewish culture, but the gospel stories probably weren’t remembered and passed down for those reasons. For most people, the questions open up ideas that are most relevant.

But the details of the questions aren’t the most important thing.

What was important is that we were all engaged, actively doing our own learning rather than passively sitting back while someone else told us what they thought was important.

The whole process didn’t take long, no longer than the average sermon and possibly a little less. But we were each able to engage with the story at our own level and from our own perspective.

Pros and cons

As I said at the start, psychologists and educators know that we don’t retain much of what we hear in a sermon. The way our short term memory works doesn’t allow that. To remember and act upon information, our minds need to be active and engaged. We remember more if we discuss things and put what we learn into practice soon after. You can learn why our brains work this way here.

Sermons tick very few (if any) of these boxes. The preacher feels good to have imparted information to a group of listening people, and the congregation can feel like they have received “good teaching”. But studies show that little is retained and even less is acted on.

The questions and discussion, on the other hand, meet a lot of the criteria for “transformational learning” – discussion, learning from peers, repeating what we’re learning, staying awake and alert.

Telling the Bible story rather than just reading it can make it come alive more. (Those who worry that telling the story this way isn’t the word of God could consider that what we have in English is just a translation, and telling the story is more or less just a freer translation.)

This is an easy teaching method to implement, reduces preparation time for busy pastors and leaders, and keeps the teaching relevant to the congregation. If a Minister feels some “deeper” or background teaching is required, it can be added judiciously in the story telling or in the feedback time.

Of course not all congregations will welcome or feel immediately comfortable with this method. But if introduced gradually and sensitively, it can surely find a place in many churches.

You can find more about Bible story-telling in the book Telling the Gospel Through Story: Evangelism That Keeps Hearers Wanting More by Christine Dillon.

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Photo by fauxels.

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