Stretching Minds II
How can we disciple the minds of our churches? Consider everything a teaching opportunity.
What are you already doing, how are you already communicating? Those things already teach people, so be deliberate about it.
The most obvious example to me would be the ways that you communicate information. Perhaps you send a weekly or monthly email that acts a bit like an old-fangled notice sheet. If people engage with it and open it, this is an opportunity to teach them.
This happens in three ways:
Firstly, how you talk about what you talk about. All of your communication is teaching something. This way of thinking can get a bit overwhelming for the communicator, so you do need to choose to stop at some point, but that one sentence where you describe what something is can work as an opportunity to teach them.
Secondly, what you do and don’t include teaches subliminally. What you talk about is what is important to us as a church. Would you be happy with that if that’s what people actually assumed? If not, change it.
Thirdly—and this is really the point I wanted to make in this blog post—you could actually use a paragraph in that email to teach something. You probably can’t stretch much beyond two paragraphs if it’s an email people are opening for information; but I say that and I look at the way we’re now happy to read long essays in our inboxes due to the advent of Substack. Most of your congregation probably isn’t reading involved cultural criticism in their inbox, but it is a setting for reading.
What you can achieve in this paragraph or two is probably quite modest, but it’s not nothing. Whenever you think it would be good to teach the church on something, you don’t have to schedule a preaching series. You can teach in a wide variety of ways, and you may as well start with what you already have. Whatever people already engage with, consider teaching through it, or just opening the Bible at it.
Patrick Miller has written on how to revamp your church newsletter and he suggests being focused about this—interestingly assuming you’re already teaching in that space, which I’ve never seen—he gives the example of a series they produced in their newsletter on how to pray, with content from an array of members. It would be work to produce, of course it would, and he is in an American megachurch, but we could still mirror something useful from this.
How else are you communicating? I’m not suggesting every church should start doing slices of truth on TikTok, though if you truly understand the platform and have the skills and have thought through how to do it in a way that won’t be corroded by the moral acid of the algorithm, then please do it. I’m not the person to tell you how to do that.
Inevitably you have something in the social internet, most likely Facebook and Instagram. Those platforms are not the same thing, don’t copy your content from one to the other, but consider if there’s a way to use what you do in those spaces to teach your people. It’s possible here that there isn’t something you can do beyond considering your language, but for some churches there will be.
The real question is, beyond a Sunday what are your teaching opportunities? I think most of us assume that’s what we’ve got as a church, but that’s not true. If your mind jumps next to whatever midweek group structure you use, that can be a very difficult way to teach as you’re asking your leaders to deliver it. That may not be their skillset, and I don’t think making every group leader have to be an elder in essence is the way to go. Though if that’s your model, teach! There will still be things you can do that are lighter touch. Go beyond that though, what else do you do? Can it be used to teach?
We probably all assume that the church football match is not a good location for teaching. You might be right. But you probably pray, right? And you could read the Bible perhaps, even if you don’t discuss it. That might not be ‘teaching’ but actively hearing the Bible read will enliven the mind.
Essentially, stop being limited by only ‘having’ Sundays. Don’t immediately schedule something else, first consider what else you already have. Could you use that as a discipleship opportunity in one form or another? Is it another chance to teach your people or have them engage with the Bible?
Feel free to fail. If it doesn’t work, that’s fine. Try some things. Bring Jesus into everything because everything is about him when we learn to see it properly. Bring Jesus into everywhere because everywhere belongs to him.
Photo by Krsto Jevtic on Unsplash
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