No pastor can have a deep close personal relationship with everyone in the congregation. No pastor can have deep discussions about truth with each of your students weekly, especially one on one and face to face. Conversely, you as the teacher can have those discussions. As a result, teachers often have more and deeper influence on their students than the pastor simply by being the one who is close and accessible weekly. Your student is more likely to ask you, the teacher, not the pastor, to pray about a situation at school or work. People will open up their lives in the small circle you influence in a way they will not to the pastor and cannot before the church as a whole. p. 10
To help further the work of training Native Americans to reach other Native Americans John has written a book to help teachers in local churches. It is not a how to teach manual because approaches to teaching will vary from culture to culture. It is rather about what it means to exercise the gift of being a TEACHER in a local church. The book is not heavy academic work but is designed to help the average worker in a local church. The chapters are short, the words are small, and there are discussion questions at the end of each chapter. While John wrote the book to help his students he believes that many of their supporters would profit from its content. The book is currently on Amazon for $15 but he would like his supporters to have them at the lower cost of $10 including shipping. Click here to purchase a book.
Teaching as a Ministry in the Church | 1
You Teach What You Are | 8
A Teacher Cares about Students | 16
Intentionality in Teaching Techniques | 23
Know the Material | 31
There are some things you just need to know! | 40
Teach Principles | 46
Teaching that Truly Educates your Students | 53
Remember that You are Teaching How to Teach | 61
Preparing the Lesson | 69
Four Concluding Issues | 76
In the same way you are the product of years in an educational system. Someone taught you about history, social studies, and government. Even if you did not pay much attention at the time you remember the approaches your teachers took. […] The point is that just like the disciples, […] you know more about teaching than you realize.
Since you already know a great deal about teaching you must make a thoughtful and prayerful application of this knowledge to the classes that you teach. Reading books on teaching techniques is not wrong; but, it will likely only remind you of things you already know on some level. You must decide before God what techniques will work best to teach a given lesson to your class. You must decide how to present the material so that the class is most likely to understand the material and apply it to their lives. This means that as a teacher you need to both pray and think a great deal not only about what a passage means but how to teach the material. P.26