Actually, the title is a bit misleading.  The truth is, training good teachers takes time.  It doesn’t take much time at all to train a mediocre or crummy teacher.  But if we want capable teachers in our classrooms (or small groups, or whatever you’re calling your thing these days) it’s going to take time.

Matt and Geoff are fairly new to our church.  They haven’t been Christians for a long time.  But I have high hopes for them.  I think they’ll make great teachers one day.  They are faithful (they even come on Wednesday nights), they are sharp, they obviously care about people and they attend Sunday school (in my opinion, that should be an absolute prerequisite for a potential teacher).  I hope to see them standing before a class of their very own one day.  So here’s what I’m doing.

We meet on a regular basis – just the three of us, for an hour or two of training.  I expect this to take a few months at least, maybe a year.  The first thing we discussed was the high calling and profound responsibility of a teacher of God’s Word.  A good place to start when talking with a potential teacher is James 3.1, “Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.”  If you tell teachers up front how important their job is, you’ll get serious teachers who take their job seriously.  If you hand them a quarterly, point them to their classroom and say, “It’s not that big of a deal; it won’t take as much time as you think,” you’ll get sorry teachers.  This principle applies to any volunteer for any job.  If you want good workers, let them know up front how important the job is.

The second thing we discussed was the spiritual life of a teacher.  I’ve never heard a better quote than Robert Murray M’Cheyne, “A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God.”  Spurgeon said, “My spiritual faculties and my inner life are my battle axe and weapons of war.”  One more for good measure, because this is the most important quality of any teacher or preacher – Richard Baxter says in The Reformed Pastor, “Take heed to yourselves, lest you unsay with your lives, what you say with your tongues; and be the greatest hinderers of the success of your own labors.”

We also talk about subjects like how to shepherd a Sunday school class.  If you care about caring for your people (and I know you do, or you wouldn’t be in ministry), the best way to do that is to really equip other people to help you care for your folks.  Every Sunday school teacher should be a shepherd.

We spend the rest of our time learning how to handle God’s Word.  When Paul wrote in Ephesians 4 that pastors should be “equipping the saints for works of service” I doubt if what he had in mind is (to use this example again) handing them a quarterly and showing them where their new class is.  We to spend a lot of time showing them how to handle a text without the help of a quarterly.  Curriculum should be a tool, an aid to their teaching; it should not be the whole of it.  They need to know the difference between a parable and poetry, prophecy and history, and so on.

Well, I wish I had more space to go on, but you get the point.  A last word – the best way to equip teachers is to model good exposition from the pulpit.  If we expect our teachers to have a fruitful teaching ministry, moving our people through God’s Word, we cannot give them sermons that are cobbled together proof texts with a few stories serving as the glue to the sermon.  If you’ll responsibly and faithfully preach the text of the Word of God, chances are you’ll have teachers who will to.

Biographical Information: Jeff Blair is a guy from Oklahoma.