Preparing Yourself to Teach
Earl Palmer
I avoid Sunday morning meanderings by cultivating textual fluency, people fluency, and schedule fluency,
—Earl Palmer
No one wants to blur or block the message of the Lord. Yet, sometimes on Sunday morning we climb into the pulpit or stand behind a lectern and, for any host of reasons, haltingly deliver an ill-prepared message or lead a Bible study that just goes nowhere.
The symptoms of such sermons and classes vary: (a) use of clichés, due to a shallow grasp of the text, (b) fogginess, due to heavy biblical spade work but light cultivation for human consumption, (c) apathy, due to sparse focus on the implications of the text. But whatever the symptoms, the source is often the same: lack of preparedness.
These defects can be corrected. In particular, I avoid Sunday morning meanderings by cultivating three fluencies during the week: textual fluency, people fluency, and schedule fluency. Let me illustrate this by showing how I prepare for preaching, which for me is the main format for my teaching.
Textual Fluency
Textual fluency means knowing the content of a Scripture passage thoroughly enough that it leaves its mark on me. And textual fluency requires a journey from biblical text understood to discipleship implication addressed. In my journey, I take five steps, posing five questions to every preaching passage.
First, there are the technical questions, such as vocabulary study. C. S. Lewis says, "Tell me what the hard words mean" (in their own setting, when they were first said). He maintained that a lexicon profited him more than a thousand commentaries. After all, a text is built with words.
Second comes historical work. I must view the text in its own setting, both the historical within the material itself and that which lies ...
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