Diving into Teaching

We’re diving into some new teaching adventures – well, sort of new.

The institute classes are continuing, although I haven’t been involved as much as I had hoped. However, I’ve been able to attend a couple of classes since being back, and they’ve been good. We’re learning about preaching and pastoral ministry – mostly the second one right now.

We’re nearing the end of our study of the Gospel of John, which has been amazing. We’re hoping to be done by Resurrection Sunday. So we’ll have a whole month to especially focus on the resurrection, which is pretty cool.

We’ve also decided to go through our doctrinal series again on Sundays, because there are so many new people at the church. There are 26 lessons, covering our doctrinal statement, our doctrinal distinctives and our values.

So I’m looking forward to kicking that off on the 11th!

One thing that is always a challenge to explain is this. Everyone wants to know what the “key” doctrines are, or what you need to “believe” in order to be “saved”. I’m not putting quotes in because I don’t believe in those words, but because these are things which themselves require explaination and definition.

Everybody likes a list, right? We talked about this in our last institute class – a “list” of priorities for the pastor. Except, the Bible doesn’t give us a list, and it’s not always that simple. Yes, we’ve all seen abuses – a pastor who ignores his family and spends all his time at church events – that can’t be right. But does that mean that the family comes “before” church events in every sense? In other words, you never sacrifice family for ministry – the family must always have the “best”?

Ministry simply isn’t that simple.

And neither is doctrine. Obviously churches list “priorities” in doctrinal statements. But does that mean you don’t need to believe the rest of God’s Word? Are parts of it not authoritative in our lives? Surely every word from God’s mouth should be believed. And of course, any church summary can never replace the Bible, which is the ultimate authority. What then is “more important”, and why? Some things are more important because they allow our church to function smoothly. Even some “opinions” or “traditions”. Other times, beliefs are virtually unseen, but they can rot your soul away little by little if they stray from God’s Word.

So we need to be careful with lists.

Another new adventure is coming after the book of John – we’re going to go through Zechariah next. Visions of people flying around in baskets and people in stinky clothes, and all that apocaliptic stuff. A different culture, a different language, a different time in history. I’ve been enjoying studying it already – but it will be a new challenge for us all!

God really does use all these teaching times and more to change our lives and give us direction and encouragement. His Word is power!