“Oh, we don’t need a teacher, we need a facilitator”

The quote that makes up the subject of this post is not a verbatim quote. It is rather an amalgam of various similar quotes I’ve heard in church culture throughout the past decade or so.

As a great fan of discourse and dialog (for me, the comments threads on most blogs are often the most interesting parts of them), and as someone who enjoys a good discussion in the GAP on Sunday mornings, I somewhat understand the sentiment in the desire for “facilitators, not teachers”. In addition, I’ve seen facilitation work wonders, at times, in brain-storming and design sessions at work. And, finally, we’ve all been held a captive audience to teachers in the past who probably, um, shouldn’t be teachers.

All that being said . . .

The church needs gifted teachers. If gifted teachers are hard to find, the church must redouble its efforts to find or (preferably) train them. The intrusion in church teaching efforts by facilitat-y “there’s no such thing as a wrong answer” philosophies has been a bad thing.

And that’s all I’m going to say (for now) about that.

By the way, this post was inspired by Jared’s latest missive (and, yes, I’m an unashamed Jared Wilson fanboy. Can you tell?). Sample this:

. . . as a community of believers seeks reform, as we seek the face of God and push, urge, inspire, train each other to exalt Christ and focus on the Gospel, it has become more and more urgent that we not abandon the monologue sermon, but reform the monologue sermon to greater Gospel-centrism, to a greater submission on the part of the preacher (and by extension his community) to the authority of Scripture.

And none of this is to say the community should be passive receptors, containers to be filled with information. None of this is to say we shouldn’t test what we’ve been taught, talk it out, use the community as the context for “field testing” theology, work at iron sharpening iron, hold our teachers accountable, etc. It is only to say that the worship gathering is not the right forum for the discussion.

A bit later, Jared quotes from Mark Driscoll, who recounts the velvet way he dealt with the teaching paradigm conflicts at his church:

We continued to meet on Sunday nights until Christmas, when some of the arty types started complaining that there was a preaching monologue instead of an open dialogue, as would become popular with some emerging pastors a few years later. This forced me to think through my theology of preaching, spiritual authority, and the authority of Scripture. I did an intense study of the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament commands regarding preaching and teaching. In the end, I decided not to back off from a preaching monologue but instead to work hard at becoming a solid long-winded, old school Bible preacher that focused on Jesus. My people needed to hear from God’s Word and not from each other in collective ignorance like some dumb chat room.

“Like some dumb chat room” . . . heh.

Update: Oddly enough, I just looked and the latest post on the GAP website that I linked to above is a Jared Wilson quote. And, yeah, I’m the one who posted it.

People are going to start talking . . .

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