Variety is the Spice of Life: Creative Ways to Communicate Content

What is the worst teaching method?  It’s the method you always use.  Most of us fall back on one style of teaching week after week.  If you want to keep your members interested and engaged, you need variety.  Try something new (to you) to communicate biblical content. 

As you teach, your goal is not to tell your class everything you know.  Your goal is to lead members to interact with the Scripture and discover for themselves what the Lord is saying.  Biblical truths that member discover for themselves will have more lasting impact on their lives. 

Here are some ideas for communicating biblical content.

• Ask questions about biblical content.  Ask questions that members can easily answer from the text such as “What three things did Jesus say to the religious leaders.”  This helps members interact directly with the text.  Content questions are a starting point; you will need other types of questions to help members apply biblical truth.
• Develop others.  Enlist someone ahead of time to give a brief report about the text such as historical setting, a key idea, or a difficult interpretative issue.
• Use various translations.  If your class is like most, members come with a variety of Bible translations.  One way to shed light on the meaning of the biblical passage is to allow members to read from the various translations.
• Use smaller groups.  Unless your class has three persons or less, you can use smaller groupings of the class to allow members to interact more directly with the Bible.  Assign each group a portion of the Scripture with a list of appropriate questions; then let them report back to the whole class. 

Biblical narratives (stories) create more possibilities for creative teaching.

• As you use smaller groups, have the group tell the story to the rest of the class and answer questions about the story.
• Tell the story in your own words, rather than reading it.
• Use dramatic reading.  Assign parts and have them members the Scripture passage as a drama.

Let me encourage you to try something new.  Too often I’ve heard, “My class would never do that.” However, when they tried a new teaching method, they were pleasantly surprised by how it was received.  Your class may be tired of the same old thing.  What is one new idea you could use this week as you communicate the truth of God’s word? 

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Bob Wood is the Church Growth Ministries Team Leader, Baptist State Convention of Michigan.  His desire is for churches to be more intentional about fulfilling the Great Commission.