Here I will provide you with three critical tips for improving Bible class. When applied, your personal knowledge will skyrocket.
During the Corona Virus pandemic, many churches moved their services entirely online, at least for a few months. While everything was shut down, we all became accustomed to worshipping from home. As of this writing, many churches have opened back up, at least partially. Where I worship, we have not yet moved back to a full class schedule, instead, we simply have morning worship and Wednesday evening Bible study. There is no class period on Sunday morning and no Sunday evening worship period.
I believe this has been a good thing.
I have argued before that one of the purposes of the dual Sunday Bible class was simply so that people who were working the morning shift at the factory could worship in the evening and people with the evening shift could worship in the morning. It was simply a matter of allowing everyone the chance to worship during the Industrial Revolution when everyone, even children, had jobs every day of the week. But in the modern world, we have turned every small detail into a competition of righteousness.
“I’m better than you because I go to both Sunday morning and evening services”. And here I was thinking that righteousness is determined by behavior, not by how many times per day you can warm a pew.
Most people no longer work 12-hour shifts in factories, so they have the freedom to attend both services if they want. Then if they attend both, they are considered the “cream of the crop”. I always argue that if lifestyle does not match convictions, the number of boxes you check on the worship schedule means nothing.
Aside from all that, with churches opening back up, many are considering adding the Bible study and Sunday evening sessions back to the worship order.
This may sound strange, but I think this is actually a poor idea simply because it is done for the wrong reasons. Why do we want to add classes back to Sunday morning? Because that is the way it has always been done? That is never good logic. The problem is that most bible classes are producing zero results. The audience is learning nothing, and the teachers lecture on “milk of the word” topics.
Let me ask you this if you were working out for one hour per day and seeing no results, would you get excited and blindly add another hour of training to your schedule? Or do you think it might be better to address the hour you are training, improve it and increase the intensity of it so you actually begin to start seeing results? This is what we should do with our bible classes. Before we go from learning nothing for one hour to learning nothing for two hours, let’s correct that first hour and make it a time where we can actually learn something.
Churches are wanting to blindly add more volume of class without first improving the quality of the classes we already have.
This has been my primary problem which much of the modern church in recent months. So many teachers are so poorly prepared or have studied so little that Bible classes end up being a waste of time. If after ten years we are still learning the same basic, rudimentary concepts that we have been learning since grade school, there is a problem.
The class session of a Bible study should be an extremely high-level lecture tailored to the audience’s age. But I continue to find time and time again that while sitting in the adult class, I am embarrassed at what we are learning. The same basic concepts are rehashed over and over again without any form of progression. This is what Paul criticized the church for when he said, “By this time you should be teachers, but you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God and have come to need milk and not solid food” (Hebrew 5:12).
My point today is that before we mindlessly add more volume of lectureships, we should first increase the intensity of the lectures and classes that we do have. A greater volume of time spent studying is not useful if the quality and intensity of the study are low. 30 minutes of intensity will decimate 2 hours of passivity. So here I will give my tips for how to increase the intensity of classes in your church to make for a more efficient lecture period.
3 Tips for Improving Bible Class
I – Objectives
When you open any class syllabus, you will inevitably run into a list of class objectives. This is a bullet point list that lays out what you can expect to learn from the course. In addition, many college lectures have similar objectives that are given in a list before the lecture starts. Textbooks also have objectives at the beginning of each chapter; describing what you can expect to understand after reading the chapter.
Now, why are there objectives everywhere when it comes to learning? Because we must have a goal for which to aim. Without an objective, there is no way to tell if I am actually improving or not. Without an objective, I cannot measure my progress and course correct if I am failing to improve. Objectives are simple tools that allow us to ensure we are actually making progress instead of just walking on a treadmill.
So, the first tip I have is that every Bible class and every lecture should have a list of objectives so you can know what you are expected to learn.
This does not require much more work on the part of the lecturer. In fact, he can simply thumb through his class outline and pick out the most important bits of information that he wants to leave with the audience, and convert them into objectives. There should be small objectives for each individual lecture, and larger objectives for the entire 8-week or 16-week class (or however long the class lasts). It should look something like the following:
After hearing this lecture on the book of Genesis you will be able to do the following:
- State the chapter and verse containing the promise of Christ’s coming.
- Know how many years Noah Preached to the world while building the ark.
- Discuss why Cain’s Sacrifice was inferior to Abel’s.
That is simple enough, right? You could have three objectives per lecture, and 48 objectives per 16-week class. Imagine if you could actually get people in the church to learn that much about the bible. They would be infinitely better off compared to what they are currently learning. The majority of them are not even bothering to read their Bibles on a daily basis. Objectives will give them some way to measure how much they are learning over time.
Objectives also allow for the application of active recall, which is critical when it comes to learning.
We commonly think of learning as something that happens when we put information into our minds, but this is not true. We actually learn most rapidly and effectively when we are pulling information out of our minds by recalling it. Recall is the secret to learning anything at least three times faster than usual. So, audience members can use the objectives given to quiz themselves on their knowledge of the lecture. They can do this daily or throughout the week and will see much greater results than the passive learning they are so used to.
So again, the first tip to improve any Bible lecture and long-term class is the use of objectives.
“Without an objective, the objective will not be reached”
Jocko Willink
II – Testing
I bash the education system for ineffective teaching and learning protocols, poor application of standardized tests, and for generally teaching a massive steaming pile of useless information. However, testing is still a decent measure of the level of understanding that someone has. If I want to know what you know about a subject, I ask you questions about it. That seems to be reasonable. What is a test but a collection of questions?
The utility of questioning is the reason why the second tip is to actually employ testing in your Bible classes.
Now sure, you do not have to force everyone to take a standardized test, there is no need for that. I am all for embarrassing myself and others in order to create the motivation to improve, but there would probably be a significant problem if you start handing out scantrons and multiple-choice exams in the middle of Bible class. This is mostly because we would be forced to realize we know almost nothing about the Bible (myself included) and we will find that to be extremely embarrassing. But hopefully, for many of us, that embarrassment would also be the impetus to change for the better.
Therefore, optional exams or even simple test questions should be provided to people before and after a lecture or long-term class in order to gauge learning. It would be useful to have a pre-test in order to assess current knowledge going into the class and then retake the same test at the end in order to assess improvement in knowledge.
This would also make use of the active recall principle. By forcing ourselves to try to remember, or recall, what we learned, we improve the chance of that information sticking in our long-term memory. Even testing ourselves before we even learn information or trying to remember something we do not already know increases the chance that the information will stick in our minds when we hear it.
So, the test is not a tool to embarrass anyone, even though a little embarrassment about poor levels of Bible knowledge would probably be good for all of us. But rather it is just a tool to improve learning.
Also, we can keep the test questions and study them later. By continuing to recall that information at lengthening intervals, we embed it even more deeply into our long-term memory.
One final tip, the exam questions should be short answer, not multiple choice. If the questions are multiple-choice, you do not really have to learn that much to perform well and trick yourself into thinking you are learning. The knowledge level of any college student is evidence of this.
This is because, on a multiple-choice test, all you need to be able to do is recognize the correct answer. That has a more limited carry over into regular life when comparing it to short-answer tests. If I ask you a question, you have to reach into your mind and pull out the answer. If someone asks you a question about God or the Bible you cannot say, “Wait, give me four choices and I will pick the right one”. You need to have the knowledge already in your mind so you can whip it out at any time. That will guarantee rapid improvement in your Biblical knowledge.
III – Accountability
Most of you already know what I think about accountability. I call it a crutch because most people rely on it far too much. They rely on it to the point where they cannot function without it then fail to develop their own strength.
That being said, most people still do need accountability. And I am not against accountability when it is used in the most efficient way – as a temporary tool to use while we gain personal strength. Once we develop the strength of will, we do not need accountability anymore.
When it comes to our classes, there does need to be some level of accountability. Because all the objectives and tests in the world will not do one drop of good if no one is actually using them or if they do not feel the pressure to improve and perform.
What we need is positive peer pressure to perform.
It is not enough to simply want knowledge; we must also want to avoid the shame and embarrassment of not having any idea of what we are talking about and/or having an embarrassingly small volume of knowledge of God.
There are multiple ways to generate accountability. The first is to simply assign accountability partners. Easy enough. Pair people up and have them quiz and check up on each other to see if they are learning and improving. This is that integrated side of Christianity that no one wants to talk about.
We all love having our little bible studies, social gatherings, and playdates together. But when we actually want to push each other to higher limits, it starts to get awkward. Everyone wants to talk about accountability, but no one wants real accountability because that will involve frequent embarrassment. But it is the only way to really take your knowledge to the next level if you do not have the ability to stand on your own two feet.
Another way to create accountability is through groups.
I would prefer to call them “Accountability Tribes/Units/Platoons/Phalanxes” because those sound cooler than “groups”. To do this you simply put a bunch of people in a group and have them hold one another accountable. It is quite simple. Perhaps they could get together once per month and quiz one another on their knowledge or on the topics they are learning in the lecture periods of class.
This is not a social gathering; it is a sparring session. Everyone in the group should be looking for weaknesses in both his own and his friend’s knowledge. Hold one another’s feet to the fire, that is how you are going to improve. Crush one another. Train how you intend to fight in the world: with focus and ferocity.
Of course, one of the big problems is actually getting people to push one another.
Most of the time we do not like doing this because we have to generate some form of stress or pressure on our friends. That is not exactly enjoyable and not something that the modern religious world would be interested in.
Most people do not want to get together and spar, they want to get together and do the spiritual equivalent of a prenatal spin-class. Most Bible studies and accountability groups lack the intensity to generate any kind of real results. In any endeavor in life, the level of intensity is going to be the determining factor. Maybe you have gone to church for 20 years, but if I handed you a comprehensive questionnaire about the bible, you would not be able to tell me the subject matter of 75% of the books of the Bible.
Gentlemen, we have been spending our entire lives in low-intensity mode, and this needs to change. We need to apply massive levels of intensity both to our individual Bible studies and also to the group learning we engage in on a weekly basis. Without this pressure, there can be no improvement.
So, take these three tips for improving Bible class I have given you today and see if you can work them into your local church.
Get them to apply objectives, testing, and accountability to class sessions and see what it does to the levels of learning. You do not even have to try it for that long. Do an 8-week test run, see what kind of results you get and then make the decision to continue or not.
If you are put in charge of teaching a class, you can always work these tips in. Just give your audience small sheets with objectives and test questions, then ask them to hold each other accountable, at least in the family unit. See if these principles do cause you to learn more about the Bible in 8 weeks than you have in the past 8 months.
