Like with all aspects of youth ministry, when it comes to teaching, context is everything. To teach effectively, the teacher must know her students, or more aptly put, her co-learners. But she must also know in what context she joins her students in learning. Before I decide what to teach, I do my best to understand whom I am teaching.
Context, in the crudest sense, is simply the situation one finds oneself in. There are dimensions to context that play together to help a teacher or facilitator know not only what to teach but also in what ways to teach. Teachers must wrestle with the following three dimensions of context.
First, there is the immediate situation. The immediate situation reveals matters like setting (Is this large-group or small-group learning?) and people involved (What age level/learning style am I teaching? What is the time frame that I have to teach? What is the setup of the room?).
Second, there is the intermediate situation. The intermediate situation provides the teacher with information about the normal environment in which the students learn on an ongoing basis. (Is this the students’ only subject-related formal learning situation? Or is what I am about to teach a supplement to their learning? Are other factors involved in the students’ learning that should shape what I teach? Is there a certain scope and sequence to the students’ learning?)
Third, there is the principal situation. The principal situation is the foremost dimension of context by which both the immediate and intermediate situations are influenced. (What is the common framework in which the students I will be teaching are learning? What is my best understanding of the students’ life perspective coming into this classroom? Are the students predisposed to think any particular way? What are the social and relational dynamics of the students?)
NOTE: You may only need to use the above outline once. For example, I have a small group of senior guys whom I teach each week. The situation outline above was helpful to determine what I would teach each week. I merely go back to it as a reminder since I teach the same twelve guys each week. However, one night I was invited teach at a friend’s church. I taught some high school seniors on the Eucharist. Before I decided to teach on the Eucharist, I used the situational outline above to help me determine that particular topic.
So, to get to the question, I use the simple framework above. I ask questions about the situations (all three dimensions) that help me get the best understanding of what I should teach. I do not start with a topic or theme or subject and then decide how I am going to disseminate information. Rather, I do my best to understand the persons involved in the learning in order that whatever I teach has more of a long-term formational impression. At least, that is my hope.
The reason I start with the context is that, in my opinion, it doesn’t matter what I teach if I can’t take a subject and teach it in a way that my students learn. Then it isn’t teaching; it is merely talking. Talking is about the teacher. Teaching is about the learner.
After determining the unique context I will teach within, I dig even deeper into the immediate situation and ask questions such as the ones below in order to determine what I will teach:
- What would interest the learners in this situation? How can I hold their attention?
- What do I think is important to teach that might enhance or even change the predisposed thinking of the students?
- What expertise do I have that I can most fully inspire others to learn from?
- What do I feel like the students are missing that I think would help shape their lives?
- What are they already learning about that I might be able to go further and deeper with? (For example, is the senior pastor in a series that I could base my teaching times on?
- What can I teach from my own experience that will help them into their future?
How do you determine what you will teach?
Deciding what to teach in youth ministry can be incredibly fun, exciting, and enjoyable. It can also be painful, draining, and difficult. Here’s hoping that my perspective on this topic (and the other two takes on it) will keep you in the first category. In short, I search for inspiration in a myriad of places. Here are a few.
Pray for God to reveal the needs of your students. Sermon and series preparation has to start with prayer. My prayer is that God will show me clearly some of the topics I need to cover in the course of the year. Sometimes it will show up in your counseling, sometimes in a conversation, sometimes in the quietness of your own time with Jesus. Either way, be listening for direction in the normal routines of ministry.
Ask them! One time not too long ago, we created a card that listed fifteen topics we could teach on in the coming year. We called it Choose Your Own Adventure and then tackled the most popular topics students wanted to learn/be challenged about.
Create a focus group and run your ideas by them. Every Tuesday during the school year at 4pm, you’ll find me in my office surrounded by a select group of high school student leaders who are my focus group. I run everything by them: rough drafts of sermons, object lessons, ideas, icebreakers, series ideas. They give invaluable insight into what they and their fellow students need to hear and how the message can best be shaped to meet them where they are living. And yes, they have veto power. It kills me when they use it, but I know it is for the greater good.
Be inspired by others. I love nothing more than devouring sermon and series ideas from other people! Youth pastors are creative, so if your idea well is running dry, find some people out there who are killing it. Stolen ideas I’ve had recently: a series on Facebook and a question/answer message where students text in questions to be answered live in the service.
Hit the majors. There are certain topics we are going to cover every year in our youth group. The majors for us would be things like friendship and purity. We make sure that specific perennial topics are being covered, though we might change the number of weeks or the voice speaking so it always feels fresh.
Try to cover a whole book of the Bible sometime in the year. This summer we did a study on a specific book of the Bible (Philippians), and last summer we took five weeks and went chapter by chapter through James. Both ended up being unique and gave us clear teaching topics for over a month. I love the dream that when someone graduates from our ministry, they have a survey of much of the Bible and a command of some specific parts of it.
Take a risk. A few years ago, a student came to me with the idea that we do completely student-run weekends divided up by the five major high schools in our area. I loved the idea, but we had never done anything like it before. A new, risky series called You Own the Weekend was born. It was huge. Students owned the services like never before, they were eager to bring their friends, and it gave me a much-needed break from teaching. Take a risk and try something out of the box; you might stumble onto something incredible.
Follow the adult service’s lead. Once a year or so, we link up with big church and match them week to week for a series they are doing. Pastor Rick did a series on being great parents, so we did How to Raise Your Parents. This January we’ll be going through 40 Days of the Word in adult services as a church-wide campaign, so we’ll create a student-friendly version of that topic as well.
Blessings to you as you pray and search for inspiration on what topics to teach your students this week in youth group.
This is the one Slant question I’ve not felt comfortable with. I wondered whether it is the right question, kind of like the classic piece of dialogue that leads to Inspector Clouseau getting bitten by a dog in the Pink Panther:
Clouseau: Does your dog bite?
Hotel Clerk: No.
Clouseau: [bowing down to pet the dog] Nice doggie.
[Dog barks and bites Clouseau on the hand]
Clouseau: I thought you said your dog did not bite!
Hotel Clerk: That is not my dog.
Asking the wrong question will still lead to an answer but possibly not the most useful answer and one that may come back to bite us (metaphorically).
What should we teach? is a question I get asked a lot in the UK context, but it is often the wrong question. What I mean by that is that it can flow from a theology that equates faith and spiritual growth with knowledge and further assumes that if we have taught something, people have learnt it. In other words, the question is limited by a particular theology and further weakened by an assumption.
We could delve deeper into Modernity-influenced rational theology or explore pedagogy and our [church] over emphasis on teaching (and then mainly in an auditory modality), but that’s not really answering the question.
Assuming that we are in fact asking: What do young people (alongside our own growth and journey) need to learn, encounter, and experience, and how do we discern/plan this? I’ll have a stab at sharing my experiments with having some sort of a plan.
For me it has always been a dialogue. I’ve explored with the teenagers and the team what living as a Christian and growing in faith might mean and look like. We’ve then tried to explore what we need to explore, learn, and engage with and put together some sort of framework together that allowed us to have a kind of plan (albeit one that has room for the unexpected). Young people and team very much together on prayer, discussion, and discernment. Asking the right question together.
Inevitably the suggestions from the teens tend to be heavy on issues (but not exclusively), but I love this because it indicates a desire to explore how faith really works in the messy business of life. It also still gives plenty of room for engaging with the Bible; it just means we are driven by the issue into the Bible, rather than going from Bible to issue.
Alongside that, I’ve tried to make sure we are modelling and exploring prayer and how to read the Bible. It’s also been useful to look at the programme as a whole, not just the teaching from the title, or the learning from my interpretation; looking at encountering God in worship, meeting a wider range of Christians, practical opportunities to do faith stuff and opportunities for spiritual practice.
If all that sounds very neat, then you need to understand that it isn’t in practice and is an ongoing conversation. It has allowed, though, a really owned and explored look at what the group is about and what it wants to explore and has provided a useful framework that defeats the panic of what we are doing next Sunday.
So for me the answer is, through dialogue.
But then again, it might be that the senior pastor trumps this and tells you the whole church is doing a year on Leviticus and you will be teaching the young people this.
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