Chapter 1 - Bad Presentations

Ephesians 4:11 says,

And He gave some apostles and some prophets and some evangelists and some pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the building up of the Body of Christ.

1 Corinthians 12:28 says,

And God has placed some in the church; firstly apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers; after that miracles and gifts of healings, supports, directives, various different tongues.

In this section I want to look at the signs of the teaching calling. How do we identify a teacher?

Bad Army Food

Many years ago when I was much younger, I was in a country that had a national draft or call up.

This was where every young person had to go and serve their country for a specific period of time. So at the tender age of 18, I was called up to go and spend time serving my country.

I was still at home at that time because I had not left home. I was still living with my parents and was still used to eating my mother's cooking. My mother cooked pretty well. As a matter of fact, I had learned to cook and I liked doing it.

I liked food and I liked making fancy foods. But as I came to take up my place of residence in the military, I found out that meals took on a new dimension. You had to stand in line and wait for ages with an ugly, big metal thing with indents in it to put your food in.

Then after standing in line for ages to get served, you eventually wondered why you bothered. What they slopped onto this metal thing was not worth eating, but you were so hungry you were forced to eat it.

Army food has to be the worst food in this world. It was terrible. I came to the conclusion that the army must have special deals with people to buy all the junk that nobody else wants; food that they are ready to throw away and that they can get cheap.

Then they had the cheek to charge you for it. If you were in the military and you had a normal job they gave you then what was called Make Up Pay.

They made up the difference between what the army paid you and what your normal salary was, and they had the cheek to add the cost of meals to your Make Up Pay.

I could not believe that they had the audacity to charge people for that stuff. I just could not believe that they would serve human beings stuff that was fit for pigs.

Then I got to chat with one of the guys who was an army cook. He was just an ordinary guy like me. When he arrived in the military, I guess he could not do very much of anything else, so they said,

"Okay, we'll make you a cook."

If you were too useless to do anything else they made you a cook. That was standard military procedure. So this guy, who had never cooked anything in his life, was thrown into the kitchen and they said,

"There you go. You're a cook."

He said to me, "Les, don't think that the army buys junk. The food that we get to cook is top grade. It is high quality stuff. We just don't know how to cook it.

When you are cooking for hundreds and thousands of guys you just slap it together in a pot and boil it up. You don't have the time or the facilities to cook it properly."

So here we had this slop that we had to eat to try and survive. But actually it was very good food. There was nothing wrong with it. It was the way it was made and the way it was presented that was bad. It smelt, tasted and looked terrible.

If I had a choice I would just as well have thrown it in the trash can rather than eat it. But it was good food. That good food had been taken, and it had been prepared, made and presented in a way that was unpalatable.

Bad School Teachers

That was my experience with the army and with cooking. Then as I cast my mind back further I think back on my days in school.

School teachers are a special breed aren't they? They are specially selected by the devil and pulled out of the pit of hell - preferably with as little training as possible, and preferably somebody who does not have a clue how to teach.

That is the guy who is qualified to become a teacher. At least that was the impression I had.

I could not stay awake for half an hour listening to some of those guys. They would drone on and on, talking about things they knew nothing about. They would read out of a text book and pour screeds of uninteresting knowledge into my head - or at least they tried to do it.

I would be sitting there chewing the end of my pencil and thinking about something far more interesting. Anything would do, just as long as I did not have to sit and listen to this boring person trying to teach me things I did not want to learn.

Did you have that impression in school? I need to cast my mind back now and think that there must have been one or two good teachers there. I really have to think hard to see who they were though, because my general impression of school teachers is that it was just a job they were doing.

Their job was simply to try and pour a certain amount of knowledge into your head, get you to write exams and go through. It seemed none of them had any interest in doing it.

You wondered what kind of training colleges these people were put through, because certainly whoever taught them did not know how to teach either.

Interesting Topics Made Boring

I found that school teachers could take knowledge that could have been wonderful and exciting, and make it so boring that you did not want to know about it. They were some of the most complicated speakers I had ever heard.

They would take simple things and over-complicate them. They would use big words and language to describe things in such a way that the average person did not have a clue what they were talking about.

You would look at this guy and think,

"Wow, he must really be intelligent. He probably got some big doctorate out there at university. The guy is an absolute genius, but he's the only one who knows what he's talking about."

Have you had that experience with teachers? They are one of the most inconsiderate speakers you have ever heard. They do not consider the pupil.

And if you dare to have the audacity to stop the teacher in the middle to ask a question, well he is supposed to allow that, but the chances are he will look at you skew. And everyone in the class looks at you as though to say,

"You stupid idiot, don't you know what he's talking about?"

Have you been there? I have been there and I was pretty intelligent. I was always top of the class and always in the academic stream. But even I had this problem trying to keep my attention and getting something from these teachers.

Bad Preachers

Then come the experiences with being in church. Did you know that it would seem that most preachers have been to a Bible Seminary where they do not teach you how to preach; where whoever taught them did not know how to preach?

Someone said once,

"The Bible has to be the Word of God to have suffered such poor preaching through the years."

You have been there haven't you? Some preachers are so boring. Okay I could be one of them. I stand to be examined.

They are long-winded, and they drone on and on, always telling you what you are supposed to do and what you are not supposed to do.

Very seldom do they tell you how to do it. They drone on and on, boring you, waffling on and giving you a whole load of all sorts of nonsense, and you walk out of there with your head in a daze.

I love having a Bible that you can write in. I always had a wide margin Bible, and when I sat in church I would open my Bible and take out my pen. I think many a preacher looked at me and thought,

"What a wonderful person. He's taking down notes from my sermon."

No I was not. I was trying to study the Bible for myself and get something out of it, because he was not giving me anything.

I thought, "If I'm going to sit here for an hour, I might as well use the time wisely and get into the Word a bit."

I would start studying the Scriptures, and I would get some of my own notes and start making up my own sermon. I would sit and listen to what he was preaching and say,

"I know I can do better than this. Let's see if I can improve on it."

Have you never done that? Well you are going to be doing that if you can learn to become a teacher, because you are going to find that most preachers out there have never been taught how to teach. They do not know how to do it and that is why they are so boring.

The Word is Badly Presented

What am I talking about? I am talking about the Word of God, which is pure, high quality food that has the ability to feed the soul.

But there are those who take it and slop it up, denature it and throw it together in such a way that it is unpalatable and you do not want to eat it. It is not the food that is at fault. It is the cook that is at fault.

There is knowledge that can feed the soul and the spirit. But if it is taught in a way that is boring and uninteresting, nobody wants to hear it.

People are falling asleep while you waffle on and on. Nobody is getting any of it. It is going in one ear and out the other. Maybe it does not even get to the middle before it disappears.

That is not the Teaching Ministry. The Teaching Ministry has the ability to take the food and make it wonderful, so that you want to eat it. That is what I want to look at in this section.

I want you to see exactly what the Teaching Ministry is. So we are going to start looking at a couple of different aspects of the Teaching Ministry.

I would like to look at some of the functions of the Teaching Ministry and what it is supposed to do. I would also like to look at what the Teaching Ministry is not and the misconceptions that people have about it. Then I want to look at what the Teaching Ministry does.

By the end of it you will be able to make a list of signs of the teaching calling. You will be able to examine preachers. You will be able to take the list with you next time you go to church, and you will be able to tick them off and say,

"No, he's not a teacher."

Or, "Yes, he is a teacher."

You will be able to look at yourself and at others that you know and quickly identify what a teacher looks like. You will also be able to identify very quickly when somebody is not a teacher at all.