Teaching, training and why we need both

One of the central claims of The Trellis and the Vine was that Christian ministry is founded not only on preaching and teaching, but also on training. In fact, the chapter in which that argument was advanced most forcefully has always been the most controversial part of the book (Ch 8: ‘Why Sunday Sermons are necessary but not sufficient’).

Col Marshall and I have often been asked about what we mean by ‘training’, and how it works out in practice. Does training essentially mean ‘running more training courses’ like Two ways to live? And if that’s too simplistic a picture (and of course it is), then what is ‘training’ exactly? How is ‘training’ different from ‘teaching’ anyway?

This week’s Payneful Truth presents a fresh take on this topic, in two parts: via a recent interview with Marty Sweeney (Marty is the ministry director of Matthias Media USA); and then with some additional thoughts to round off.

First, here’s an edited excerpt of my interview with Marty.

Marty and Tony talk about teaching and training

Marty: Today, I want to talk to you about what I’ve colloquially said is teaching versus training. Let me set this up for you.

Tony: Yep. What do you mean by that?

Marty: I’ve been reflecting on my now 15-plus years doing ministry, specifically teaching ministry, in front of a classroom or in a small group, and I realized that often, I just default to content dissemination and I shorthand that as ‘teaching’.

Tony: Okay.

Marty: Now, I know that’s probably not fair to the word ‘teaching’, but what I mean by that is this—I’ve got all this content in my head, I’ve worked hard at developing a structure to deliver it, and I download it, so I’m teaching people. But what I realized is that I’m giving them content, but I’m not training them to be disciple-makers or to get that content out for others. That’s what I mean by ‘training’ them.

It’s one thing to just give people content. It’s another thing to teach them and train them in a certain way that they are applying that to themselves, but also thinking about their neighbours, their friends, their coworkers. I think I’ve been a content disseminator but not a trainer.

Tony: Yeah.

Marty: Do you see that difference or maybe do you have any better words to describe it?

Tony: Well, I’ll outline some of the things that I’ve been digging into over the last couple of years regarding the ‘one-another’ word ministry of Christians, because it’s the same issue. What’s the relationship between that kind of more practically oriented, everyday Christian speech, and the preaching or teaching that we receive in church or in a Sunday school class? (Hint: I think it’s much the same as the relationship between ‘training’ and ‘teaching’.)

First, I don't think we have to denigrate teaching by calling it ‘content dissemination’ as if it doesn't do anything powerful, because it does.

Marty: Right. Yeah.

Tony: If you teach well—and I’ve been in some of your classes, Marty, and you do teach well—you’re not just blurting out material that washes over people; you’re actually forming and changing their minds. You’re providing them week by week with a new way to think about the world and themselves and God and everything. You’re forming their mind and heart, as that content you’ve disseminated seeps in. It restructures the way that your hearers think about everything and understand everything. How does Paul put it in 2 Corinthians 5? When I’m in Christ, it’s a new creation and I no longer regard anything from the standpoint of the flesh. I now regard everything from the standpoint of Christ. That’s the wonderful thing that preaching and teaching does. That’s why it’s so powerful, and that’s why we need to keep listening to it!

But nearly all knowledge has two dimensions or axes to it. There’s a kind of knowledge that changes your whole mind and way of thinking about the world—but there’s also a kind of practically immediate knowledge, the knowledge of how to actually do things.

If we can come to my second favourite topic after God-Jesus-and-the-Bible, which is golf—you can read as many golf magazines as you like, and I read plenty and watch interminable YouTube videos. But there comes a point where you need the practical immediacy of actually doing it, and having someone alongside you to help; someone to say, “No, no, don't do that!”

And I think that’s what we're talking about when we talk about ‘training’. It’s not just the mind of my hearer that is being changed; it’s their behaviour and action being changed. If it just stops with their mind and their understanding, and doesn’t lead to a new way of speaking and living, then something’s missing; it hasn’t gotten the whole way.

And this is where ‘training’ (as we’re calling it) comes in. Training is that kind of instruction and learning that takes place in the ‘practical immediacy’ zone—where you’re learning, for example, not to be angry, or not to let the sun go down on your anger, or what it means in practice to love others. You need someone alongside you at that point who is not so much trying to shape your whole understanding (like a teacher), but is bringing that understanding to your particular moment and helping you see what it means; someone who is advising and reminding and encouraging and urging you to do it, and admonishing you when you don’t do it.

That’s the zone that ‘training’ belongs in, in my mind. It’s helping people translate their understanding into life and action and speech. And it’s usually a different mode of education. It’s more a matter of being alongside you, helping you to learn what it means, sharing wisdom, and encouraging and exhorting and helping you to grow.

Now, I think it’s the same, Marty, whether you’re talking about training someone to share the gospel or training someone to pray, or to love their wives and children, or to learn not to be so envious. In all the different ways that our life is changed and sanctified as we come to know Christ and his Spirit works within us—in all those ways, there’s another mode of instruction and encouragement. Let’s call it training if you wish.

Marty: How can we make this shift—from just teaching, to also training? To ‘transformative learning’, to put it that way?

Tony: It starts with listening. Helping someone to shift from where they are starts with seeing where they are. It starts with listening, with having a sufficiently close level of interaction with them, so that you can see where this person is at and where they’re up to, and what encouragement and help they need to change.

One of the differences between the teaching-preaching mode of mind formation and the more practically immediate mode of training is simply in size and level of interaction. You can teach and form the minds of 500 people at a time if you’re a gifted teacher and preacher. But, if I’m going to help each one of those people actually implement something in their lives—to learn how to share or learn how to speak—well, they’re all at different points and different places. They all will need different sorts of help. It requires a more micro level of interaction.

And, sometimes the problem is simply that we haven’t set up structures or contexts for this to happen. We’ve set up structures to teach, which are larger contexts where one person is teaching 50 people at a time in a 40 minute timeframe or something. But in those structures, you’re fairly limited with what you can do at the practically immediate l