A Teacher of the Church

Theology, Formation, and Practice for the Ministry of Teaching

Moulds

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781498276023
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book will deepen your regard for the church's task of didache, the act of teaching Christians. The chapters explore what the writers believe are several key biblical texts and themes for teaching, select doctrines of the church that inform teaching as a ministry, and features of teaching in the Lutheran tradition and its current practice. We authors address these matters with deep commitment to our shared Lutheran tradition, yet also with profound respect for what the Holy Spirit has done across the centuries in other orthodox traditions of the Great Church. Welcome to our conversation, a conversation the church has shared--though not without dispute--for centuries (from Chapter 1).

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A Teacher of the Church

Russ Moulds

Dr. Moulds has served as a Lutheran high school teacher, college professor, and instructor in the parish. He writes and presents frequently on topics related to the teaching ministry. This chapter considers the question, “Who is a teacher of the church?”

Whatever your image of “a teacher of the church” may be at this moment, expand that perception. In the chapters that follow, we will likely consider content related to your image, but to enlarge that view, consider first the history of the church and several examples of those who have served the teaching ministry, sometimes surprisingly so.

A Teacher Roster

In Acts 18, Priscilla and Aquila while at Ephesus encountered Apollos preaching about Jesus and detected he “knew only the baptism of John,” so this wife-and-husband teaching team “took him and expounded to him the way of God more accurately.” In third century AD Egypt, Antony, one of the church’s first ascetic hermits or “desert fathers,” attracted countless visitors and followers who frustrated his solitude by seeking to learn his simple Christian life. To the north in Syria, Symeon the Stylite concluded the church had become too worldly and needed an extreme lesson in discipleship, so he lived atop a pillar sixty feet closer to heaven.

In the tenth century, Peter Abelard—when he wasn’t busy with his torrid, secret, and ultimately tragic love affair with his patron’s daughter, Heloise—taught the church to re-read the earlier teachers of the church and reconsider its traditions, thus setting the stage for Luther and other reformers. When that time arrived, Philip Melanchthon, author of the Augsburg Confession (and not a clergyman), extended his duties as a professor and activities as a reformer by opening a remedial school in his home for younger students who would not otherwise pass the university entrance exams.

In the twentieth century, Walter Becker (my first principal, whom you will not find in church history books) was called to move his teaching ministry to a new congregation where he and his wife and family resided on the stage in the school gymnasium for their first year until other housing could be arranged.

Not all these teachers are exemplars of ministry nor are any of their excesses a license for us. Yet their variety prompts us to ask: Who is a teacher of the church?

Who Is a Teacher of the Church?

In the context of these and other examples of the church’s teachers, this book is aimed chiefly though not exclusively at those who are or soon will be teaching ministers in their congregations, schools, and colleges. The authors are all Lutherans with decades of service in the pastoral and teaching ministries. As a thinking reader, you will not agree with all the views presented here even as the authors do not all agree with each other. Nevertheless, this book will deepen your regard for the church’s task of didache, the act of teaching Christians. The book explores what the writers believe are several key biblical texts and themes for teaching, selected doctrines of the church that inform teaching as a ministry, and features of teaching in the Lutheran tradition and its current practice. We authors address these matters with deep commitment to our shared Lutheran tradition, yet with profound respect for what the Holy Spirit has done across the centuries in other orthodox traditions of the Great Church.

If you don’t happen to be of the Lutheran persuasion, we believe that examining this deep tradition with its strong emphasis on teaching the faith will enrich your understanding of your own tradition and your appreciation for our shared convictions within historical Christianity, that history acknowledged in this chapter’s opening paragraphs. Welcome to our conversation, a conversation the church has shared—though not without dispute—for centuries.

A question not always explicitly asked in this conversation is, “Who is a teacher of the church?” That question may go unasked because its answer might be taken for granted. Some maintain that the theologians are the church’s teachers. They must be included, yet most Christians do not hear or read the theologians and are influenced by them only indirectly as their ideas are filtered through local instruction, popular and simplified books, and sermons. Some say the pastors who preach those sermons are the church’s teachers. Surely all pastoral acts serve to teach, but pastors are often the first to acknowledge that sermons (even in expository preaching) are not the best vehicle for instruction, that pastors are often not good instructors, and that their time is devoted to care for souls and church administration rather than teaching. The church has created such offices as director of Christian education or, in some congregations, minister of Christian nurture. Those in such offices sometimes teach, yet their responsibilities may revolve more around managing programs and facilitating activities which, though related to the church’s didache, serve mostly as delivery systems for prepared materials and events.

Perhaps the teachers of the church today are the religious media figures, popular authors, and conference presenters. Without empirical studies, it’s hard to say to what extent the church at large takes its cues from their content, though clearly some are influential. The quality of content varies with the source, and, while some of these high profile figures have much of value to offer, few are comprehensive in their scope. Most tend to focus on some specific concern, issue-oriented topic, or agenda for personal or congregational development, and, as always in the market place, the consumer’s rule is caveat emptor. As a genuine teaching ministry, their greatest deficiency is the listener’s lack of access to the dialog and mutual, interactive conversation that we see in the ministries of Jesus and Paul.

Another response to “Who is a teacher of the church?” limits the answer to Jesus and Paul and perhaps other biblical sources. By this account, Christ is the rabbi, his apostles are those sent to convey his teaching, we have their instruction in the New Testament which recognizes and includes the authority of the Old Testament (cf. Rom 15:4), and this is the source and norm for the church’s teaching. Those who present their words are, then, not so much teachers as communicators. Certainly the historical church has assigned importance to this view with phrases such as sola scriptura and solus Christus. But ample biblical content also exists to validate some role, office, or function of teacher (see for example Eph 4:11–12 and 2 Tim 2:2), as we will confirm in later chapters.

Given that biblical content, some role for the teacher has existed in the church from its earliest years. Thus, another answer to who our teachers are could be called the patristic view. The “patristics,” or “church fathers,” refer to those church thinkers and writers in the first several Christian centuries who hammered out the doctrinal positions that define our historical orthodoxy. The shape of our teaching today was put in place by teachers such as Origen, Athanasius, and Augustine as they thought deeply, originally, creatively, and sometimes controversially in order to separate truth from error in what the Christian faith says and means. Their individual efforts were not always successful, and they found plenty of fault with each other along the way, but cumulatively their work yielded a body of instruction that the church has since relied on and continues to affirm.1

But not indiscriminantly. The Roman Catholic church and the Pro-testant churches divided 500 years ago in part over how much authority to assign to the church fathers and their traditions. This is a dispute that every teacher of the church today—Lutheran, Catholic, or otherwise—should learn, appreciate, and be ready to discuss with students because it involves the authority of the Gospel itself. The reader will have to pursue that complex story in other studies, but here it points to an additional view: since church teachers do not always agree, the real teacher of the church is the Holy Spirit. Only the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete (John 14:16), can give us insight to the Scriptures, help us glean truths from the church fathers, the church’s traditions, and other church figures past and present, and guide us to what God would have us know. But this view, in turn, raises age-old problems about excessive subjectivism and individualism for the Christian learner. The Christian, whether learner or teacher, is also a member of the body of Christ and the whole faith community in which God is at work. We not only say, “I believe in God the Father almighty,” but also “Our Father who art in heaven.”2

Teaching the Community of Christ

Teaching the church, then, is a community role, and that role includes those teaching in the Christian community’s congregations, schools, and colleges. Yet in my own work in Lutheran high schools, colleges, and church worker conferences, I find that many who are such teachers do not consider themselves a “teacher of the church.” Rather, by their perception, they are certainly faithful Christians and teach the fourth grade in a parish school but are not teachers of their congregation; or they teach a subject and coach a sport in a church-affiliated high school but not the things of faith; or they profess their discipline in a college with a denominational connection but don’t teach or explicitly locate their teaching within that theological tradition; or they run educational programs for their congregation, but they are program administrators and not expositors of Scripture as a means of grace; or they are competent shepherds and preachers but, though they are supposed to be apt teachers (2 Tim 3:2), haven’t the time or training to develop curriculum that fosters disciples.

“Teacher of the church”—the expression sounds a bit grandiose. Who would be so bold as to claim it? Instead, we should join Paul in his self-identity as chief of sinners. True enough. Whoever would teach the Christian faith and life must do so with the self-effacing humility of sinner-saint rather than any pride of office.

What’s more, perhaps our congregational and educational practitioners’ belief is correct. Perhaps they are not teachers of the church if they don’t have, in addition to a practical grasp of the Gospel, a good command of a) Scripture, b) the church’s history, c) its hermeneutic tools, d) its doctrines, e) their own and different traditions, f) current spiritual issues and influences in their community, and g) some effective ways of educing spiritual growth in that community. Now, that may sound like a tall order, but think about some lesser degree of expertise next time you’re sitting in a dentist’s chair or airliner.

And what if we don’t have teachers who are competent in these characteristics? Just as nature hates a vacuum, the same is true of the spiritual reality. The priests of Baal (1 Kgs 18), Simon Magus (Acts 8), and the “super apostles” (2 Cor 11) are always ready to step in and fill a teaching void. Teaching of some sort will always occur in or be directed at the church. The question is: Who will the teachers be and what will they teach?

The church, then, will have to identify its teachers. And the church has prepared candidates among those already in its congregations, schools, and colleges. Many may not consider themselves teachers of the church. But many of them could be, and already are or are prepared to become such teachers. That’s what this book is about. We offer perspective, background, comment, reflection, and some positions we stake out along the way. We hope to encourage those who serve in some practice of teaching in the church to serve also as teachers of the church. As the Holy Spirit calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian church, by that church God also calls out those he will use to instruct the church so that we may “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Pet 3:18). We will examine this calling—both the role and the process—thoroughly in later chapters.

At this point in this chapter, the reader might expect some dramatic alarm about some crisis for the church or the teaching ministry, and why we’d better do something soon about this dire condition. However, alarm is not in order: “Built on the Rock, the church will stand, even while steeples are falling.” Yet neither is complacency: “Hark, the voice of Jesus calling.” And when calling the apostles, he assures them, “On this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt 16:18).

No Small Potatoes

Think of it this way: for two thousand years, the church has withstood the persecution of the Roman Empire, numerous heresies, several attempts at intellectual takeovers such as modernism, progressivism, and fascism, the moral erosion of consumerism, the threat of world communism, and its own share of internal scandals and corruption. The church is not going away, and those teaching in the church are not part of a small-potatoes operation, even thoug...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: A Teacher of the Church
• Chapter 2: Christian Teaching: That They May Have Life Abundantly
• Chapter 3: God’s Two Strategies: Part I—Teaching the Tension
• Chapter 4: God’s Two Strategies: Part II—Our Peculiar Ministry
• Chapter 5: The Ministry of Every Christian: Part I—A Needed Perspective
• Chapter 6: The Ministry of Every Christian: Part II—Theological Perspectives
• Chapter 7: The Ministry of Teachers: Part I—A New Testament Perspective
• Chapter 8: The Ministry of Teachers: Part II—Lutheran Perspectives
• Chapter 9: What’s Lutheran about Lutheran Teaching?
• Chapter 10: The Call and the Will of God
• Chapter 11: To the Teacher of the Church: “Follow Me!”
• Chapter 12: The Employerization of the Teaching Ministry
• Epilogue: Some Concluding Prepositions
• Bibliography
• Suggested Reading