The Equipping Ministry, Student Workbook, SW15

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T H E E Q U I P P I N G M I N I S T R Y

Our objective for this segment, Contact, Content, and Connection in the Teaching Ministry , is to enable you to see that: • Effective biblical teaching involves, like preaching, three interrelated steps making up the “Contact, Content, and Connection” model of instruction: we are to seek to establish contact with our audience informed by their culture and life situation, communicate the content of the Word of God in our teaching lessons clearly and boldly, and make connections on specific areas for disciplined application of the Word to their lives. • We establish contact with our students in the teaching situation specifically as we prepare and teach lessons that pay careful attention to the culture and life situation of the students–their language, the ways in which they understand, process, and communicate ideas and truths. • The second phase of effective teaching is communicating the Word of God clearly and boldly. In doing so we ought to select means and methods that allow us to paint a picture and engage our students in such a way as to make the meaning of the text come alive for them, as directly and concretely as possible. • Jesus’ method of teaching stories, metaphors, images, and symbols with passion and clarity can make the communication of the Word dramatically more effective in urban cultures, which especially tend to take these narratival, poetic, and symbolic elements seriously in their self-understanding and language habits. • We ought to ensure that our curricula addresses specific subjects and issues that are appropriate to the audience and their situation. Regardless of the themes, however, we must be careful to keep the theme of our teaching the continuous retelling of the Story of God in the life and work of Jesus, and our application of his will for our lives as citizens of the Kingdom. • We make direct and potent connections in our teaching situations by learning to interconnect the content of the biblical message with the practical concerns, needs, and challenges of our students’ lives. • Application involves drawing out key principles which summarize the teaching imaged and spoken forth during the content section of the teaching. Whatever the connection, we ought neither to be wooden nor strained; we must allow room for the Holy Spirit to challenge the students,

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