One of the great things about believing the Holy Spirit works in God’s people to help them understand the scriptures, and of believing in the perspicuity of the scriptures themselves, is that we ought to recognise all believers are capable of reading and understanding God’s Word. I won’t run through all the caveats (that I’m sure you’re familiar with) about what perspicuity actually means and how we might understand what the scriptures have to say. Let me just leave the bald statement here: all believers ought to be able to understand the scriptures for themselves in some measure.

Most pastors not only believe this, but reckon their job is therefore to show people what the scriptures say, what they mean and how they apply to us. I was talking to someone who was going to be leading a bible study at our church about this. We both recognised you could run any bible study armed only with these three questions: (1) what does this say?; (2) what does it mean?; and, (3) how does that apply to us? Even in our sermons, nothing should really come as a surprise to any of our people as we’re speaking. Everything we say they ought to be able to see in the pages they’re reading.

We tend to recognise that bible study and sermon prep is often much more complicated than it needs to be. I’ve heard more than a few pastors say something similar to what I said above concerning bible study. The emphasis is always on the fact that our people can understand this and they can teach the bible. They’ve convince themselves they can’t and that they need the experts to come and tell them, but the truth is, they can make observations on the text, work out what it means and then apply it too. Most of the time they just lack confidence. Lots of pastors actually spend their time trying to build that confidence in our people, showing them how we do it so that they can do it for themselves. We’re aiming to show them that they can read and understand the scriptures and don’t need the experts to tell them; they have the greatest interpretive expert dwelling inside of them!

What often surprises me though is that those who make the strongest case for encouraging our people to do this simultaneously then argue that they are not equipped to teach their people. That must be left up to the bible colleges. We can teach them to ask three questions of the text to do a bible study, we can stick together sermons to feed our people, but apparently we can’t cope with showing them basic biblical or systematic theology. I don’t know why because all the blokes I know who say they can’t have no problem telling me their theology and where they got it from. If they’re able to do that to me, I’m not entirely sure what the mental block is on passing that on to their people. Other than, just as for our people themselves, it boils down to a lack of confidence.

But as any teacher will tell you, often teaching kids is about being one book ahead of the kids. Often, theology isn’t much different. If we’ve even thought about the relevant questions at all and read any of the helpful books on it, we’re already a little ahead of the class. If we’re a little ahead, it is incumbent on us to pass on what we’ve learnt.

More to the point, our three bible study questions might help us when it comes to baldly reading a text put in front of us. But as we know, having a framework of biblical theology and systematic theology to act as helpful guidelines as we teach the passage is also quite important. It stops us reading crazy things into the text. We could, of course, avoid that by synthesising and reading every passage that might have something to add on the issue. But then, that is ultimately what systematics is and, once we’ve done it, we then have the framework in place without having to read every possibly helpful verse on the topic every time an issue crops up in whatever text we’re reading. Most pastors have at least a rudimentary systematic and biblical theology at play behind most of what they teach their people. And if they’ve got that in place, I’m not sure what worries them so much about teaching it to their people.

There is nothing stopping the majority of pastors from teaching basic systematics and biblical theology in their churches. Most could have a reasonable stab at historical theology and ecclesiology too. Assuming they’re able to teach the Bible at all, I’d imagine hermeneutics are going to be there too. Which begs the question: why do we think only bible colleges can adequately teach these things to our people?

Funnily enough, last time I chatted with a bible college principal about what they would teach – and what was expected of people before they arrived – they said: we do expect churches to have done some work with people before they arrive. My question was, if the churches have done that work before they arrive, what exactly do I need to send them to bible college for? Unless there is something that I can’t teach, what is the college going to do that we can’t? This usually comes down to how well you might be able to teach the languages. But I hate to break it to the colleges, there are plenty of free tools online so you can teach yourself without spending five grand for the privilege. And then there is a even bigger elephant in the room: quite a lot of pastors do a pretty good job without the languages at any rate because *whispers* good commentaries do much of that work for you. Let’s be honest, most of us who have done the languages never got so good at them that we didn’t just read a commentary and go, ‘it’s probably that then’.

Which comes back to the question, why have we convinced ourselves that we can’t teach our people? Why have we convinced ourselves that we need experts to teach for us? It seems to me that if we’re competent to handle the bible, and we have any theological framework at all (and we know how we came by it), there’s no reason we couldn’t teach our people. Let me put it this way, I am not so bright or intelligent that I am an exception to most pastors. If I can these things to my people, I struggle to believe you couldn’t to yours.