Most churches have more than one forum for teaching. The traditional model of two services on a Sunday tended to mean two services, almost identical in format and style, morning and evening. Some of those churches added a midweek meeting to the mix, which was basically a third offering of almost identical format just with some of the liturgical elements present on a Sunday missing. But the teaching all took basically the same format.

In more recent decades, some churches experimented with the same three service format, but altered the style of the teaching in each spot. So, you might still have a Sunday morning service largely like every other Sunday morning service. But the evening service might be a bit more theological, a bit more interactive and take a different approach. The midweek meeting might be in church, but equally likely might have migrated to some homes, for a more informal-feeling bible study of some sort.

My church has three main formal teaching opportunities. We have the theology breakfast on Sunday mornings before the main service. After that, we have the Sunday morning meeting. Midweek, we usually have separate groups that meet in homes. We find these different contexts lend themselves to different formats.

So, in our Sunday morning meeting, you will get the standard form sermon as the primary point of teaching. There are all the other liturgical bits you’d expect to find that aim at supporting what is being taught. Nevertheless, the primary focus is the reading and preaching of the Word that happens in sermon form.

But in our theology breakfast, we are doing more of a (unsurprisingly) theological bible study. We’re not looking at a specific text and trying to understand what it means and what it has to say to us in particular. We’re corralling lots of different bits of information – a text here, a verse there – to pull together what the Bible has to say on its big themes. We do that in our systematics, and in our historical theology as we look at how the Bible has been understood in the Reformed tradition and we do it in our ecclesiology track too. Otherwise, we’re learning how to read a text and considering examples of how to read and interpret the Bible as we do hermeneutics or we’re looking at the whole sweep of the Bible and understanding how it all holds together in biblical theology. Nevertheless, whichever we are doing, it’s usually an interactive bible study. Essentially, look at verse A, compare it with verse B, add in verse C and, taking them together, what does it tell us about theological concept D (cf. a list on a handout showing multiple other examples that say largely the same thing). Rinse and repeat for an hour or so.

When it comes to our home groups, the format changes a little again. Aside from the fact that we eat a meal together first and then pray for each other second, the bible study itself is a little different. For a start, we pick up whatever we were considering on Sunday. This takes out most the need to ask ‘what does this say?’ and ‘what does this mean?’ questions. We have already told everyone what is says and what it means in the sermon on Sunday. We’ve also done a little bit of the ‘what does this mean for me?’ question too. So, straightaway, we’re not coming to the passage cold with no knowledge of what it says or means.

Instead, our focus is on application. The study is more informal and involves much more open-ended questions pushing us to consider application. The question format is closer to:

1. We said on Sunday that this passage means X
2. We said that this means Y for us
3. If X & Y are true, how do we make sense of A, B and C?

Alternatively, we might format the questions this way:

1. We said on Sunday this passage means we ought to A, B and C
2. How does A help us as we find ourselves in D, E or F scenario?
3. How does B change our understanding of G, H, or I?
4. How does C make a difference to us as we go about K, L or M?

The questions are much more targeted to to application and thinking about the specific scenarios in which the teaching might be at play for the people in the group. The questions are also designed, not so much to get people to think about what the text means (they’ve already been told) but to think more about what the implications of that meaning are specifically for them in the ordinary scenarios of life in which they find themselves.

The point here is that different contexts and different aims mean different formats of learning lend themselves best to what we are doing. If I am simply telling people what a passage means and what they ought to do with it, a didactic sermon works pretty well. I am, in effect, trying to speak to their heart and, if they listen up, they should understand what this passage means and what it means for them.

If I am trying to teach people about theology drawn from scripture, asking people to do some of the work themselves may help it stick better. Helping people see the passages and verses from which we draw our theology is useful. Letting them compare and contrast what the Bible says in different places will help them understand it better. This doesn’t require a didactic approach necessarily, so much as a highlighting approach. We’re simply pointing to certain verses, asking what they see for themselves and then encouraging them to draw conclusions about the specific verses in front of them. It is training people not to make ad hoc interpretations, but to see that we can understand scripture simply by looking at what we see and drawing reasonable inferences about it.

If I am trying to teach people about the implications of scripture – particularly as it pertain to the ordinary run of their own lives – then open-ended questions about what we are reading is more helpful. Letting people think about their own situations (which aren’t specifically in the text) and, understanding what the Bible says on its own terms, think about what that passage is saying to them in their situation is a helpful way to teach careful application. It also allows people to apply the text to minutiae that I as the pastor simply wouldn’t know unless they tell me. It allows application to a whole raft of areas of life that a sermon simply can’t do.

There are all sorts of other ways you might teach and other forums for doing so. But it is worth thinking about what you are aiming to teach and what format best serves what you are trying to do. I am fairly confident different things will warrant different approaches. It seems to me worth asking ourselves, are we using the best approach to encourage what we are actually aiming to do?