Don't Distance Yourself From Your Students

Peter Mead has some excellent comments about teaching from wholeness, with integrity, being open and engaging with our students:

Early on Palmer is describing what makes a good teacher or a bad
teacher. He quotes one student who could not describe her good teachers
because they were all so different, but she could describe her bad ones because
they were all the same. “Their words float somewhere in front of their
faces, like the balloon speech in cartoons.” Parker notes that bad teachers
distance themselves from the subject they are teaching, and therefore from their
students also. But good teachers join self and subject and students in the
fabric of life.

How true this is for preachers too. We preach poorly when we
distance ourselves from our message, but we preach well we make sure the message
is coming from inside us and going directly to our listeners. True
preaching, by definition, is the delivery of a text’s message
“which the Holy Spirit first applies to the life of the preacher, then through the preacher, to the listeners.” (Robinson’s classic definition).

Remember the simple, yet profound formula in Palmer’s book – effective
teaching is much more about identity and integrity than mere technique.

He's referring to Peter Palmer's book, The Courage to Teach.

Please remember that your teaching is a ministry, not just a task. This means your efforts are co-joined with the Life of Christ in you, so that you abide in Jesus and the Word (see John 15), and work in cooperation with the Holy Spirit. That's the way to teach to change lives.