Improve Your Delivery

I emphasize over and over again that teaching Bible studies and Sunday School classes is not a sermon. But we teachers can learn a lot from great preaching. "Holding Hearer Captive" is a short article that has excellent tips on improving your delivery, especially your vocal range. Recommended.

Ministry, Not Event

I'm looking forward to meeting Jessye Brown in heaven -- she taught Bible studies for 53 years!

Great Bible Teachers think about teaching as a ministry, not as an event (or even a series of events) to get through. This is our service for the Lord. We're always learning, always sharpening our craft under the Lord's direction.

Free Teaching Tips Collection!

I've compiled the best Bible teaching tips from 1000 Bible teachers into a free ebook. You can get it at

http://www.teachtochangelives.com/teachtips.pdf

This is free to download, free to distribute. I'd like to see this great information get into as many hands as possible. So send it to your friends (or send them the link), post it on your web site, make photocopies for your teachers at church. What a blessing to be able to leverage a large community of teachers!

Be Careful How You Read Your Bible

Some humorous insight from

There is a reason I don't do the whole "just open your Bible thing." It's because I heard about the guy who opened his Bible to see what God would say to him and he read, "Judas hanged himself." He thought, "Now that's depressing--let me try this again--and so he opened it and read, "Go and do likewise." He began to get really worried and finally said, "OK, I am going to try this one more time & so he did and read, "What you are about to do--do it quickly." "

If You Teach Children's Sunday School...

check out this set of resources:
http://www.sschool.com/content/index.htm#Teacher%20Helps

Nice collection, quite a variety of information available.

Guide for Teaching in a Small Group

There is an excellent, detailed guide for teaching in small groups available (PDF file) at
http://www.vineyardcolumbus.org/resources/sgresources/PDFs/HowToTeach.pdf

Recommended.

Using Blogs in Teaching Ministry

I've gotten several questions from people who are thinking about starting a blog as an adjunct for their teaching ministry.

I'd say -- go for it!

You can use a free service like www.blogger.com to get started, and if you can type you can post to your blog. You don't have to be a computer geek at all.

Here's one caution, though: manage your expectations.

Initially, most of your audience will be people whom you point to the blog. You aren't likely to get thousands of visitors your first few months. The sheer number of blogs being created is staggering (see this

Redeeming Technology for God's Purposes

It's been said that the two groups of people who most aggressively exploit communications technologies are religious groups...and pornographers.

Mark Batterson has a nice blog entry about redeeming technologies for God's purposes -- as Gutenberg did with the printing press. He recommends we go "carpe digital," and compares podcasting with John Wesley's outdoor sermons.

Check out his thoughts about how to follow-up a teaching time (in his case a sermon, but it would be true for a small group Bible study or Sunday School class) with a second go-round. He makes sure his sermons are available to listen to again (mp3 audio file), and he emails a written version of the sermon as a follow-up.

Might be worth trying in your teaching setting!

Get Free Reports

I've posted a number of free special reports and articles at

http://www.teachtochangelives.com/reports.htm

You can read my answers to questions submitted by hundreds of teachers just like you, how to overcome fear, my recommendations on the best reference books, etc.

Check it out today.