My problem is that I actually like to listen to sermons, making it harder for me to figure out what needs to change. But I also can’t really explain how they are overall beneficial in the long run. Sounds weird. I really enjoyed your sermon this last Sunday. It is just kind of hard to figure out how to fix something you like.

One my students in class this week was asking about something he didn’t understand in the book, a comment about what learning is. The problem that he could understand was when the book stated that learning is typically permanent. He talked about how hard it is to recall what the professor said last week, so how can learning be permanent? My response was that some people would argue that learning never happened if it wasn’t permanent. If you can’t remember it later, then there never was any learning going on. The example (which is kind of sadistic if you think about it) that people always use in learning is of the child that burns their hand on a match and learns that fire is dangerous. But if the child keeps burning themselves all the time – then they never learned the dangers of fire. In other words, learning has to be permanent in order to be learning at all.

That is the challenge we have with the Church in general – we need to be concerned with learning and doing, not sermons and visitors. The great commission is to go and make disciples, not converts or happy visitors. To do this, I think we need to teach educational psychology instead of homiletics to our pastors, and get instructional designers involved in planning church instead of ministers. But maybe that is just my occupational bias coming out 🙂