The Teacher Who Wouldn't Pick A Style

There's a moment every teacher eventually finds. You've been leading the class or the group for a while, and you finally hit your groove — the thing you do that works. For me, it's depth. Give me a passage, let me sit with the Greek behind a word, trace how an idea moves from Genesis to the Gospels, and then open the floor so we can wrestle with it together. Deep theory, balanced with real discussion. When I teach that way, I come alive, and so do the people wired like me.

And here's the part I had to learn the hard way: there are two guys in the back of that same room who checked out about eight minutes ago.

They're not bored because they're shallow. They're bored because I was teaching the way I like to learn. I'd found my style — and my style had a blind spot the exact shape of me. The people it fed were the people who were already like me. The people it lost were everyone else.

We talk about teaching styles the way we talk about personality types. "I'm a lecturer." "I'm more of a discussion person." "I tell stories." We say it like we're naming something fixed, like our blood type. And there's a comfort in that, because if this is just who I am, then the two guys in the back aren't my problem. They're just not my kind of learner.

But then you go back and watch how Jesus actually taught, and the whole frame falls apart.

He didn't have a style. He had a range.

Look at the Sermon on the Mount. That's not a discussion. That's not a story. That's sustained, authoritative teaching — Jesus opening the law and pressing it deeper than anyone in the crowd had heard it go. "You have heard that it was said… but I say to you." He sat down, the disciples came to him, and he taught (Matthew 5–7). If you only had that scene, you'd file Jesus under "expositor" and move on.

Except that's not how he usually did it.

More often than not, Jesus taught by asking. One pastor, Martin Copenhaver, went through the Gospels and counted it up: by his tally Jesus asks 307 questions, is asked 183, and directly answers only a handful. Count it differently and you'll land on a different number — people always do — but the pattern doesn't move. The Great Teacher spent far more time asking than answering. "Who do you say that I am?" "What do you want me to do for you?" He'd take a lawyer's question, tell a story, and hand the question right back: "Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor?" (Luke 10:36). He made people arrive at things instead of handing them over.

And when a question wasn't the tool, a story was. The prodigal son (aka The Father Who Ran). The good Samaritan. The sower. He wrapped the sharpest truths in narrative and let them get past people's defenses before anyone realized what was happening — the same move Nathan pulled on David a thousand years earlier, telling him a story about a stolen lamb until David condemned himself, and only then: "You are the man" (2 Samuel 12).

Then there are the times he didn't say much at all. He got up from supper, wrapped a towel around his waist, and washed his disciples' feet — and that was the lesson (John 13). And there were the times he stopped teaching them and sent them out: go into the towns, do the thing, come back and we'll talk about what happened (Luke 10). Learning by doing, debriefed afterward.

Lecture. Question. Story. Demonstration. Apprenticeship. That's not a man with a teaching style. That's a man with a full range, and the wisdom to know which one the person in front of him actually needed.

Your style is your gift — and your blind spot

Here's what I've come to believe, and it's the reason for this whole series.

The way you naturally teach is a real gift. It's not a flaw to be a deep expositor, or a natural storyteller, or the person who can pull a silent room into honest conversation. Those are genuine strengths, and the church needs every one of them. Don't hear any of this as "stop teaching the way you teach."

But your default is also the thing you can't see around. Because almost all of us, without ever deciding to, teach the way we ourselves would want to be taught. The lecturer assumes everyone wants the depth he wants. The discussion leader assumes everyone wants the room opened up the way she does. The storyteller assumes the story is landing for everyone the way it lands for him.

And so, quietly, we build rooms that serve people like us and lose people who aren't. Not because we don't care — because we can't see it. My depth was a gift to half the room and a closed door to the other half, and I genuinely didn't notice for a long time, because the half it worked on was nodding along and the half it didn't was too kind to say anything.

That's the blind spot. It's shaped exactly like you.

What this series is, and isn't

So over the next several posts, we're going to walk through the ways people teach — one at a time. The expositor who brings back gold from the text. The teacher whose questions do the work. The one who tells the story that slips past the guard. The one who teaches people to read the text for themselves. The one who disciples life-on-life, up close, over years. The one who sharpens through challenge.

And here's the promise I'll make about every single post: I'm going to give each mode its full due before I ever name where it fails. Every one of these is a real gift. And every one of these has an honest failure mode — a way it quietly stops serving the room and starts serving the teacher. The depth that becomes a performance of preparation. The discussion that becomes everyone sharing opinions while the text slips out the door. The story that's so enjoyed nobody's changed. I'll name those honestly, because you can't widen a blind spot you won't look at. But not one of these posts is going to tell you there's a right way to teach and you've been doing it wrong.

Because there isn't a right way. There's a range. And the good news — the thing I want you carrying out of here — is that range is learnable.

You will never be equally strong in all of them, and you don't have to be. But the modes that don't come naturally to you? You can borrow them. The expositor can learn to ask one real question and wait. The question-asker can learn to land the plane. The storyteller can learn the turn. You don't have to stop being who you are to widen who you can reach.

The person you'd rather be teaching

There's one more thing under all of this, and I'll just say it plainly, because it's the reason it matters.

When we teach only in our default mode, we're really teaching to an imagined person — and that imagined person is almost always a version of ourselves. The learner who wants exactly what we want, at exactly the depth we want it. The trouble is, that person usually isn't in the room. The actual people are: the two guys in the back, the woman who needed a story and got a syllabus, the young man who'd have caught fire if you'd just asked him instead of told him.

Learning a second mode, and a third, is a small act of dying to yourself. It costs you the comfort of your groove. It means teaching the person who's actually in front of you instead of the one you'd rather be teaching. Paul put it about as directly as it can be put: "I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some" (1 Corinthians 9:22). That's not a marketing strategy. That's love doing the work of widening.

I've watched a friend of mine grow into this. When he started leading, he taught the one way he knew. Two years on, you can watch him read a room and shift — a question here, a story there, and then, when it's needed, he'll go deep. He didn't get a new personality. He grew a range. And the room grew with him.

So here's the only question I'll leave you with this week: what's your default — and who in your room does it quietly leave out?

You don't have to fix it today. Just start by seeing it. We'll take the modes one at a time from here.

Next in the series: The Expositor — the real gift of teaching deep, and the moment your depth stops feeding the room and starts feeding you.

---
Where Appostolic fits: Growing your range shouldn't mean rebuilding every lesson from scratch for every room. Appostolic's Lesson Format Templates and Lesson Assembly Studio let you shape the same teaching into forms that fit each audience — a children's class, a men's group, a Sunday devotional — so you can meet the person in front of you without losing a night to prep for each one.