Teaching Theology

The job unfinished

This simple post is about praying for our students.

Why? There are four main reasons why it is part of our job;

1. Teaching is ministry according to the New Testament and prayer for those to whom you minister is a part of all ministries in God’s church.
2. There are clear examples in Paul, who often mentioned his passionate prayer for those he taught, and Christ himself such as in John 17 and when he said to Peter “I have prayed for you”.
3. It is a marker of humility, which teachers need especially. If we think we can do the job ourselves we will not pray. If we know we cannot, we will pray.
4. It helps to create the right relationship between you and your students. You pray for those you love and wish God to bless.

For What? Here are a few suggestions;

1. The first answer to this is simple, we pray that the objectives of theological education will be achieved in our students. We want them to grow and be formed academically, ministerially, in their character and in their spiritual lives – and not these separately but that each student be formed into an integrated devout scholar servant for God.
2. We pray also for the conditions which will make this achievable, the right attitudes to these things, the right relationships between teacher and students and a prospering thoughtful college.
3. We pray for special needs we know of in individual students, a relationship gone wrong, a sickness, a fear of not keeping up, financial problems.
4. Above all we ask for the presence and work of God in the classroom, in all our activities with the students and in our preparation.

How? This is up to you;

When we are engaged in teaching one to one, such as in postgraduate supervision, for instance, it is easy to imagine and configure. It will probably form part of our preparation for a supervision occasion and at other times depending on need.

When we are teaching a larger class, we will be praying that we will achieve what we should in the teaching of that class and that it will go well and usefully interactively but I don’t think that should absolve us from mentioning the students by name before God. We will have a class list, hopefully with photos, and this can form a basis for briefly holding each up before God, maybe a number of our students each week.

It is just one of those very few rules which have no exceptions; If you teach someone, you also pray for them, otherwise the job is unfinished. As I said at the beginning, it is really quite simple.

This entry was posted on August 29, 2018 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.