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But often they ponder these questions alone, in silence, with no one to empathize or even listen to them. In adult education, we have the important privilege of helping people understand their fears and work through tough issues with a mature biblical perspective. We can touch the throbbing pulse of human pain, anxiety, hope, and joy.

The problem, as my lawyer friend showed me, is that many people in churches today have never brought their adult minds to bear on an understanding of the Bible. They tend to assume that Scripture has nothing specific or helpful to say to them about the real world in which they live. For them, the Bible seems like a relic from childhood rather than a living statement of hard-edged truths that demand to be studied and interacted with on a daily basis.

But the Bible was written primarily for adults, to answer adult questions, to deal with adult problems. Finally, then, adult education is vital to the church because it is our opportunity to open the Word of God, the textbook of the church, for people to whom it is ultimately addressed.

Adults learn differently than do children, and I've found it helpful to keep in mind the unique characteristics of adult learners whenever I've taught adults. Malcolm Knowles, in his The Practice of Modern Adult Education, has given me a lot of insight here.

• The adult learner is self-directed. Adults like to see themselves as self-directed and in charge of their own lives. But sometimes we inadvertently make them feel dependent, almost like children.

For example, when you put people in rows in a classroom, many adults feel (even if only subconsciously) that they are in a childlike setting. Since many people look back on their school days in a less than positive way, the return to a classroom as an adult can have unhappy connotations.

Furthermore, few adults will volunteer to be placed in situations where they will feel they are being talked down to or treated with condescension. When the teacher is the "expert" and the learner is "talked at," the adult hardly feels in charge of the learning environment.

Some adults, of course, have no problem with such a model of learning, but most adults rebel and vote with their feet; they find another class—or even another church—where they are not made to feel like they've stumbled back into Miss Grimble's sixth-grade class.

• The adult learner has accumulated a large reservoir of experiences. As adults grow, they learn to trust their own judgment and experience more and more, and they test what they hear from others against their own sampling of reality. If what the teacher says is not validated by and connected with their own experience, they will not take the teacher's message seriously.

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