If Harvard cannot assume their professors can communicate, how much less can churches.
— Howard Hendricks

A young woman, an award-winning interior designer, saw that her church needed a Sunday school teacher for one of the children's classes. She volunteered. They put curriculum in her hands and said, "If you can read it, you can teach it."

She couldn't. She tried, she read, she stumbled through some classes—and she quit. Though it has been years since, she was traumatized by the experience, and if anyone asks her to teach, she responds with a decisive, "No!"

She is not the only gun-shy ex-teacher sitting in the pews of our churches. And who can blame her? At the same time, who can blame pastors, Sunday school superintendents, and education committees? Just as my daughter-in-law had curriculum shoved in her hands, many pastors have teacher training dropped in their laps, having little more expertise in teacher training than she had in teaching. And training teachers can be as tough as teaching ...