restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations

Greek DVDs Now Available

 David Alan Black  

Our Greek DVDs are now available for purchase. I’m totally stoked. Sweet tasktick!

Let me tell you a bit about the 24 DVDs:

1. The course is based on my beginning grammar,Learn to Read New Testament Greek, which is highly suitable for self-study. Any edition of our grammar may be used with the DVDs. You can purchase the book from any online store, includingAmazon andBarnes and Noble.

2. The DVDs were recorded before an audience that was ALIVE! Come with us to the Evangelical Theological College in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and join our class as I teach through our grammar chapter by chapter in English!

3. The DVDs are inPAL format, which is widely used overseas. We chose this format because of our desire to make Greek instruction available in the Two Thirds World. PAL format is readable on any computer that has the capacity to play DVDs.

4. In your order we will include a free pronunciation CD in which I read the Greek of the first several chapters aloud so that you can attune your ear to the language.
5. No foreign language knowledge is assumed or required to take this course. I teach Greek “from scratch” and explain concepts simply and with generous illustrations from English.

Man do I love Greek! I pray that you may learn to love it too. I really like the idea of a bunch of people coming into contact with the original language of the New Testament because of this course. May these DVDs bless you, edify the church, bring glory and praise to Jesus, and advance His kingdom cause worldwide!

To order your set of DVDs, go to ourDVD Order Form. U.S. and Canada only (no international orders). 

Here’s a sample from chapter 2:

April 13, 2009

   restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations

Greek, Discipleship, and Making Injera

 David Alan Black  

Have you ever eaten Ethiopian food? If so, then your hands have handled injera, the pancake-like staple used with most Ethiopian dishes.

Now, injera is extremely difficult to make properly, as Becky will quickly attest. Training by an expert is usually required. I once spoke with our Ethiopian son Fasil about this. He told me, “Papa B, there are four steps involved in becoming an injera maker. First, you watch a master make it. Then you help her. Then you do it yourself. Finally you teach others to make it.” Fasil, being the excellent teacher that he is, went on to draw an analogy with the way Jesus taught His disciples.

Needless to say, the New Testament places a high premium on teaching, but not just any kind of teaching. Discipleship always involves training. And every believer is to be trained, not just a handful of ecclesiastics. Once we recognize that Jesus calls all of His followers to serve Him, the days of appealing to a call to “the” ministry will have ended.

And just how did Jesus train His disciples? In exactly the same way one learns how to make injera. They saw Him work, then they shared in the work, then they did it themselves, and finally they trained others. This is a time-tested pattern. It works, no matter what your area of service in the body of Christ might be. Once this biblical pattern begins to be practiced, I believe we will see even larger numbers of Timothys being trained by Pauls — and not necessarily by taking them away from their homes and jobs and placing them in colleges and seminaries.

This weekend I’ll be concentrating on “lay” training as I begin teaching a Greek class in a local church. Of course, the Bible draws no distinction between clergy and laity, even if our churches do. Every Christian is called to serve, and every Christian needs training to serve effectively. Certainly Greek is not a requirement for everyone; but for those who desire to tap into this wonderful resource I am always eager to make myself available to help. Actually, I am quite diffident about the location. The training may occur in a college setting or a local church setting or a home setting. Let training be available to all — without fees for students and pay for teachers! Of course, Greek is no Open Sesame to biblical interpretation. Yet I cherish the hope that a reading knowledge of the language might drive us back towards New Testament principles.

So what’s the point of training? It is to help us become more like our Master. And it is to equip us to serve Him skillfully. God  warns us not to waste our talents. In the Gospels we find that Jesus was indeed a master teacher. He trained His disciples by pouring out His life into theirs and then asking them to pour out their lives into others. In so doing He made one thing abundantly clear: the kingdom of God is not comprised of kings and warriors but servants and children.

Jesus didn’t goof on the process, either. Those who follow in the way of Christ are called to be trainees in the kingdom. This was true then, and it is true now.

April 14, 2011

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com.

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   restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations

The Great Omission in the Great Commission

 David Alan Black

Recent events in the past three years —both personal and national—have forced me to reevaluate much of my thinking about such crucial issues as war and peace, civil government, marriage, parenting, even agrarian v. suburban lifestyles. I began to realize how little I really understood what our Lord did when He created the family, the church, and society.

What I try to offer here at Dave Black Online is a biblical look at these and other issues. I have provided numerous examples from my own life. More importantly, I have tried to analyze, in depth, what Scripture says. The result is something my wife and I are striving to achieve in every area of our life.

One area I’ve come to realize is vitally important in our society is the importance of sound doctrine as a basis for everything we do as a family, as a church, and as a society. Thankfully, within conservative Christianity there is an increasing number of people whose lives are marked by a growing hunger after God Himself. They are eager for truth and will not be put off with glib sermons. They refuse to be satisfied with traditional “interpretations.” They are athirst for the living God, and they will not be satisfied until they have personally tasted the Word of Life.

The Baptist expositor Charles H. Spurgeon once said:

We only progress in sound living as we progress in sound understanding. “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” Do not say of any error, “It is a mere matter of opinion.” No man indulges an error of judgment, without sooner or later tolerating an error in practice. Hold fast the truth, for by so holding the truth shall you be sanctified by the Spirit of God.

The great pastor-teacher A. W. Tozer put it this way:

It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God’s children starving while actually seated at the Father’s table. The truth of Wesley’s words is established before our eyes: “Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is proof of this.”

Thanks to our splendid Bible societies and to other effective agencies for the dissemination of the Word, there are today many millions of people who hold “right opinions,” probably more than ever before in the history of the Church. Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true spiritual worship was ever at a lower ebb. To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the “program.” This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.

Sound Bible exposition is an imperative must in the Church of the living God. Without it no church can be a New Testament church in any strict meaning of that term. But exposition may be carried on in such way as to leave the hearers devoid of any true spiritual nourishment whatever. For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience, they are not the better for having heard the truth. The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.

In my opinion, the primary reason for the confusion regarding what the Bible teaches is the absence of Bible teaching! I believe that sound biblical teaching, and sound biblical teaching alone, can cure the basic ailments of the church. Expository preaching presents the whole counsel of God and avoids illegitimate proof-texting (pulling verses out of context or reading meanings into them never intended by the Holy Spirit).

An example of expository preaching is the ministry of the Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli. Like Luther, Zwingli believed that the Catholic Church had fallen away from the teachings of the Bible. Yet Zwingli made even more of the Scriptures as the pattern for the church than did Luther. Generally speaking, the Lutherans had followed the Catholic practice of reading only certain portions of the Bible in church each Sunday. Zwingli, on the other hand, started his preaching in Zurich in the year 1519 by going through the Gospel of Matthew word by word and verse by verse. Nor did he use a translation. He had the Greek New Testament in front of him on the pulpit and explained its meaning to the people in his own words. For people to rediscover the meaning of God’s Word was more thrilling than the discovery of America by Columbus!

I cannot emphasize this enough: Christians that are well-taught are well-equipped for life. Tragically, so much of what we call “preaching” today is nothing more than an extended evangelistic altar call, followed by umpteen verses of an “invitational” hymn until someone comes forward to “get saved” or “rededicate” their life. However, the Scriptures say that the pastor is to be, first and foremost, a teacher (Eph 4:11). One of the qualifications to be a pastor is to be “able to preach?”—no, “able to teach” (1 Tim 3:2).  And 1 Corinthians 14:26 makes it clear that everything done in the church is to be for “edification,” that is, for the building up of the saints. That’s why I have published articles calling for a return to biblical teaching in our pulpits. These include:

• Solus Christus, Sola Scriptura!

• Pastors, Join the Black Regiment!

• Brethren, Let Us Return to New Testament Practices

• Want to Reform Your Youth Ministry? Reject Adolescence!

• No More Excuses: Pastors Must Get Serious About Teaching Their Flocks

• Let Pastors Teach!

So I ask: where are the teachers in our pulpits? They are scarcely to be found, despite the fact that our Lord’s Final Commission requires us to teach new converts in order to “make disciples” out of them (Matt 28:19). He said: “…teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.”

This is the Great Omission in the Great Commission. May God raise up a new generation of pastor-teachers who will change this forever!

June 7, 2004

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com. His latest book, Why I Stopped Listening to Rush: Confessions of a Recovering Neocon, will be released later this month.

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The Great Need

 David Alan Black 

In a day when edification was never more urgent it seems that the church’s teaching mission was never more lacking. One might almost say that the contemporary church has all but forgotten that an indispensable part of our Lord’s Great Commission to His church was “teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19). Indeed, the very concept of the pastor as a teacher has dropped out of our vocabulary. Pastors (usually called “preachers” here in the South) are expected to administer, counsel, and preach, but rarely are they expected to teach the Word of God in a systematic fashion. In fact, in Ethiopia I have yet to find one pastor who teaches the Bible verse by verse, passage by passage. An urgent need remains today for surveying the whole problem of the pastoral ministry with special reference to the need for edification and the methods by which such a need can most effectively and scripturally be fulfilled.

What impels me to insist that the pastoral role is supremely one of teaching and not preaching? We may learn the answer from the apostle Paul. At the beginning of his list of qualifications for overseers in 1 Timothy 3, Paul writes that pastors are to be “able to teach” (didaktikon). This provides strong biblical warrant for requiring overseers to be teachers. This is confirmed by Paul when he writes to Titus that an overseer “must be devoted to the trustworthy message that is in agreement with our teaching, so that he may be able to encourage others with healthy doctrine and refute those who oppose it” (Tit. 1:9) and when he says to the Ephesians that Christ “gifted some to be…pastor-teachers, in order to equip the saints to do the work of ministry” (Eph. 4:11-12).

It may come as a surprise to many Christians, even as a shock, that the role of pastors is regularly expressed in the New Testament in terms of teaching. They expect their pastors to deliver pithy sermons or evangelistic talks but not to exposit the Bible systematically. It is not surprising therefore that the Lord Jesus, in describing the role of the good shepherd (pastor) in John 10, emphasizes his feeding ministry. The good shepherd is concerned that his sheep always have enough to eat. Thus Jesus was primarily a teacher, feeding His disciples with the good pasture of instruction.

It is tragic beyond words that this high and holy purpose of Christ to edify His Body through pastor-teachers has been frequently diluted by the church. Instead of the faithful exposition of the Word of God, the teaching ministry becomes a pathetic attempt to induce people to live better lives. But Scripture teaches, and experience confirms, that the greet need today in our churches is for a knowledge of God’s Word and a spirit of obedience to its teachings. Such knowledge and obedience is expected of every Christian.

Ultimately edification is the responsibility of the whole church and every member of it (cf. Col. 3:16: “teaching and admonition one another”). But Christ expects His under-shepherds to take the initiative in feeding the flock of God.

The health of the church depends on it.

January 20, 2006

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com.

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The Great Evangelical Heresy

 David Alan Black

In his book How Should We Then Live? the late evangelical philosopher Francis Schaeffer wrote, “Pragmatism, doing what seems to work without regard to fixed principles of right or wrong, is largely in control. In both international and home affairs, expediency—at any price to maintain personal peace and affluence at the moment—is the accepted procedure. Absolute principles have little or no meaning in the place to which the decline of Western thought has come.”

Schaeffer, at whose feet I had the privilege of sitting while a student in Switzerland, was right. Evangelicalism has been contaminated by the very disease it has tried to cure—secularism and pragmatism, a philosophy of life void of eternals. It is the great evangelical heresy of experience first, Bible second.

“The danger when men stop believing in God,” said G. K. Chesterton, “is not that they will believe in nothing, but that they will believe in anything.” This quote aptly summarizes the point at which our modern society has devolved. The central evangelical difficulty is its experience-focused, individualistic, man-centered, anti-intellectual philosophy. For the Reformers, doctrine was central and Christian “experience” followed, but modern evangelicalism has largely reversed the picture, making human experience central and using (abusing?) Scripture to bolster what it has already “felt.” I believe this is one of the reasons why not a few evangelical churches have fallen into the grip of so-called “seeker-sensitive” practices, since such practices invariably appeal to the desire to attain the most remarkable spiritual jolts.

Only a Reformation perspective can save us from our worst enemy—our own hubris. National revival will be possible only when the Word of God is introduced into every sphere of life by those committed to the scriptural Christ. In focusing attention on the Word of God instead of the word of man, the Reformers sought to reverse the great evangelical heresy by insisting on God first and man second, revelation first and knowledge second, Gospel first and faith second, justification first and sanctification second—in a word, the supremacy of God in the first rank and man’s religious experience secondarily related to it.

Where today are the men who will stand up for this Word of God fearlessly? Belief in an inerrant message from God should make a man prophetic. He should be impelled by it to speak forth (“forth-tell”) relative to the great issues of his day. In America hardly a trace of this prophetic outlook survives. The same old pious formulas are repeated Sunday after Sunday. How lazy and beholden to tradition we have become!

Long before the controversy in the Episcopal Church, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote:

It is not surprising that the ministry should attract crackpots, eccentrics and oddities who in happier times would have appeared as characters in Waugh’s earlier novels rather than as beneficed clergymen. Scarcely a day goes by but some buffoon in holy orders makes an exhibition of himself in one way or another, more often than not on the subject of sex—that pons asinorum of our time. Can it be wondered at, then, that the Church’s voice, when heard, is more often than not greeted with derision or just ignored?

I believe it is time to reverse this trend. The start of a new academic year is an opportunity to substitute Christ-made for man-made on everything we do. Perhaps God may then grant us a national rebirth, a new era of dependence on Him and the Scripture.

The humblest student who is in the school of Christ is “wiser” than the profoundest sage whose eyes have never been opened to the reality of God’s transcendent glory. In focusing attention on God instead of man, the Reformers can lead us back to eternal standards of righteousness rather than ephemeral human traditions.

August 12, 2003

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com.

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The Majesty of the Great Commission

Darrell Dow

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them inthe name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”  (Matt. 28:18-)

The contemporary Church largely ignores the Great Commission.  Dr. Tom Rainer, dean of the Billy Graham School at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, found that 90- of Christians have never shared their faith with another person.  Rainer concludes from his research that perhaps, “the most eye-opening discovery we made about the unchurched person’s attitude towards us Christians is that most of them would like to hear about Jesus Christ from us. Yet the vast majority of the unchurched with whom we spoke have never had a Christian share their faith with them.”

Yet even when Christians muster up the courage to discuss the Cross, that is often where we stop.  Today, there is a tremendous need for Biblical evangelism that surpasses tract passing and personal testimony.  What is needed is a comprehensive program that brings the comprehensive message of salvation to every individual.

Evangelicals have an extremely narrow view of God’s Kingdom and His purposes.  What is the purpose of the Great Commission?  Is it merely direction to the Church to witness in a hopeless and dying world, snatching a few desperate souls from the fiery cauldron of the lake of fire?  Or should Jesus’ directive give us hope that the Holy Spirit will empower the Church to promote salvation against the world and the evil one?

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus asks His disciples the BIG question that we must all answer—“Who do you say I am?”  Peter responds by saying, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”  Next, Jesus tells Peter that upon his confession, “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”  The picture painted by our Lord is of a militant and empowered body of believers, taking the light of the Gospel message into the world and scattering the darkness.  It is the forces of evil manning the barricades against the Church, not visa versa.

Though Satan is a mighty enemy, described as a roaring lion, Scripture gives us comfort that in light of Jesus’ victory at Golgotha, the strong man has been bound, and we are to plunder his house (Matt. 12:29) and occupy it until Jesus returns. 

Thankfully, we have not been left powerless to fulfill our mission.  We have the Word of God, which is sharper than a two-edged sword, and access to God through prayer.  Most importantly, we have Jesus’ promise that He will be with us always in the person of the Holy Spirit, who was sent to be our counselor and minister. 

Aside from the purpose of the Great Commission, Evangelicals also frequently misunderstand its nature as well.  Is it merely individualistic, with the hope of saving individual lost sinners and training them in their private “walk with God” and public worship?  Or is its goal to necessarily transform individuals with the expectation that they will make a difference in the world, creating a Christian culture?

Dave Black recently discussed the perversion of the “individualistic” Gospel.  He writes:

One of the perversions of the Gospel I think needs eliminating today is the emphasis upon personal evangelism to the detriment or exclusion of any social emphasis. I do not question the fact that salvation is personal and individual, but it is far more than that. However, for many evangelicals the emphasis on the personal and individual has increasingly made salvation individualistic. The whole of the Christian experience is thought to be one’s personal relationship to God – often to the exclusion of one’s relationship with others or to the culture in general.

Salvation is both personal and social. Since sin is personal, each individual is guilty of sin and must be forgiven for his sin, not someone else’s. However, salvation is also social. Jesus is Lord of all. Politics, education, economics, the arts – all these are included under His divine Lordship. Thus Christians must come to understand that although salvation is individual and personal, the kingdom of God is far broader than just our personal salvation experiences.

In Genesis 1, God gives Adam the command, “Be fruitful, and multiply, replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” 

Man’s task in accordance with God’s command and our own nature, having been created in His image, is to exercise dominion and develop culture.  As a “federal head,” Adam did not merely act on his own behalf, but as a representative for all of mankind.  Thus his fall into sin was imputed to all humanity and perverted the God-given desire to exercise authority in God’s name, and replaced it with a desire to become God ourselves.  Consequently, Christ’s representative and vicarious death was necessary to restore and renew the image of God of allow redeemed men to bring the creation into submission to God.  Thus, there is an intimate connection between the Great Commission and the Cultural Mandate. 

As Christians, our duty is not simply to fill our churches and drag new converts into the baptistery.  We are to make disciples for our Lord, and teach them to obey everything God has commanded. 

True Christian discipleship recognizes that every sphere of life is under the authority of God, and Christ’s salvation and healing is not merely for individuals, but also for the creation that groans under the impact of sin.    As Gary North has written, “Nothing is to be excluded from Christ’s healing: not the family, not the State, not business, not education, and surely not the institutional church.  Salvation is the salve that heals the wounds inflicted by sin: every type of wound from every type of sin.”

Let us rediscover the majesty of the Great Commission.

December 18, 2004

Darrell Dow writes from Louisville.  He is the husband of Kathy, father of Andrew, Joshua, and Jackson.  Darrell currently works as a statistician and is first and foremost a Christian.  Darrell maintains a website and weblog and may be contacted here. 

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Grand Reformation Tour

12 days from only $2,599 • May 29 – June 9, 2005

 David Alan Black

Dear DBO Reader:

I would like to invite you to join me on a 12 day escorted tour featuring Germany, France, and Switzerland. This is a unique opportunity to gain an overview of the Reformation by visiting the sites associated with Hus, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and the Anabaptists. You’ll learn about your Christian heritage, meet local believers, and have the trip of a lifetime. Southeastern Seminary students will have the opportunity to earn three units of credit by signing up for 2150: Church History Study Tour.

If you would like further information about the tour, please go to my special webpage at Reformation Tours, or call Rowena Drinkhouse, toll-free, at 1-800-303-5534. You will never speak with a more pleasant individual (British accent and all!).

I hope many of you will be able to share with me the beauty and history of Reformation Europe!

Warmly,

Dave Black

May 18, 2004

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com. His latest book, Why I Stopped Listening to Rush: Confessions of a Recovering Neocon, will be released this year.

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Graduate, Be Like Jesus!

 David Alan Black 

Perhaps the gravest danger facing every graduate is pride. The New Testament is very clear about this sin.

As Christians we are members of one another, a Body with many different yet equally important parts. The members of this Body neither envy each other nor debate their relative importance. Each of us has a job to do, and we are to carry out our God-given responsibilities in humility, however prominent – or however unseen – those responsibilities may be. Each is to fulfill his task without conceit and without false humility. Whatever gifts we have come from God, and we must use our gifts not for our own personal prestige but for the common good.

When Paul wrote to the Romans, he spoke of “the grace that is given to me of God” (Rom. 15:15). Paul regarded himself as nothing more than the receiver and transmitter of grace. It is one of the great warnings of Scripture that if we pride ourselves in our own abilities we cease to be a pipeline through which the grace of God can flow out to others.

If anybody had the right to be proud, it was the apostle Paul. He had been given the privilege of knowing great secrets about the kingdom of God and of being the instrument by which the Gospel went out to the Gentiles. Yet these privileges did not make Paul arrogant. He was always more concerned that Christ should be seen in him than that he should be noticed. To the Ephesians he wrote, “It is to me, less than the least of all the saints, that this grace has been given” (Eph. 3:8). Privilege made Paul humble, not proud; and to emphasize this point he coined a term: “leaster.” Paul was less than the least – the “leaster” – of all God’s sanctified people. One of the great disservices we can to do our fellow believer is to forget this truth and to make him think that he is inferior to us.

There is only one Body. Christ is its Head, and when He ascended on high He gave gifts to men. This is the essential difference between the man of God and the man of the world. The Christian is under the authority of his Head and does everything by the grace of Christ, just as every part of a healthy body moves at the behest of the brain. The man of God shines as a light, but the light is not his own. It is the light of Christ shining through him.

If we would serve Christ, let us have His mind and lay aside our personal ambitions, our pride, and our desire for prominence. Instead, let us have His humble and selfless desire to serve rather than be served.

December 10, 2013

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com.

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Grades and the Gospel

 David Alan Black  

At the beginning of my thirty-fourth year of teaching perhaps you’ll allow me a few random thoughts about education.

1) Teaching is not teaching unless lives have been changed. It is not mere instruction we need in the classroom. Instead we need men and women who will model the Jesus lifestyle. Those who do, who depend completely on the living God and not on their own intellectual prowess, are the people God will use to shake our generation.

2) Information is not a product to be marketed. Today we have a glut of information about the Bible. The result is often a slavish dependence upon computers, degrees, education, management skills, and human talent. If there appears to be any human explanation for what we do, we jump on it. When this happens, our science and technology become nothing more than tools of the Evil One. It is only when we are freed from our over-dependence on human plans, programs, and leaders are we able to trust God rather than ourselves.

3) Our “studies” often betray our callous indifference to God and what matters most to Him. If we love the Lord our God the way we say we do, how can we spend so little time in doing what is of eternal importance? The world is looking for handsome, self-important people to lead it, but God is looking for humble, Spirit-dependent people who will love the lost as He does.

4) If you are a student and a follower of the Lord Jesus, you have a lot more to worry about than good grades and a diploma. God has prospered you for a reason. The fields are white unto harvest NOW. Millions of people in Asia have never once heard the Gospel and have never seen a Bible, let alone spoken with a Christian. Remember: we’re talking about real people with real souls.

Through the years I’ve often closed my classes with a prayer that contains these words: “Lord, make us winsome and attractive for the Gospel.” I got the imagery from 2 Cor. 2:15. Paul says our lives are to be a “fragrant aroma.” We are to influence others like perfume. Our goal is not to beat people into submission with arguments. I have yet to witness a debate where anyone’s mind was changed. Maybe you have, but I haven’t. I think Paul is saying that redemptive people are winsome. And even when they do engage in apologetics (a legitimate enterprise), they have an attractive fragrance that stands out from the aromas of the world. In short, Christians with a combative disposition do not help the cause of Christ.

So, dear Lord, please make us winsome and attractive for the Gospel. Please help us to put a lost world before grades.

It can be done, and by God’s grace it must be done.

October 11, 2010

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com.

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Graders Who Don’t Grade

 David Alan Black 

Recently I had a discussion with a college student about teachers and teaching. He expressed some frustration that his term papers were being graded only on form. Content wasn’t even being looked at. “Turabian is all that matters,” he noted dourly. What’s more, the professors themselves weren’t grading their students’ papers. That was left to a “grader.”

If he was shocked at what he was experiencing in college, he was even more shocked when I said to him, “I have had several graders, but one thing they never do for me is grade.” I have always graded my students’ papers myself – even in my New Testament Introduction classes, which average over 100 pupils. That’s two hundred 10-page papers a semester, which I read myself and always leave comments on.

I remember the frustration I had when I was in seminary and had just toiled over some paper, only to discover that a “grader” had assigned me my grade. I believed that assigning grades was the prof’s responsibility. After all, he was making good money (well, he was making money at least) to teach me, and if I was going to sweat drops of blood working on a paper, it seemed only fitting that he should reciprocate, at least to a degree.

It’s all a matter of stewardship. I grade my students’ papers because I believe that’s my responsibility under God as a teacher. So if students have a problem with the grade or a question about a comment that was made on the paper, they know with whom to remonstrate. The only exception I make are in my Greek classes, where I have the students grade their own quizzes and exams immediately after taking them, which reinforces the learning experience and is just plain pedagogically sound.

Just as not all “pastors” are pastors, so not all “teachers” and teachers. (By the way, not all “students” are students either, but that’s a topic for another day.) The gifted teacher is eager to do his best to help his students, even at the price of personal inconvenience. He has an “open door policy,” knowing that the steps of a righteous man are ordered by the Lord, and that by putting his students before his own research and writing there will always be time for his own research and writing. In 29 years of teaching I have had an open door for students, and no student who visits my office is ever considered an “interruption.” At the same time, I have (by the grace of God) been able to produce not a few journal articles and books along the way, but never, I might add, at the cost of my real calling, which is to teach and mentor and “shepherd” (I like that term) my precious God-given charges.

What, then, do my graders do? Rote work. Recording scores. Averaging final grades. Running down books in the library. Substitute teaching when I have to attend a professional meeting. I choose my graders for the potential they show as teachers, and I work with them in a mentorship relationship to help them achieve their goals.

Peter put it this way: “Just as each one has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of the varied grace of God. Whoever speaks, let it be with God’s words. Whoever serves, do so with the strength that God supplies, so that in everything God will be glorified through Jesus Christ.”

Folks, it’s as simple as that. Determine what God has gifted you to do, then do it (yourself). Don’t shuffle your responsibilities and duties onto the shoulders of others, even if others are paying them to do that. Martin Luther noted (commenting on 1 Peter 4:7-11):

Peter would remind especially each individual to take heed to the duties of his particular office. In the pursuance of his own occupation, each is to attend faithfully to whatever is committed to his charge; to do whatever he is commanded to do. As the Scriptures teach in many places, there is no work nobler than being obedient to the particular calling and work assigned of God, and satisfied therein; faithfully serving one’s neighbor and not gazing after what is committed to, or enjoined upon, another, nor presuming to transcend the limits of one’s own commission.

I couldn’t have said it any better.

April 21, 2005

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com. If you would like to know more about becoming a follower of King Jesus, please feel free to write Dave.

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