If you attend a traditional church there is a pretty decent chance that at least on of your current Sunday school classes is using a video curriculum of some sort. I know that smaller churches especially use these quite frequently. I also understand why churches use these. Who wouldn’t want to have Louie Giglio teaching your pupils instead of Joe the trucker with no theological training?
In my past life as a youth pastor I received numerous pleas from companies to try their product for our teaching time. I never did because one of my great passions is preaching and teaching. However, I am now an associate pastor and my responsibility in some areas is less “hands-on”. Rather than teaching myself I am responsible for filling certain areas with people to teach.
Yet, I still would rather have Joe the trucker teaching instead of pre-packaged teaching from some of the best teachers in the world. Why?
First of all, God has placed Joe the trucker in our local church and not Louie Giglio. Therefore, assuming that Joe the trucker has a passion and a certain giftedness for teaching, he is meant to fill that teaching role even if he is less polished.
Secondly, my job as a pastor is to train the people in our local church for the works of ministry. I am not certain that I am faithfully doing that if I pop in a video rather than spending the hard work of training an unpolished trucker how to teach the Bible.
There are also other practical reasons that I prefer not to use pre-packaged videos. And I am not saying that in every instance using videos is wrong for a teaching session. They can be very helpful if used in moderation and accompanied with more personal teaching. But as for me I prefer training instead of polished.
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P.S. I really love the Louie Giglio videos and have used them on occasion myself. I used the passion teaching series simply as an example. In my opinion those are actually a great resource to use to compliment the regular teaching of an unpolished Joe the trucker.
