Bible Training – Michelle Lesley

Originally published June 15, 2023

See my 2024 update at the end of this article.

I recently had the great pleasure of participating in the inaugural G3 Women’s Expository Teaching Workshop. I had a wonderful time and learned so much! Here are six reasons I would encourage you to make sure you’re signed up for the next one!

1.
G3 has a biblical perspective on women teaching.

There are two unbiblical extremes when it comes to women teaching. On the left: egalitarianism. Women can pastor, preach, exercise authority over men – anything goes. On the right: hyper-patriarchy. Women can teach other women practical homemaking and childrearing skills, but that’s it. Any biblical teaching or learning has to come from your father, husband, or pastor.

G3’s perspective is right in the biblical middle of those two unbiblical extremes: No, women can’t preach, pastor, instruct men in the Scriptures, or exercise authority over men in the gathering of the church body, but we can and should pour the gospel, and Scripture as a whole, into our children, and the women and children of our churches. And it’s important that we be properly equipped to do that. If you’re gifted to teach and want to hone your skills, or even if you just want to learn to study the Bible more accurately, G3 will equip you from a biblical perspective.

2.
You’ll learn to handle Scripture
in a serious, scholarly way.

Look out across the vast wasteland of the women’s “Bible” study industry, and what do you see? “Bible” studies that encourage you to focus on your feelings. Narcissistic navel-gazing. A plethora of personal anecdotes from the author. And what little Scripture is included is mishandled, misunderstood, and misapplied.

But a G3 expository teaching workshop for women will help you to become “a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). You’ll learn about immediate, historical, and biblical context, the structure of the passage and how to outline it, how to find the central proposition of the passage, and so much more. It will equip you to bless your children and the women and children of your church with rich Bible teaching instead of fluff and false doctrine.

3.
You’ll learn from the outstanding men of G3

They’re all pastors with years of experience in rightly preaching and teaching God’s Word, so you’ll get to learn from the best. Our main teachers were Josh Buice and Tom Buck. They taught us thoroughly without expecting us to be seminary-trained or talking down to us as though we knew nothing of the Bible. We gained a great deal from their instruction about studying and teaching.

Thank you so much to G3 and Three Sixteen Publishing for
providing each participant with a new Legacy Standard Bible!

4.
Small groups

Before arriving at the workshop, each participant studies and prepares teaching notes on a passage(s) of Scripture. In your small group of about 6-8 women, you’ll work together to correct and fine tune your outline and notes. The women leading the small groups have been trained by the men leading the workshop, so they’re “well versed,” so to speak, in the passages at hand, and the small groups work uniformly with the lecture sessions. The small groups are a wonderful time of encouragement.

5.
Fellowship

What could be a greater joy than to make new friends from all over the country, and to be reunited with old friends you don’t get to see often enough? The fellowship at the workshop was practically non-stop. From communing over the Word together in our small groups, to relationship-building over meals, to after hours fun and frolic, it was a foretaste of the “together forever-ness” we’ll have around the Throne for all eternity.

This is only the second time my A Word Fitly Spoken podcast partner and dear friend, Amy Spreeman, and I have been able to meet in person. It was such a treat to spend the weekend with her! Many thanks to my former pastor, Laramie Minga, now Director of Media and Managing Editor for G3, for giving us a tour of G3, including the podcast recording studio!

6.
I guess you had to be there.

Probably the most common question asked about the G3 expository teaching workshop for women is, “Will it be recorded?”. No. And that’s a good thing! There are some things you just can’t experience through a screen – you have to get out there and do them! You could listen to the lectures on a recording, but that was only a small part of the weekend. You couldn’t participate in the Q&A after the lectures on a recording. You couldn’t work collaboratively with your small group on a recording. And you certainly couldn’t enjoy and be encouraged by the fellowship with the other ladies on a recording. This is one of those things – like riding a bike or visiting the Grand Canyon – where you just have to be there.

The G3 expository teaching workshop for women was incredibly helpful. Encouraging. Edifying. Sharpening. A warm time of fellowship around God’s Word with other women just like you and me who want to get better at teaching the Bible. I cannot recommend it highly enough to you. If you can make the sacrifice to be at the next one, make it.

To be alerted to the details for the next workshop, be sure to sign up for the G3 email list, get the G3 app, and follow G3 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

A word to the wise – when you see registration open up for the next workshop, register immediately. The first workshop sold out in 48 hours.

I hope to see you at a G3 event in the future!

2024 Update

Last year, I attended the workshop as a participant. This year, I had the privilege of attending as an apprentice – training to lead a small group in the future. I felt like I was better prepared and learned so much more this year. (So, maybe if you’re planning to attend a workshop, plan to attend twice! :0)

Photo courtesy of G3
Josh Buice training small group leaders and apprentices

Tom Buck instructing the attendees

Josh Buice instructing the attendees

Photo courtesy of G3
Class of 2024

Last year, I explained why you should attend a workshop. This year, I’d like to share some advice, personal observations as an attendee (from me, personally, not from G3), and thoughts that have occurred to me about what to expect and how to prepare yourself if you’re considering attending a workshop.

◇ Understand that this is a workshop, not a conference. You don’t duck in on whichever plenary or breakout sessions sound interesting and cruise the exhibit hall and bookstore when nothing else suits your fancy. This is a lot more like a seminary level hermeneutics course crammed into two days. You’re there to work. You arrive with your homework completed, and you attend all of the teaching and small group sessions so you can learn what you need to learn, take it home, and implement it.

◇ You should thoroughly familiarize yourself with G3’s theology if you haven’t already, and don’t attend if you’re not willing to put any disagreement you may have with it aside in order to learn agreeably and cooperatively.

◇ Due to the lackadaisical way many pastors preach and the abysmal teaching (if it can be called that) model the women’s Bible study industry generally uses, the mindset and methodology G3 employs for analyzing and exegeting Scripture is likely to be completely foreign to you and go against the grain of everything you thought you knew about studying and teaching Scripture. In other words, prepare yourself for a whole new way of thinking about and approaching Scripture – a change of mind, for the better. In fact, let me give you a little illustration…

If you’ve ever taken piano lessons, you know that you don’t arrive at your first lesson, sit down, and play one of Brahms’ concertos. You start with the building blocks: notes, timing, key signatures, chord structure, scales, and all the other lovely aspects of music theory. If you’re like me the two times I tried piano lessons, you’ll probably go home thinking, “What in the world did I get myself into? I just wanted to learn how to play the piano!” – especially if you already know how to play by ear. It can be kind of frustrating until you realize you are learning how to play the piano – properly.

That’s kind of what this workshop is like. We’re out here playing by ear, not realizing our timing is off and our chords aren’t structured properly, and the workshop scraps all of that and starts us from scratch to teach us proper “Bible theory”: this is a quarter note, here’s how you count in 4/4, forte means “loud”.

And if you come in thinking you already know everything about Bible study and teaching instead of humbly being ready to learn something new, you’re going to get discouraged and frustrated.

◇ Because the women’s workshop is just getting off the ground, attendance is very limited and there’s a long waiting list for the few slots available. If you manage to secure a slot, prepare yourself as I’ve mentioned above, and put forth your best effort. It’s not fair to the dozens of women who really wanted to attend and would have put forth their best effort for you to arrive ill prepared, miss sessions for non-urgent reasons, quit midway through the workshop, etc.

◇ Since the teaching sessions and small group sessions are so intensive and everything builds on everything else, I think you’ll get so much more out of a workshop if you’ll attend during a distraction-free season of your life. If you have a family situation or a business to run that requires you to constantly step out of the room to take phone calls, if you have an infant who’s too young to be separated from you for a few days, or if you have some other situation requiring a lot of your attention, my best advice is to wait until you can attend the workshop undistracted. It’s not that any of those things bother the other attendees, it’s that you will miss so much and will not get your full money’s worth if you’re not able to stay in the room and stay focused on the teaching. And you may even miss presenting your assigned passages of Scripture to your small group, which is a major component of the workshop.

Arrive prepared and do your best, and you’ll find a G3 Women’s Expository Teaching Workshop to be one of the most valuable experiences of your life. I hope to see you at a workshop in the future!

No one asked me to write this article, and I didn’t get any sort of discounts or perks for writing it. You know me – when I find a fantastic, doctrinally sound resource, I recommend it to you, and the G3 expository teaching workshop for women is one of those resources!

Special Events, Uncategorized

6 Reasons You Should Attend the Next G3 Women’s Expository Teaching Workshop

June 15, 2023June 12, 2023 Michelle Lesley

1.
G3 has a biblical perspective on women teaching.

2.
You’ll learn to handle Scripture
in a serious, scholarly way.

3.
You’ll learn from the outstanding men of G3

Thank you so much to G3 and Three Sixteen Publishing for
providing each participant with a new Legacy Standard Bible!

4.
Small groups

5.
Fellowship

6.
I guess you had to be there.

To be alerted to the details for the next workshop, be sure to sign up for the G3 email list, get the G3 app, and follow G3 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

A word to the wise – when you see registration open up for the next workshop, register immediately. The first workshop sold out in 48 hours.

I hope to see you at a G3 event in the future!

Bible Study, Church

McBible Study and the Famine of God’s Word

November 11, 2016January 13, 2025 Michelle Lesley

“Why can’t we just be taught a book of the Bible?” I heard this again today from a Christian woman hungry for her church to teach her the truth of God’s word. It’s a cry being raised by women from all over, scrounging through the dumpster of “Bible” teaching their church currently offers, searching for something – anything – that will nourish their hearts, minds, and souls with biblical truth so that they might actually be able to grow in Christ.

What’s going on here, church? Pastors? Women’s ministries? Why are godly women starving for the word of God at their own churches? This is a problem. And it’s not a small one. And it’s not going away. It’s getting worse.

My family is a one income family. My husband works hard to provide for us, and we’ve made a lot of (completely worthwhile) sacrifices so I can stay home and raise and home school our children. One of those sacrifices is that we rarely get to eat out, even at a fast food restaurant. That means I cook. A lot. Fortunately, I happen to enjoy cooking, but it does take several hours of work a week. And sometimes, at the end of a long day, I’m tired and not particularly in the mood to spend a couple of hours on my feet chopping and mixing and sautéeing and stirring and roasting. I’d much rather chuck it and have my husband pick up McDonald’s on his way home. In fact, if we could afford it, and I couldn’t cook, and I thought it was healthy, my family would probably eat fast food for supper three or four times a week. I like fast food. My kids LOVE fast food. And why do all that work if you don’t have to and there’s an easier option, right?

But that’s no way to feed a family. It makes people obese and can lead to all kinds of other physical problems like heart disease, hypertension, and digestive ailments because the majority of fast food is high in the bad stuff (cholesterol, sodium, fat) and low in the good stuff (fiber, vitamins, minerals). Not to mention that having other people do the work God has assigned me is the lazy way out.

Yet while it’s easy to see how detrimental and unhealthy it is to feed a family a regular fare of fast food in the physical realm, this is exactly what most churches are doing in the spiritual realm when it comes to their Bible study menu.

“My pastor asked me to teach a women’s Bible study class. What’s a good book to use?”
“Why don’t you just teach them a book of the Bible?”
“Oh, I don’t feel equipped to do that.”

“Our Sunday School class is looking for a new curriculum. Any suggestions?”
“How about just working through a book of the Bible?”
“Our teacher works a lot of hours and doesn’t really have the time to study and prepare like that.”

screenshot-2016-11-10-at-12-31-44-pm-edited

I hear this kind of thing over and over and over again. Churches aren’t even attempting to train people to properly teach the Bible, and Bible study “teachers,” (often through no fault of their own) either don’t know they need to be trained, or don’t have training available to them, or they’re unwilling or unable to put in the time and effort to be trained and to prepare lessons.

We have classes that need teachers, so we take whoever is available and willing, and we stick them in front of a group of people, hand them a take out bag of McBible Studies written by the celebrity Christian du jour and say, “Here. Feed the church family.”

That’s a problem in and of itself, first and foremost, because relying solely on pre-fab studies due to the fact that no one is trained to instruct the people of your church in the word of God isn’t biblical. The Bible says that pastors, elders, and teachers in the local church body should be “able to teach.” Not facilitate. Not read aloud what someone else wrote. Not “able to work a DVD player.” Teach.

But recruiting “teachers” who are unskilled in handling God’s word to lead a pre-packaged study often morphs into another dangerous problem, especially in the area of women’s Bible study: importing false doctrine into your church. Here’s a list of LifeWay’s top selling books for 2015. Every single non-fiction book on this list that’s likely to be used for a women’s group or individual Bible study (seven of the twelve by my count- which is a staggering proportion considering LifeWay also sells men’s studies, theology books, training manuals, “Christian living” books, and a wide variety of other non-fiction topics, but I digress) is written by a false teacher. Every. single.one.

In my research of women’s Bible study authors and teachers, I estimate that approximately ninety-five per cent of the the female authors and teachers on the shelves at your local Christian retailer are false teachers. That goes way beyond a biblical “diet” laden with cholesterol and fat. Now, we’re talking about spiritual food tainted with E.coli. If you’ve got a woman in your church who’s facilitating a class using materials by one of these false teachers because she’s not competent enough in God’s word to teach the Bible, how in the world is she going to be able to catch and correct the false doctrine these Christian celebrities are teaching her class?

The answer is: she’s not. In fact, her awareness of her own incompetence in Scripture and her assumption that the Christian celebrity knows what she’s talking about (Because, after all, she’s a celebrity and LifeWay sells her materials, so she must know what she’s talking about, right?) will have the exact opposite effect. She will downplay and keep quiet about any nagging doubts – assuming she knows her Bible well enough to even have those doubts – in her own mind that the Christian celebrity is teaching things contrary to sound doctrine, and she will affirm the false doctrine that’s being taught. Then, this harmful bacteria of false doctrine will spread from woman to woman and class to class, and discerning women, knowing that the kitchen is contaminated, will grow emaciated from a lack of clean cuisine to feed on. We end up with a church full of “Bible” study and Sunday School classes that teach fluff and false doctrine instead of the unadulterated word of God. To borrow from Coleridge: “Food, food, every where, nor any bite to eat.” We’ve got a famine of God’s word, right in His very own house.

Church, pastors, women’s ministries- we’ve got to put a stop to this. People teaching Sunday School, Bible study classes, and, particularly, women’s Bible study classes must be trained in basic hermeneutics, the competent handling of God’s word in context, and the ability to teach sound doctrine as well as to refute the false. Do we not believe Scripture, or somehow think our church is exempt from it, when it says:

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. 2 Timothy 2:15

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. James 3:1

Where is our fear of God and our obedience to His word? We would never think of letting an untrained, incompetent teacher teach our children math or science in school when all that’s at stake is their academic education. Why are we satisfied to let untrained people teach the Bible at church when people’s eternities are at stake?

It doesn’t take years of seminary training. I never went to culinary school, but I’m still able to cook and feed my family a healthy diet because of what I’ve learned from others. Pastors can train teachers. Skilled Bible teachers can train others to teach. There are even great books and materials that can help as you teach people how to teach the Bible.

A doctrinally sound book study can be a fun, interesting, or useful supplement to the regular, straight teaching of Scripture in a Bible study class, but even these shouldn’t be used in place of training teachers. The best theologian out there isn’t a living and active member of that class. He doesn’t know the strengths and weaknesses of the class’s theology. He can’t address their current struggles and questions. He doesn’t love them, care about them, pray for them, and labor in the Word for them.

Only real life, trained, biblically competent teachers can do those things. They are vital and they are irreplaceable.

So let’s quit shoving Happy Meals into the hands of women who are starving for the pure milk and meat of God’s word. Let’s offer some cooking classes and set the table so the members of our churches can sit down to a healthy, home cooked diet of nourishing food that will help them grow to spiritual maturity in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And, now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go start supper.