Engaging Students in Active Learning

It is important for teachers to model how to study the Bible and to help learners construct their own understanding, rather than just delivering information to students.

Creators and Guests

Host

Dr. Gregg Watson

Associate Dean of Academic Services & Professor of Old Testament Studies

Host

Dr. Paul Kelly

Professor of Educational Leadership

Host

Tyler Sanders

Director of Communications

Producer

Courtney McCaa

Digital Media Specialist

What is The Bible Teaching Podcast?

Practical instruction for today's church leaders with Dr. Paul Kelly and Dr. Gregg Watson.

Tyler Sanders 0:01
I'm your host, Tyler Sanders. I'm here with Dr. Paul Kelly and Dr. Gregg Watson. Today we are talking about how to bring your learners into an active learning context, or maybe to put it another way, how to do more than just share what you learned preparing the lesson, but how to bring them into their own way of dealing with the text. Is that right?

Dr. Kelly 0:22
Yeah, I think so. Tyler, I mean, as I look at the way that I started out learning how to teach, and the way that so many other people tend to teach the Bible, that our approach is to say; Okay, what I have to do is, I have to study the Bible as hard as I can and get as much information as I can. Because the more information that I can get, the better I'm going to do with my class. And so we dig into the text, we look at references, and we examine the text, we sort of break things down, we ask questions about specific words and all that kind of stuff. And then, I learned so much by doing that, is what I'm trying to say, is that I learned so much myself about doing that, that this whole process of studying to be prepared is really helping me to get the text in my head. But then what I do is I go in and I impress the people in my class with all the stuff that I've learned, and I just sort of dump it on them. And it's helpful for people, I'm not saying that it's not, that they learn things from that, but they miss the opportunity to be on the journey that I was on when I was trying to study the text. And so because of that, my approach at just giving them information doesn't tend to engage them in the learning to the extent that I'd like for my learners to be engaged. And one of the things that I think it does is it makes them look to me as the authority, instead of looking to the Word of God as the authority,

Dr. Watson 1:53
It makes them complacent. It really makes them passive. I mean, I would like to think I'm good enough that they're learning everything they're ever going to need to know when I get up there and just machine gun them with the information and stuff. But that's not what making disciples is about. It's about giving them an understanding of how to root this stuff out of the text for themselves. So that they can come in and say, "No, no, no. Watson, I was thinking about this the other day, and I think this is what it is. Yours is wrong." I would love that!

Dr. Kelly 2:28
Maybe not every teacher wants that kind of experience. I don't know.

Tyler Sanders 2:32
But that first step is still super important. And we're not saying don't do that step. It's like, do a second step, where you take all that and figure out how's the best way for everyone else to kind of get all the things that I just got.

Dr. Kelly 2:44
I think what we're talking about is huge, because preparing to teach really is this two step process, at least two steps. I need to know the text, I need to study it, I need to do the best that I can to faithfully understand and be able to convey the truth that's here. But then I need to take a second step where I say, Okay, if this is what this text teaches, how do I help my people find that? How do I help them get that? Some of the educators, talk about that in order for somebody to have truth, that they can't just take it from your mouth to my ear, that it has to be constructed in my own head. And I think there's some truth to that. I think that there's a need for people to be able to build that truth together for themselves, and that takes a different approach than just dumping stuff on them. It means that I really have to engage them with the text in some ways that I think are different than that.

Dr. Watson 3:48
It means finding ways to teach the discipline of learning from the text. My experience in my Sunday school classes is, you you help them see something and all of a sudden they're running into the political arena. They're jiving into the politics of the region. They're doing all these things that really have nothing to do with the text. And in some cases, it's almost impossible to get them to turn back. Because they've been taught, they've been conditioned to say, once they hit a certain point, I can go anywhere I want to with this now, and they never get to rest in the text, or they never find the discipline of resting in the text.

Dr. Kelly 4:36
Yeah, and you've talked a lot about how we move way too quickly to application kind of issues without really understanding the text before we do that and that teaching the Bible ought to be more than just, "so what do I do with it today" that it ought to cause me to really be able to see and reflect on what the writer was talking about as he was engaging folks. Certainly, we want to make application of the text, but I think what you've talked about over and over again is how just moving quickly to application without developing a deep understanding of text can be problematic. And so, you know, your folks don't even want to pay attention to the text, it sounds like. It sounds like they just want to say, Hey, let's go talk about, Donald Trump or Kamala Harris or something like that instead.

Dr. Watson 5:20
They are fascinated with the text. And when you pull them into the historical and cultural stuff, and then bring some of the linguistic stuff into to bear on it, I like to do that background and then say, Okay, now that we've kind of got this out there, how do we read the text now? But, inevitably, at least 90% of the people in the class never come back to the text. They go running in all these different directions.

Dr. Kelly 5:52
Yeah. I think the other thing, Tyler, about this that's so important is that our job is not just to teach people what the text says. It's to model for them how to study the Bible for themselves. That we've developed a culture that's...a church culture, that's basically biblically illiterate because people don't engage with the text themselves in any kind of a consistent way. I teach teenagers quite a bit, and most of the time, when you're talking to teenagers, it's like they really feel a need to study the Bible. They just have trouble understanding it when they read it. So how do I help them to learn to understand it as they read it? We model that for them. We give them experiences in a classroom where there's somebody that can say, oh, yeah, think about it this way, so that we help them to get that. So that they're better able to know what questions to ask of the text, how to interact with it, how to think about it when they're trying to do that on their own.

Tyler Sanders 6:55
I mean, the Bible is a really big book. It's very big. And actually, I think this is probably what shocks some people when they come into seminary, they're looking to go into ministry, they've probably done a lot of Bible study, but after four years, or three years, you get your MDiv, you don't know everything. You actually come out and you're like, wow, I know so much less than I did going in. But the hope is that you've learned the practices you need, and you've kind of learned the resources out there so that you can spend the next 10, 20, 30 years in ministry. You're still learning. You're still working through it, because at the end of the day the Bible is complicated. The gospel is simple. And there are parts of the Bible that are very simple, but it's just a complicated work, and it takes a lot of work to get into it. But learning those principles at seminary, or at a Sunday school, wherever you are, you have to have those tools because it's too big to just get it all in a year, or whatever.

Dr. Watson 7:59
I know our focus is really on lay people in the church and so forth, but I think a good illustration- what you're saying just just really fired something in my mind. Seminary is very limited actually, in what it can teach and impart. We can give lots of facts, lots of figures, but we also feel here at Gateway, we feel this real compulsion to be very loyal to the local church. That's where our heart and soul really is. But I think people have the impression that I can go to seminary and I'll come out being a good minister, knowing how to love and care for people, be a good preacher, I'll know all the theology and stuff I need to know. Well, no. We honestly can equip you and give you the ability to do those things. I can't teach you to love. Love is something you choose to do or don't do. And I think, kind of in miniature, that's the way we actually need to see our task, our role as teachers in Sunday School, is we are facilitators of people who have 100 miles to go.

Dr. Kelly 9:16
And certainly, we can help them look at the text. And there are things in my study that I can't replicate in the room. So I'm not saying that I don't tell people anything about the text. I'm saying...it's kind of the difference between I'm going to go up to Baldy, and so I just decided to go up and start walking. And I don't know where I'm going or what I'm doing, so I'm just wandering around up there. Or I sit down in a room someplace in the church or the seminary or my home, and somebody tells me about all this stuff that they did when they walked around Baldy and explained to me what they saw, and all that kind of stuff. And it's like, I don't really want either of those experiences when we get into the text. I don't want somebody just telling me; this is what I experienced when I read it. Nor do I want somebody just to let me go free, where I'm just wandering around in the text by myself. But I want somebody to be like my guide, that's walking through it with me, that's helping me to learn as I'm seeing it, that's pointing out the facets of the text that become most important, and that's helping me to process and think about it. But I also am going to make discoveries on my own as I do that, and the trail then becomes mine. I had a guide, but it was my experience, my trail, not just somebody else's that they gave to me. I think that's the analogy that I'd use in terms of how we do this.

Dr. Watson 11:02
Interpreting scripture is about learning to find those trail heads, for understanding contextually, what's going on. And we hear people say, context-read the passage before the passage or read the verse before and verses after. Yeah, but it's actually more than that. You've got to be reading attentively. Like, we were going to do some stuff out of Acts 17; the Areopagus address where Paul is in Athens and it says, "and Paul stood in the middle of the Areopagus". Now, if you had never read another thing in the book of Acts, what's the first question you need to ask? What the heck is an Areopagus? Look, it was huge in ancient Greece. Where is Paul? You found your first trailhead. And so you can read back, if Paul ends up in Athens Greece. Well, what's significant about it-it's the intellectual center of the universe back in those days. And here's this Jewish intellect going in amongst all the brainiacs there. This is fascinating. He's going to do theology. He's going to talk about his God in terms of the unknown god.

Dr. Kelly 12:26
That's really important. What you're saying is really important, because as I get into a text, sometimes, the thing that I need to do first of all is to show them what mountain we're on, to give them a sense of context of what we're talking about. Because, honestly, most of what Paul says is very understandable in this text. I don't have to be a New Testament scholar to be able to understand what he's talking about, but I do need a little bit of context that's sort of painted for that in order to do that.

Dr. Watson 12:56
This is interesting, too. We're talking about context and finding these trailheads. One of the very clear divisions of the book is Acts 1:8. "In not many days hence, My Spirit will come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and the uttermost parts of the earth". That's the outline of the book. And essentially, then the gospel is going to be driven by the Holy Spirit to the uttermost parts of the earth. And then you have this struggle for it to grind its way out of Jerusalem. And then it's almost like somebody opens the door and they're running and then it's divided into Peter and Paul. You got Peter up to about chapter 12, and then all of a sudden, you've got the first missionary journey, the second missionary journey, and the third missionary journey. So you've got all these contexts within which these things are happening, and all of them are governed by Acts 1:8. So if you ever find yourself saying, What is this about? Go back to Acts one eight. It's about the Spirit driving the gospel out to the othermost parts of the world, and the men and women that He used to do it.

Dr. Kelly 14:11
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why don't we read through the text?

Dr. Watson 14:14
I'm gonna be reading from the great HCSB version here. "Then Paul stood in the middle of the Areopagus and said, 'Men of Athens I see that you are extremely religious in every respect. For as I was passing through and observing the objects of your worship, I even found an altar on which was inscribed to an unknown God. Therefore, what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, He is the Lord of heaven and earth, and does not live in shrines made by hands, neither is he served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives everyone life and breath and all things. From one man, He has made every nation of men to live all over the earth, and has determined their appointed times and the boundaries of where they live, so that they may seek God, and perhaps they might reach out and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us. For in Him, we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said. For we are also His offspring, being God's offspring, then we shouldn't think that the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image fashioned by human art and imagination. Therefore, having overlooked the times of ignorance, God now commands all people everywhere to repent, because He has set a day on which He is going to judge the world in righteousness by the man He has appointed. He has provided proof of this and everyone by raising Him from the dead.' And when they heard about the-", here's the important part, because everything Paul is saying is of interest, but the thing that really sparks it is this statement about raising Jesus from the dead. "When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some began to ridicule him, but others said, 'we will hear you more about this.' So Paul went out from their presence. However, some men joined him and believed. Among who were Dionysius, the Areopagite, a woman named Damaris and others with them."

Dr. Kelly 16:26
Wow, that's such a great text and such a great story. And I think it's maybe the clearest point where you get this message that comes to a people that had no real background in anything related to the Jewish faith or the coming Messiah or anything like that. And so really, what Paul is doing is he's saying, How do I preach the gospel to a people that have no context to understand. Which I think is great. So if that's what Paul is doing, then how do I help my people to start to see what Paul does to try to make that happen? What are some ways I can do that? And it seems like to me that there's just a lot of ways for us to get at that. Like I could ask the class to go in and start to pull out, What are the main points, the main ideas that Paul is expressing through this? As we read through it, what are the big ideas that he's reading? And they'll start out looking through it; I perceive that you're very religious. They're religious, but they're not Jewish, they're not Christian. What's he talking about? Well, he's trying to identify with them. So they can read that, they can see that. And then, "For I passed along and observed objects of your worship," and he talks about how they were so religious. Well, Paul makes a big deal out of that, but that's not something that I have to be an expert in to be able to know. It's something that somebody in my class can clearly pull out, and as they start to work through the text for themselves, they can start to identify those key ideas of Paul bringing to pass this idea of the Christ being the unknown god that they desperately need to know. That He's not a god that's made by hands. That as they engage with those things, they can become more and more familiar with what Paul's doing and how he's doing that. And ultimately, we're going to get to the application of this, where you say we live in a world that has no context for being able to talk about it. So I think there are a lot of ways to get at this idea, but I think getting them to engage with the text, instead of just allowing them to listen to me talk about the text, is huge in terms of them constructing an understanding of this text, them finding that this text becomes theirs because they understand it.

Dr. Watson 19:01
And ask them, What did Paul say? Well, first off, what did Paul do? What are the things that he did? He walked, he looked, he noticed, he took note. What did he say? And you can do just those two things for the moment, and write a list up on the board. And then ask them, so what? And when Paul says this-and I think this is easy to overlook-when he says, "I see that you are extremely religious." Do you know that would have been one of the most complimentary things for Paul to say in this group of people? And Paul doesn't walk in with an arrogant snear on his face. Paul walks in there and in humility, engages them on their turf, and with one of their deity, one of their gods, right there. And then he begins to unfold the truth, not by equating the eternal Creator with this thing, but to say, what you call the unknown God...I can tell you there is a God out there.

Tyler Sanders 20:08
A knowable God. That's so good. And then you look at it, if you analyze this, there's a lot of things you can get. I mean, you can certainly get without having a deep knowledge of like, the city of Athens in that period of time, or whatever, like you can get [Paul's] tone of voice, if you trust Paul, which we do, he's telling us as readers, a lot about the people he's talking to. He's saying they're religious. He's saying, here's the things that are important to you, and I'm bringing this to you in your state, and then in the very end, talking about the resurrection, like, of course that's a core to a Christian belief, we're so familiar with that sometimes maybe it goes over our head, but that's interesting to a lot of people. Death is something a lot of people are afraid of, have concerns about and questions about, and everyone experiences it themselves, but also just around them. So I mean, there's something generally true about that, universally true, but he's bringing it straight to this group of people.

Dr. Kelly 21:12
Yeah, I think that's so good. I think there's a little bit of a tendency for us, when we start trying to think; how do I engage people in the text? There's a little bit of a tendency for us to go simplistic, because we don't want to stretch people. We don't want to take time to have to think through it. Because honestly, having people examine this for themselves is going to take more time than just telling them what it says. It's not like this is a fast way to get through Bible study. It's just a better way to do it, I think. So I think it's going to take time. And because a lot of people don't, they tend to go simplistic. And they'll say, In verse one, where does Paul say that he is? And those kind of questions don't inspire a depth of look at the text. They don't inspire that. But I loved what you just said, to say something like, guys reading through what Paul says, tell me what we know about the people he's speaking to. I mean, that's a rich thought, where it's going to cause them to look at the text and examine the things that Paul's talking about. So I want to look for ways to engage them in the text, where they're looking for truth, that they're looking to explain, that they're looking to understand, that they're doing critical thinking, as opposed to just saying, Paul says he's in Athens.

Dr. Watson 22:32
Yeah, I think too, and part of what you're saying here is being willing to let go, to release some control over things. I have an idea of where I want to go every week and one of the hardest things for me to do, after studying and knowing where I'm trying to get to, is to let go because I'm pushing to get to that point. What if, by asking them to look at the text, I only got three verses, four verses in, but yet they're doing the rich stuff of digging in. I think I've more than doubled the value of lesson that way.

Dr. Kelly 23:08
I agree, yeah. And I think when you start doing this, when you start getting into the text and letting them sort of get their fingers on it, I used to say to teenagers, they need a test drive. To test drive the text for themselves, instead of just riding in the passenger seat or in the back seat. But I think what you do is you increase people's ability, first of all, to appreciate God's word. Second of all, to be able to remember the things that they're learning. And, thirdly, to be able to make application of the things that they're learning. And I think all that stuff is better for our discipleship process than just giving them information.

Tyler Sanders 23:46
I think in like a group setting, like you said earlier, you want to be careful not to just have anything goes, every interpretation is sensible or valid, or whatever. You don't want to have that, you need to have guidance in a lesson. But by letting people look at the text, people will see things that other people don't. And it's just one of the blessings of having different brains, but being together in a room. You can certainly end up with a richer understanding of the text. I did a podcast with Dr Stewart about Revelation. There's a million things I don't know about Revelation, and I've learned so much through just sitting in there. But one of the things that I had never picked up on before, that I guess is pretty common if you're in the field, but John, over and over, he says, "I heard this, then I looked and I saw this." Now, when I just read, I think that's just a different way of saying something external made it into my brain. But that's not...it's way more happening in the text. There's like-usually the things don't match up, or they're slightly different in a way that's supposed to illustrate a point. But like, that's just not how my brain normally works. I would have never come to that, I don't think. The Holy Spirit can do anything, but I wouldn't have come up with that on my own.

Dr. Watson 24:11
What was going on, was not necessarily what I was hearing.

Tyler Sanders 25:19
Yeah, that's right, right. And it's there in the text. And then you see this is a very intelligently written text, which is a cool thing to see, but also that imagery starts to... it's supposed to be surprising to me. And when I sit there and I understand it's supposed to be, it is surprising. There's more there than I thought there was. But that's one of those benefits of getting different people in there, looking at the text and taking it very seriously. Different people are going to find some different things that in that group setting, as a teacher part of your responsibility is to suss out what doesn't need to survive in that group context, but to integrate what does.

Dr. Kelly 26:02
Well, and I think that's right. I mean, one of the things that I do when I'm studying for a sermon or a Bible study or something like that, is that I'll spend an awful lot of time where I just start thinking about like...I've been working on Colossians chapter four, and I was looking at, Paul tells the Colossians to be diligent in prayer, and then he says to be watchful or aware in their prayer. And I'm like, what does that mean? And so I just start playing around with it, and I'm making notes in my journal, like, maybe he's talking about the need to be aware of what's going on around them, so that they know how to pray because of what's happening in the people's lives around them, the situations and that kind of stuff. Maybe it's this human awareness that is really important. Or maybe what he's saying is that we need to be aware because of what the Holy Spirit is doing, that I am a spiritual being that's born again of the Spirit, and so I need to be aware of how the Spirit's moving and be sensitive to Him. Or maybe-I mean, Colossians deals with so much like, bad theology and people that were teaching heresy and stuff like-maybe what he's talking about is being aware of how the enemy is at work, and what the Enemy is doing. And I don't know which of those is right, but I'm writing all this stuff. Now, at the end of the day, when I teach this passage, one of the things I have to decide is, is that worth me spending any time on? Is that one word, is that something that I'm gonna bore down on because we're really gonna get this, or is that one of those things that I say, okay, that's an interesting thing to me, but it's not the focus of the passage. Let me get to where the meat is in this passage.

Dr. Watson 27:48
And depending on the context, it might be worth it to lay it out and say, Look, this is hard to pin down. The way I see it there's three or four different ways this could be understood. And give them the significance of each one. And then say, Now, I guess if I have to go with it, I'll go with this one, and here's how it makes it significant for this passage. They see the process.

Dr. Kelly 28:15
Yeah, yeah. I think that's really good when they can see the process with that. Or maybe even better, to say, I'm looking at this, and when I was studying this I was thinking, what on earth does he mean? So what are some things that this could be talking about? But the problem is that I'm spending time now, and if I have unlimited time to teach the Bible forever and ever, we're going to spend eight hours studying this passage. That's great. But I'm going to get about 30-45 minutes to be able to deal with it. I want to deal with what's most important in the passage. And as the guide, I'm going to know we're not going to pay attention to that cactus, because there be a ton of those, but this tree over here, this is like the only place in the world where this tree exists, or whatever. So we want to pay attention to that, and that's the way I want to approach scripture, is point them to those things that are going to be most important in terms of understanding what the author is trying to tell us as he's writing this story, or as he's developing this argument. It seems like to me that there's this need for us to not necessarily think that everything that goes through my brain goes into the lesson.

Dr. Watson 29:24
There's a level of understanding and research in this passage that's really interesting, because if you really want to get down to the nitty gritty, you got to go look at what Stoics and Epicureans really believe. Because the concept of a resurrection, of rising from the dead, was absolutely foreign. It's why he says later on, he says it was foolish. The cross is a stumbling block to the Jews, but it's absolute foolishness. Because when Paul talks about the cross, the resurrection is always lingering there. You know it's just right on his lips. And understanding the intellectual, the philosophical content, and actually philosophical context is the right way to do it. I don't know that you could call it pure theology, that these makes people had. But if you can lead people to get a little taste of the deeper or higher learning things, then say by the way, if you really wanted to investigate this, here's this article in this dictionary over here that's really clear. If you just get one that's interested, man, you've won.

Tyler Sanders 30:46
Well, and I think there's always a benefit in telling people, when you read the text and you come across something you don't understand, don't just skip it. Maybe we can't cover it in this lesson, or maybe you bring up like, there's something kind of complicated going on here, but here's some research for you to go suss it out. But anytime we're letting people know to wrestle with the text, you can wrestle hard with it. It's gonna win still, like you're not gonna beat it and then your whole life is going to fall apart because you've outsmarted the Bible. You can really wrestle with this thing hard, and a lot of people out there...I mean, we have a whole library full of books. There's probably not a question you're going to be able to come up with that someone else hasn't already thought about. And then 100 people after them thought about and wrote about and worked through. There's a lot out there to plumb the depths. But anytime we're telling people, this is hard, just dig into it. Try to find it. I think that's going to end up being...again, even if everyone doesn't do that, one or two in your class, they might find a real nugget.

Dr. Kelly 32:00
And one of the things that I think is important, is to give people permission to slow down. We've done so much trying to get people to read through the Bible, because we want them to know, at least, to have read the stories. And there's value in the three chapters a day that it takes to be able to read the Bible in a year. But gosh, you move so quickly through things that there's not time to really resonate, to really reflect. And it seems like to me that there needs to be times when we just encourage people to slow down, to read more carefully, to think about what they're reading, that this is the Word of God. It's not like they're reading the newest John Grisham novel or something like that. It's not that they're even reading some Chuck Swindoll book on how to have a happy life or something like that. This is the Word of God, and it's worth slowing down and spending a little more time reflecting on.

Dr. Watson 32:57
One of my things is there are certain parts of scripture in which I am so interested. And if I'm gonna go dig some more, I'll always go back to that Honey Hole, to that same thing until I find a connection somewhere else. And the absence of breadth in my reading actually creates some real surprises when I actually read somewhere to find connections. But I do, I've got certain parts of Scripture that just absolutely engage me, and I'm always really kind of excited and mystified when I find, hey, there's somebody else, somewhere else that talked about this.

Tyler Sanders 33:41
Yeah, sure. Well, you ready for the next phase of the podcast? We're gonna apply this to a certain age group. We need some cool music to go under this probably, like circus music.

Dr. Watson 33:57
We need some cash prizes.

Tyler Sanders 33:59
Oh, good, a college group.

Dr. Watson 34:01
Oh, I don't think we've ever hit that.

Tyler Sanders 34:03
Yeah, I don't know if we have. That's a fantastic group for this. I think this is a really great passage to go over with the college group.

Dr. Kelly 34:09
Yeah, absolutely. I think that to some extent it depends on what my college group is like. If this is a group of CBU students that's probably going to look different than if it's a group of folks at UCLA. So try to figure out what their background is, but in any case, college students, man, their brains are at peak efficiency. They don't have a truckload of experience to build on, but they definitely are able to think well and to think outside the box. So inviting them to engage with a text like this, I think would be huge.

Dr. Watson 34:50
I think too, and this may sound kind of funny, but I think with college students, asking them to suspend belief or not demand belief in a certain thing, but simply to take the text on its own merrits. What is this Aeropogis thing? What do you see here? Because if you've got a college student that's not a Christian, that hasn't got any Christian background, all of a sudden, this gives them a way to draw them right into the Word of God, into the text. Paul did this stuff in life. This isn't some myth.

Dr. Kelly 35:25
In a sense, Paul is coming in and speaking into the college.

Tyler Sanders 35:30
And, I think a pretty common experience for college students too, is you get a way broader exposure to lots of different world views, not just through your professors, but maybe you're like me and you grew up in Mississippi, and you went to high school and middle school, you did everything in Mississippi, and then I went to the College of Mississippi as well. But-

Dr. Kelly 35:51
You don't sound like you're from Mississippi.

Tyler Sanders 35:52
I really destroyed that accent.

Dr. Watson 35:57
And he's a John Grisham guy right there in Oxford.

Tyler Sanders 36:02
But it's funny. It's a small school. It's small town Mississippi, but there's people from all over the world there. All kinds of different beliefs and all kinds of stuff. And all of a sudden, you're kind of in the deep end of like, everyone kind of has different ways of approaching the world, but it's so fascinating that this is the passage we have because that was not Paul's world.

Dr. Kelly 36:25
Yeah, Paul was a Pharisee. He was a Jew of Jews.

Tyler Sanders 36:30
That's right, that's right.

Dr. Watson 36:31
Do you notice, though, how he walks in and-we've already talked about the respect that he shows and stuff like that, but the dude was not in the least intimidated. So this is a man who's aware of his intellectual gifts, and he's a man who's got the awareness to be able to walk into a different situation and just totally mystify. He convinced an Areopagite, this Dionysius!

Dr. Kelly 37:00
Yeah, that's crazy. Well, and not just that, but in the church today, when we start talking to people with competing world views, there's a real tendency for us to do that in a way that's hateful or in a way that tries to put down their ideas or push aside their understanding. And Paul doesn't do that at all. He tries to build connections, to build bridges with people, to try to help them to understand that what he's talking about is not, maybe as foreign as what he would say. I mean, even to say that God is near to everyone if you can just reach out and perhaps find Him. That's pretty cool. And for college students. Man today, college students are so reactionary to the kind of critical, judgmental kind of stuff that they see so much in our society, especially among those of us who are Christians.

Tyler Sanders 37:03
And like, what a comforting verse that is that God is so close. I think sometimes we can miscommunicate that. Of course, we need to be honest with what sin is and straightforward about that in our preaching. But also, we don't want to portray that God is distant from us.

Dr. Watson 38:14
He's a lot closer than you think.

Tyler Sanders 38:16
Yeah, that's right. Well, to wrap up for our little application. I think you already said it, Dr. Kelly. Take it slow. If I could add one more little twist to that; do your prep and print out your manuscript or whatever you have and then just set it aside for a couple hours or a day, and then go back and be like, now how I'm actually going to teach this? Give yourself enough time to go through and say, How am I going to translate this?

Dr. Kelly 38:41
That's good.

Dr. Watson 38:42
Think about the students and what they need to take from it, and not so much what you need to give them.

Dr. Kelly 38:50
So good.