2. Decide who you are before deciding what you’ll do. Christian teaching flows out of who you are in relation to God and others, not from how well you can perform.

3. Process is more important than content.

4. No curriculum will solve your program problems. A good curriculum will provide structure, offer ideas, give biblical interpretation and cultural background information, and suggest a starting place for your teaching. A curriculum will not inspire you or your students, make you a better Christian, meet the particular needs of your learners, or solve your classroom problems. Curriculum is written for the widest possible audience. You’re special. Your class is unique. Use curriculum to benefit your particular learners.

5. Good teachers facilitate learning; great teachers inspire learning.

6. People don’t remember lessons; they remember relationships.

7. People learn in many ways, but each person has only five senses through which he or she learns. “Creativity and “innovation” only go so far before they become ineffective.

8. Learning never ends. It’s a lifelong adventure.

9. There is no perfect program. There are good and better, valid and sound, and great and good enough. And any one of them is only good for its time because people grow and times change.

10. Learning is change. Teaching is not entertainment. Learning is not always fun. Change is difficult, sometimes painful, and often resisted. The kind of change (learning) we seek in Christian teaching at its highest level is metanoia—“conversion.” In the final analysis, that’s the work of the Spirit, and that’s real change!

Except taken from A Christian Educator's Book of Lists, available from Smyth & Helwys Publishing.

Israel Galindo is Professor of Christian Education at the Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond.