The Adult Class Nobody Wants to Teach Is the One You Keep Ignoring

Every children's ministry problem you have is downstream of an adult teacher shortage nobody is willing to name.

I spent eight years watching this play out. The kids' wing gets the volunteers, the budget, the check-in system, the appreciation lunch. The adult classroom down the hall gets whoever agreed to it three years ago and never found a graceful way out. And then everyone acts surprised when the parents cycling through the kids' program don't stick around long enough to become the next generation of volunteers.

The adult education program is your volunteer pipeline. When it runs on fumes, everything else eventually does too.

If you cannot keep 15 adults engaged for 45 minutes on a Sunday, you are not going to convince those same adults to give you a Wednesday night and two Saturdays a month.

Here is what I kept running into as an operations person. We had a rotation of adult teachers who were, functionally, unmanaged. Nobody planned their calendar. Nobody knew what they were covering next month. When one of them got sick or moved or just quietly quit, we found out the Saturday before, and someone scrambled to print off whatever quarterly booklet was closest to the copier.

That is not a teaching problem. That is an operations vacuum, and it is fixable.

The first thing I did when I finally got permission to touch the adult side was build a shared calendar that went out a full quarter. Not the content of every lesson. Just: who is teaching, what week, what general series. Twelve weeks of visibility. That one change cut the Saturday-night scrambles almost entirely, because a teacher who knows they are up on the 19th does not forget the way a teacher who found out on the 17th does.

Predictability is not the enemy of good teaching. Chaos is.

The second thing was harder, and I want to be honest that I only half-solved it. Adult teachers, in my experience, are more resistant to being coordinated than the kids' volunteers. They have often been teaching adult Sunday school lessons for longer than the director has been at the church, and they read any system as a critique of their competence. Some of them were right to. I pushed a shared prep template on a longtime teacher once and he took it as an insult, and honestly, looking back, I introduced it badly. I led with the form instead of the reason.

What I should have said, and what I say now when I help churches through this, is that the system exists to protect the teacher when life happens. Not to grade them.

Because life happens constantly. The single most common failure I saw was the sub gap. A regular adult teacher has a family emergency on a Thursday. There is no bench. There is no shared plan the sub can pick up. So either the class gets canceled, which trains adults to treat it as optional, or someone improvises for 45 minutes in front of a room of people who have been reading Scripture longer than the improviser has been alive.

Both outcomes cost you.

What actually works is boring. A two-person minimum per class, even if the second person only floats. A shared folder where the current series lives so any of three or four people could step in. A text thread instead of relying on one director to be the switchboard for every substitution. None of this is inspiring. All of it is what separates a program that survives a director being out sick from one that doesn't.

I will give you the caveat, because it matters. If your whole church is 40 people and you have one adult class taught by the pastor's wife who has done it faithfully for a decade, most of this is overkill. You do not need a substitution matrix for a room that has never once needed a substitute. Build the system to the size of the actual problem. A 400-member church running four adult classes has a coordination problem. A congregation of 40 has a relationship, and you do not systematize a relationship.

The thing I am still not sure about is appreciation. Kids' ministry volunteers get thanked constantly, and we know retention improves when they feel seen. Adult teachers rarely get any of that, and I genuinely do not know whether it is because they do not want it or because we have just never bothered to ask. I have seen a handwritten note land well with one longtime teacher and get shrugged off by another. I do not have a clean formula for that one.

What I do know is that the adult classroom is the room church leadership walks past on the way to the crisis they consider more urgent. And it stays a low-grade problem for years precisely because it never becomes a five-alarm one. Nobody quits dramatically. The class just gets a little smaller, a little more improvised, a little more optional, until one day you look up and the adults who used to fill your volunteer roster are gone and you are not sure when it happened.

Start with the calendar. Twelve weeks out. Everything else gets easier from there.