The Adult Class Nobody Wants to Teach

Ask a church which program eats the most curriculum budget and they'll say kids. Ask which program gets the least thought and they'll also say kids, which tells you the budget is going somewhere without a plan behind it. But that's not the conversation I keep having lately. The one I keep having is about adults. Specifically: why the room full of grown-ups who've been in church for thirty years is the hardest room in the building to teach, and why almost nobody wants to admit it.

Here's the pattern I've watched play out across a lot of different churches. Children's ministry gets a director, a theme, a supply closet, a check-in system, sometimes a full-time hire. Youth gets a pastor and a pizza budget. And the adult classes? They get a retired guy named Gary and a stack of quarterlies from a publisher that hasn't updated the design since the second Bush administration.

I'm not knocking Gary. Gary is often the most faithful person in the building. But Gary was handed a job with zero support and a resource that assumes his class is eight retirees who will read the passage out loud, nod, and go to lunch. Sometimes that's exactly the class. Often it isn't anymore, and the material has no idea.

That's the part that gets me. The people writing adult Sunday school lessons at scale are writing for an average congregation that doesn't exist in any particular room. They're writing for the median. And the median is a statistical fiction. No church is the median.

I talked to a teacher a while back, mid-size suburban church, who described his adult class as "three converts, two people going through a divorce, one guy who could probably teach the class better than me, and four people I honestly can't read." And the curriculum in front of him was pitched at a warm, undifferentiated "the faithful believer." None of those nine people are the faithful believer in the abstract. They're nine specific problems, nine specific hungers, sitting in folding chairs.

Why does this happen? Partly economics. It costs a publisher real money to write curriculum, and the only way that math works is scale. Scale means genericness. You can't write for the divorcing guy in the third row when you're printing 40,000 copies for 40,000 different rooms. So you write for nobody, carefully, and call it universal.

But I think there's something deeper than economics, and this is where I get a little uncertain, because I've seen it break both ways. There's an assumption baked into how churches treat adult education: that adults are done. That the real formation happens with kids and teenagers, and adults are just maintaining. Topping off the tank. So you don't need great material, you just need something to structure the hour.

I don't fully buy that. But I'll admit I've also seen adult classes where the members clearly preferred maintenance. They didn't want to be challenged. They wanted the room, the coffee, the same eleven people, and a comfortable forty-five minutes. And a teacher who tries to disrupt that with something ambitious can absolutely wreck a good thing. So I'm not going to sit here and tell you every adult class needs a curriculum overhaul. Some of them are functioning exactly as their people want them to function, and the teacher's real job is hospitality, not pedagogy.

The problem is you can't tell which room you have from a catalog. And the publisher definitely can't.

What I keep coming back to, from the tool-building side of this, is that adult education is the place where personalization matters most and gets invested in least. A generic lesson for six-year-olds mostly works, because six-year-olds share a developmental floor. A generic lesson for a room of adults who've each lived forty-plus years of specific life is a much heavier lift. The gap between the median and the actual person is enormous. It's the widest in the building.

And yet the adult teacher gets the least help closing that gap. No director. No training track. A quarterly written for the fictional median believer. Then we wonder why adult classes plateau, why the same people show up out of loyalty, why churches quietly stop counting adult class attendance because the number's a little depressing.

I don't think the answer is more polished quarterlies. Polish isn't the missing ingredient. The missing ingredient is knowing your specific nine people and building the hour around them instead of around the average of forty thousand strangers. That used to be nearly impossible for a volunteer teacher to do from scratch on a Tuesday night. It's getting less impossible. That's most of why I do what I do.

But here's the honest caveat. A tool that helps you tailor a lesson to your actual room only helps if you actually know your room. And a lot of adult teachers, especially the faithful ones who inherited the class, have never been given permission to ask. They've been handed material and a schedule and a folding chair. Nobody ever said the point was those nine people, not the curriculum.

So if you run a church and you've got a Gary, go sit in his class. Not to evaluate him. To find out who's actually in the room. My guess is it's not the median believer, and it hasn't been for years, and everybody in there knows it except the material.