The following transcription is part of a lesson entitled, "Maturing Our Churches -- Lord, Teach Us," taught on Thursday, July 7, 2016, at the Reach Summit in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. You can listen to the audio recording of this lesson here. (Please note that a small subscription fee to DTV is required to access the lesson.)
Kay McKean -- Sterling, Virginia, USA
I’m so thankful for this opportunity to speak because women need to teach, too; and women need to hear women teach.
There is a big difference between men and women. There’s a difference in how we hear things, in what we want to hear about. Women understand each other. Women understand, (for example) that crying can be fun. Women understand -- going to the bathroom in groups. Women understand -- sometimes you just have to drive to another gas station because this one is just "too icky!"
Women need a little bit of help to be happy. It’s kind of easy for men to be happy: they have one mood, all the time. For men, wrinkles add character; a five-day vacation requires only one suitcase. Men can do their nails with a pocket knife; and men have freedom of choice concerning growing a moustache.
Women know that any conversation with women will eventually lead to something about menopause, childbirth, or the monthlies – it will just go there.
So we need to hear from women; and women need to teach.
Teaching others is the greatest act of optimism that we can do. When you teach, you learn twice.
I am grateful for the men in our fellowship who are providing opportunities for women to teach women. I am grateful for the brothers on the Teachers Service Team who have welcomed the women’s input, who want to hear the women’s voices, want to hear the female perspective. I am thankful for my husband, Randy McKean, who always wants to provide an opportunity for the women to teach. He’s always saying, "the women need to teach the women." I hope that brothers across the fellowship will realize that it takes planning, creativity, sometimes it takes money, to allow the women to teach.
Jesus knew that women want to be taught. In Luke, chapter ten, when Jesus is teaching Mary, it says, “Mary sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said.” She took a disciple’s posture to the rabbi, sitting at his feet, I’m sure in that conversation Jesus wasn’t just talking about female topics, he was talking about devotion to God, how to live their lives.
In John 4, Jesus engaged in a religious debate with the Samaritan woman, and then that woman went off and she asked a question, which I think sometimes we overlook. She told the people in the village, “Could this be the Christ?” That indicates to me that she had an understanding, a learning, of what the Messiah was going to be like, and she wanted to talk to other people about it.
In Luke 24 at the resurrection, when the angels said to the women, “Remember how he told you that he would be killed;” if you look at the context of when Jesus had said that, it was in the context of teaching a lot of things. I think it’s important to understand that women teaching other women shouldn’t just be about female-oriented things; it’s deeper, it’s theological. We want to learn, we want to study.
It helps us to learn from other women. We love hearing the men, we’ll never stop loving hearing the men; we also need to hear from one of our own.
1 Peter 4:8 reads, “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” I am not sharing this scripture for this reason, but since I just read it, Randy and I just wrote a book called Radical Love. You can find out more about it here.
In this scripture, 1 Peter 4:8 (NIV), it goes on to say, “Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms. If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ.” The point I want to talk about today is the fact that when we teach, the women who do teach, we need to give it our very best, give it our very heart, we need to know that we are teaching something so wonderful, we have this opportunity to share the best news in the world and we need to do it well.
We need to speak it clearly: Colossians 4:4. We often talk about speaking boldly, but Paul also said “clearly,” and that requires planning and foresight, study and research, looking things up and really digging deep, so that we can provide for the women something more than a clever little three-point alliteration of something. Women want something deep, they need it, they’re hungry for it and they want it.
There was a period of time when I was in a particular church, attending midweeks. I wasn’t in the full-time ministry at the time, I was working (a secular job), attending midweeks. You go home, you try to fix dinner, you go to midweek, and it’s -- blah. Somebody threw something together at the last minute. And I remember feeling: I wanna be fed! I need something, I need God’s word tonight, I’ve been beat up by the world, I need to be built up by God’s word! And I thought, if I ever get the opportunity to teach again, I’m gonna learn from this. I’m going to know that, in my little church, when the women come together, they have been fighting traffic, they have been working at a hard job, they run home, they feed their kids, they grab them into the car, they get to church — I don’t want them to come and not be fed and given to, I want them to know it’s worth it!
I also want to expect a little bit of them too: I want them to learn something. My own personal opinion:I love the fact that we have technology. I love seeing the scriptures up on the screen, but I love seeing people say, “Oh, he said 1 Timothy, let me turn there.” It can be a paper Bible, an electronic Bible, an iPad, iPod or whatever, but people need to look at it, they need to turn to it, they need to know where in the world is 1st Timothy. They don’t do that if we just flash scriptures up on the screen and don’t give them time. I want to follow along, that’s what really appealed to me as a young Christian. I was thinking, “I can learn this.” We used to sit there with our Bibles and our notebooks, we were engaged!” Just my opinion.
There’s a song I love: “I love to tell the story of unseen things above, of Jesus and his glory, of Jesus and his love; I love to tell the story, for those who know it best seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest.” I love to tell the story. Can I just ask that we remember, when we tell the story, it’s good news? Sometimes the way we tell the story is -- blaaaahhhhh! We need to lift people up when we speak to them, and help them to know it’s good news.
Here are some examples of a few of the curriculum pieces that I’ve developed over the years. I’ve done studies on:
- Genesis , chapter by chapter
- Esther
- Questions that Jesus asked. a whole year of studying the questions that Jesus asked people, and talking about how those are questions to us as well
- I’ve done studies on women of the Bible (It would be really great for the men one day to do a study on the women of the Bible)
- For a whole year in our church we had a theme of “Believe;” and so for the women’s classes we spelled our the word “Believer.” B was for Beginning; E was Enmity; L was for Land, I was for Instruction; E was for Entrance; V (we did several classes) on villains and heroes (the books of Judges and Kings); E stood for Exile and R for return, we went through the whole Old Testament in a year. It was a great deeper study.
- I’m doing a series on “I’m Possible” right now.
I hope that you agree and appreciate the need for women to teach, to find the opportunities, to make it good.
I love teaching. I don’t think I’m the most scholarly or anything; I always say I go to the Teachers’ meetings — I don’t have any letters after my name. I’ve just been reading the Bible a long time, that’s all I can say.
There’s a legendary cellist named Pablo Casals, who was asked, when he was 90 years old, why do you keep practicing day after day, you’re 90 years old! His response was, “because I think I’m making progress.” And that’s how I feel about teaching. I keep doing it, I think I’m making progress, but I have a long way to go.
Thanks.