What is wrong with short series?
In our articles on 'The teaching program of the local church in an age of Biblical illiteracy' and 'An example of a possible four year plan,' we have put forward a particular model for planning the teaching in a local church. This involves working down from Bible to book to individual message, and it involves teaching regularly and systematically through whole books of the Bible.
Obviously, in some cases, this will mean fairly long series of messages (although the longest series in our example teaching program is only 25 messages, with a break in the middle). However, one criticism that is leveled against this approach is that this kind of series is far too long: people today only want, or need, series of four or five messages at a time on any one subject or book.
So what is wrong with short series? At one level, nothing much. Under the right circumstances, there is a lot to be said for having a short series of four or five messages on one theme or book of the Bible. However, the problems start when that is all you do. In our example of a possible four-year plan, some of the series last for 24 or 25 weeks.
Many people today would say that this is too long. (What on Earth would they have made of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who took something like ten years to teach through the book of Romans?) They say that:
- people think that they have 'got the point' of any Bible book after about four messages; they do not need any more. Indeed, they want to move on to something else
- people do not have a long enough attention span to handle a long series on one book
- people today do not attend church as regularly as people did in the past, so they do not benefit from having a longer series on one book of the Bible
So what is wrong with short series?
- If we are dipping in and out of books - looking at one chapter from one book, then a couple of chapters from a different book - we are making it much harder for people to understand the message of the whole book. They may be able to get the message of a short book (John's first letter, perhaps), but they will never get the whole picture of a longer book such as Genesis or Luke or Romans
- By taking this approach, we are modeling to people that we can pick and choose which parts of the Bible we will read. We can choose the parts we like. Some parts are more important, or even more inspired, than others
- By taking this approach, we are adjusting the teaching program of the church to the lowest common denominator in the congregation, rather than encouraging growth
- This approach allows the teacher to fall back again and again on his own favorite themes, by choosing the passages that deal with those themes. A consistent approach of teaching through books forces the teacher to examine the difficult parts of the Bible too
- This approach says to people that we are in control of the structure of what is taught, rather than the Word of God itself controlling the structure
- This approach can easily give the impression that the Bible's message is a series of disconnected beliefs, rather than a holistic, intellectually coherent way of life
- The argument that we should have short series because people have short attention spans is false and misguided. It might be possible to argue that because people have short attention spans, we should only have short messages (although even here, if the messages are done well, people can often cope with rather more than we give them credit for.) But this has nothing to do with the length of a series. People do not listen to the whole series at one time; they listen to it one message at a time, with gaps of one week at a time in between
- If the messages, and the series, are being prepared properly, short series require far more work of preparation from the teacher - he is doing a new lot of background work every few weeks, instead of every few months