The gift of teaching

Making a thing understood, and staying with a person until it is. Romans 12:7 names it in a single clause, 1 Corinthians 12:28 ranks teachers third in the church after apostles and prophets, and Ephesians 4:11 puts shepherds and teachers together in one phrase, which is why many churches speak of a pastor-teacher as one job rather than two.

In an ordinary week it looks like the person who takes the awkward question at the end of a service and draws the answer on the back of a notice sheet. It looks like the membership class, the Tuesday evening study that has run for eleven years, the parent who can say what a word like justification means without reaching for three more words nobody knows. Teaching is mostly repetition, and the gift is what makes repetition bearable.

You tend to notice it by where a conversation goes. People bring you a question wanting the short answer and leave with the long one, because you asked what they already thought. You check that somebody followed you before you move on. You would rather sit down with a person for twenty minutes than send them a good link.

It is most often confused with preaching and with the word of knowledge. A preacher may or may not have this gift, because teaching is measured by whether the other person now understands and not by whether the address was good. A word of knowledge is something said at a moment; teaching hands material over so that somebody else can hold it and pass it on, which is exactly the chain Paul describes to Timothy (2 Timothy 2:2). It is also confused with encouraging, and the shortest way to tell them apart is that an encourager wants you to move while a teacher wants you to see.