That's not a classroom technique for me, it's how I lead everywhere — in the pulpit, in a cohort, in a boardroom. A question that's alive in a room does more formation than a conclusion handed down, and I build every learning experience I lead around that conviction.
I teach from inside a tradition of communal discipleship, not individual mastery. In the Black church, formation has never been a private transaction between a teacher and a text — it happens in the room, out loud, tested against real lives and real neighborhoods. That's the model I bring into any classroom I lead: less lecture, more workshop. Students don't leave with notes. They leave with something they built, tested, or said out loud that they'll have to live up to later.
I also teach from data most practical theology classrooms don't have access to. When I lead a session on discipleship infrastructure, I'm not describing a theory — I'm showing what actually happened across a dozen-plus churches when a sermon tried to survive the week. Students work with real, live material: partnership assessments from Immerse cohorts, sermon-to-course data from Multiply, neighborhood snapshots from Community Playbook. The classroom becomes a lab, not a lecture hall.
Three commitments shape how I run a room
First, the question comes before the framework.
I'd rather a student sit in genuine uncertainty about what their church's ZIP code actually needs than hand them a four-step model too early. The discomfort is where the learning happens.
Second, I teach in threes.
Whether it's a sermon series, a cohort structure, or a single session, I build toward three moves a student can actually carry out the door — not ten things to remember, three things to do.
Third, I design for the room to outlast me.
A Wednesday night series I once led on questions of faith taught me, painfully, what happens when a room isn't equipped to hold hard questions without reaching for control instead of curiosity. I've built every teaching environment since then to do the opposite — to make space wide enough that a real question doesn't have to be dangerous to ask.
I don't measure a class by what students can repeat back. I measure it by what they build, what they notice differently in their own context afterward, and whether they leave more willing to ask the next hard question than they were when they walked in.