How to Teach Church History
Whether you are teaching the entire history of the Catholic church or the individual history of your worshipping community, you may find presenting these topics to be a daunting task due to the difficulty in getting people's attention during a history lesson. However, a few techniques can inform your teaching methods in order to help you present historical events in an interesting and stimulating way, thereby enriching members' regard for their church and tradition.
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Instructions
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Prepare to teach church history by outlining the period that you want to teach. Whereas the entire history of Christianity is important, this may be far too ambitious for you. You may want to highlight certain important or interesting events, such as the Christian Empire, theReformation or the founding of your denomination.
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Present a timeline to your students. This gives a context for all of your teaching. You can outline the major events in the history of Christianity, your denomination or your particular church. Limit your timeline to the events that you hope to cover; otherwise you may overwhelm students with too much information.
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Make sure that you demonstrate how each historical event leads into the next one. You want to be careful not to present historical events in isolation.
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Relate historical figures to well-known figures. Relate famous individuals to people who your students might already know.
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Emphasize what type of spiritual or religious ideas you want your students to derive from learning church history. Tell the students why learning church history improves their spiritual relationship with God and others and focus on ways that students can learn from the spiritual journeys of others.
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References
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