The Pastor Who Had To Go

Mar 3

A student of mine once attended another church with a friend. She came back excited to talk about the event and what all they did. There was this thing and that thing but she never mentioned the teaching. She was young high school student so not all that strange but I thought a question might prompt some memory.

She immediately started laughing and proceeded to tell me a story of how the pastor closed all serious and then said, “Okay, I need to go because I really have to go.”

She remembered nothing he taught. But she remembered everything about how he ended.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Your students are going to remember something from your class. It might be an accidentally memorable thing, like the heavily loaded key ring that I once had to endure listening to. But there is no question about it, they will remember something. The question is whether what they remember has anything to do with what you actually taught.

Every teacher person has a version of this story. The off-hand comment that became the thing everyone quoted for months. The illustration that completely overshadowed the point. The misspoken word that left everyone giggling. We’ve all accidentally become memorable for the wrong reason.

But here’s what makes this more than just a funny story: there’s actual science behind why it happens. And once you understand it, you can start using it on purpose.

How the Brain Decides What to Keep

The brain is not some magical storage unit that hold all every encounter, conversation, and memory. It can’t store equally and retrieve it on demand. It’s more like a phone with limited memory. An app needs to be deleted every once in a while. A few photos get dropped into the trash. The brain is constantly having to make decisions about what’s worth keeping and what needs to get discarded.

This process isn’t random, although it can sometimes feel that way. The brain actually prioritizes based on it own system.

Emotional. If something makes you laugh, cry, feel uncomfortable, or become surprised, the brain highlights it. It marks that moment as important. It gets filed away in a special place with quicker access. With the example at the beginning, the pastor’s potty humor created an emotional response of surprise and laughter. And my student’s brain kept it.
Unexpected. The brain pays attention to when something breaks pattern. A class that follows the same rhythm becomes background and soon each day blends into one another. This is why it can feel like the weeks are just slipping by - nothing unexpected happens. But when something breaks the pattern, the brain pays extra attention. It couldn’t anticipate the next move so it’s not more alert.
Personal Connection. Information likes to connect with something already stored in the brain. Each student has their life and experiences. When we can connect to those experiences and emotions, our students’ brains are connecting more quickly than if simply presented a fact.
Repeated and Reinforced. A single hearing of a fact rarely produces lasting memory. It’s why you don’t remember information you learned in that one class outside of your field. The brain needs to encounter information multiple times, in multiple ways, before it moves from short-term to long-term storage. Marketers know this and use this to their advantage. They know that if you see the ad, the billboard, the commercial, the flier at the store, and the logo on someone’s item, you’re more likely to think of them when you need or even want a product they offer.

Straight forward delivery is the easiest way teach because you read through the lesson, cover the points, and stay on track with an outline. It’s easy but it’s also the least effective because it triggers none of these criteria for the brain. This is why people can sit in Bible class for years and years and still feel like they don’t really know their Bible.

The Forgetting Curve

In the 1880s a German psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered something that every Bible teacher should be made aware of. Ebbinghaus discovered that people forget 50% of what they learn one hour after learning something new. Within 24 hours, people forget 70% of the new information. And within a week, up to 90% is gone.

The average Bible teacher sees their students once a week. That means that next week, when you see your students again, they only remember 10% of the new to them information. So, for students who have grown up in church and have had multiple points of contact, they’re going to look like rock stars. The students that heard everything you taught last week for the first time, they’re going to look, and probably feel, a little more slackards.

Ebbinghaus called it the Forgetting Curve and more than a century of research confirms his discovery. It’s true across cultures, ages, and subjects. Including Bible learning.

Students who don’t seem to remember from week to week aren’t lazy or disengaged. They’re just overwhelmed by the flood of information presented to them in Bible class, from the pulpit, on social media, during commercial breaks, at work or school, and in every day life.

It’s a little daunting but there’s hope. Yes, there’s always hope in Christ but let’s forget the Sunday school answers for a minute because the same science that reveals the problem also reveals the answer. And it’s easier than you think.

The Solution Isn’t More Material

Teachers often want to combat the Forgetting Curve by trying to cover more ground. The thinking is, “If students are only going to remember 10% then I’ll cover more so there’s more information in that 10%.” Other times, teachers just repeat and repeat the information hoping it’ll stick. And while repetition is good, the students didn’t repeat it, the teacher did. In the end, neither of these works really well because it’s the same avenue for delivering information - the teacher talks and the students listen.

The real solution is to change how the information is experienced in the first place.

When students encounter what truth in story form, they remember it longer. When they have to wrestle with a question rather than just repeat the answer, it sticks with them. When they’re emotionally engaged with curiosity, surprise, joy, or discomfort, the brain decides the information is worth keeping.

The pastor my student visited was right about one thing. He created a memorable moment. He just wasted it on a potty joke rather than Truth.

Be Intentionally Memorable

As teachers, we need to quit asking,” How do I cover this material?” and start asking, “How do I make this truth unforgettable?”

It might look like starting with a relevant story that creates curiosity before introducing the lesson. It might look like asking questions that students genuinely have to consider rather than the ones that only require “Sunday school answers.” It might look like highlighting the moment in the passage that should surprise people rather than smoothing it over or shying away from it.

Scripture is full of surprises and things that seem to contradict each other. But perhaps, these aren’t contradicts at all, maybe they’re invitations from our Creator to help us discover the Truth more deeply and recall it for a lifetime rather than a moment.

The memorable moments can happen at the end of class, not with a tidy sum up but with something the forces the students to keep thinking about it during the week. It can be a challenge that requires them to do something, a question they can’t fully answer yet, or a bold statement that is both weighty and true.

You don’t have to be funny to be memorable. You don’t have to be loud or dramatic. In fact, funny or loud or dramatic can become the memorable thing rather than the truth if it’s forced. You don’t have to be anything other than intentional about the moments you create and honest about what the brain actually needs to hold onto truth.

In the End

It was a special event by student visited with her friend. There were probably a lot of hours poured into the event. The pastor probably worked hard to write a good message. He probably had good content, a strong structure, and a genuine desire to communicate something meaningful. But the thing that survived wasn’t any of that.

You have the opportunity to learn from his mistake. Something from your class is going to stick. In the end, you get to decide whether it’s an accident or a strategy. Your students’ spiritual growth may depend on your choice.

If you want to go deeper on exactly how to make truth stick, I created a free workshop just for that. It's called How People Learn and it will change the way you walk into your classroom.

** The forgetting curve statistics referenced in this article are drawn from Hermann Ebbinghaus's original research, published in Über das Gedächtnis (1885), and confirmed by subsequent educational psychology research.