Church Leader Insights Blog with Nelson Searcy

Co-Teaching A Message

Today I am co-teaching Message # 3 of our Tongue Pierced series with Kerrick. This is the first time we have co-taught together in quite a while, although before we went multi-site we used to do it quite a bit.

The #1 question we get about co-teaching is ‘how does it work?‘. This Sunday it works this way: I’m doing the first 15min of the message, Kerrick will do the next 10min and I’ll come back and wrap it up. Sometimes we do half and half but in general its good to have the person who ’starts’ the message to ‘conclude’ the message, as it gives greater symmetry to the entire message.

Co-teaching a message with someone has its advantages:
- Multiple voices keep people more interested
- Multiple voices connect with a broader audience
- Less physically taxing that doing a message alone (especially when you are doing four in a row!)
- greater creativity
- more fun doing a message together

I’ve found that you can’t just co-teach with one. In general their style has to be 65% similar to yours (I talk pretty fast so they have to be comfortable talking fast too).

Finally, co-teaching is a great way to raise up a new teacher or to introduce a new teacher to your congregation.

I’m sure I’ll address this issue again in the future, but if you have any questions just comment below.

Off to the 10am service.

Nelson

P.S. Another key to effective co-teaching is to have your preaching calendar done way in advance so you have plenty of time to prepare to teach together.