What Do You Do When You No Longer Believe a Doctrine You Used to Teach?
This is a discussion, not a lecture. It is also not a debate about which doctrines are correct. It is a question for the specific person who is currently in this situation and does not know what to do.
I taught Sunday school for six years.
I taught the same class every Sunday morning, a group of about fifteen adults, most of them older than me. I prepared the lessons during the week. I read the commentaries. I answered the questions. I was, for that hour, the person in the room who was supposed to know.
And then, over the course of about two years, I stopped believing one of the things I had been teaching.
I am not going to say which doctrine. That is not the point, and it would turn this into a different conversation. What matters is that it was a doctrine I had taught with confidence, in public, to people who trusted me. And I no longer believed it.
I did not stop believing it all at once. It was not a crisis. It was a slow erosion. I would be reading a passage and the doctrine would not fit. I would hear a sermon and feel something shift inside me. I would teach the lesson on Sunday and walk out feeling like I had lied.
For about six months, I kept teaching anyway. I told myself I was being careful. I told myself the doubt was a phase. I told myself that if I kept teaching it, maybe I would believe it again. None of that was true. I was just scared.
Here is the case for telling the truth and stepping down.
You cannot teach what you do not believe. This is the simple version. If you are standing in front of a class and saying words you do not mean, you are not teaching. You are performing. And people can tell. Even if they cannot name what is wrong, they can sense when a teacher is not convinced of their own lesson.
There is also a witness argument. If you keep teaching a doctrine you have stopped believing, and then later - through someone else, through a book, through your own admission - the class finds out that you have not believed it for years, what does that do to their faith? You have not protected them. You have deceived them. The longer you wait, the worse the eventual discovery is.
And there is the simplest argument of all. You are not doing anyone a favor by staying silent. The people in that class have their own questions. They have their own doubts. They may be sitting in your room every week thinking they are the only one who does not fully believe what is being taught. If you - the teacher - cannot be honest, how are they supposed to be? Your silence reinforces their isolation.
That is Side A.
Here is the case for staying, for now, and being patient with yourself.
Doubt is not the same thing as unbelief. This is the first thing to hold onto. You are not sure. That is different from being sure of the opposite. Many people who have gone through a season of doubt have come out the other side believing the doctrine again, with more depth than before. If you step down on the first strong wave of doubt, you may be stepping down from something you would have returned to.
There is also the question of what stepping down does to the class. If you resign, the class is disrupted. The people who trusted you are confused. The leadership of the church may ask questions you cannot answer without exposing more than you are ready to expose. And you may not be replaced by someone with the same care you brought to it. You may be replaced by someone who teaches the doctrine without your doubt - which is what you were worried about in the first place.
And there is a third argument, which is that the classroom is not the place for your personal crisis. You do not owe every person in your life your full inner state. There is a version of this where you step down from teaching, you take six months to yourself, you work through the question with a pastor or a counselor or a friend, and then you decide whether to come back. That is stewardship of your own process, not dishonesty.
That is Side B.
I have not resolved this for myself. I have done both. I taught for six months after I stopped believing, and then I stepped down, and both of those things had costs.
Here is the question I keep coming back to.
If you have ever stopped believing a doctrine you used to teach, what did you do - and what do you wish you had done?
Not the answer you would give your pastor. The answer you would give a friend who is in the same situation right now. Did you step down? Did you keep teaching? Did you talk to anyone? Did you leave the church entirely? Did you come back to the doctrine later?
And if you are in the middle of it right now, what is the hardest part? Is it the fear of being found out? Is it the guilt? Is it the loneliness of not being able to say it out loud? Is it the worry about what your family will think?
You do not have to name the doctrine. You do not have to name the church. You just have to be honest.