Reading the Bible Together: A Personal Testimony
I’ve noticed a problem in my church. And, candidly, among other Christians I know. They seem to know the basics of the faith, and strive to live godly lives, but despite reading their Bibles at least a bit they don’t know their Bibles well. Nor do they know how to go about reading God’s Word.
There are plenty of reasons for this, I suppose, but I’ve been trying to focus on how I can help those I know and care about. Over the last fifteen years I’ve run courses in churches to help with this. I found that I often ended up teaching knowledge rather than reading skills.
Knowledge is important. I believe what I did had value, and people were blessed by Jesus through our time together. However, most had little more idea how to approach the Bible for themselves than they did before. I suspect this had to do with the way I approached teaching these courses. So, I hatched a plan to find a better way to give people the skills they lacked and so dearly wanted.
In the last few months, I tried to get back to basics with a small group of men and women from my church who had expressed a desire to learn to read the Bible better. My grand plan: we would read the Bible together. We would read through Colossians. Over six sessions we would work our way through the whole book. So basically, I invented a Bible study.
The participants didn’t know each other well, so we started with a meal at my house and then stayed around the table to open our Bibles. I made them a “reading Bible” by printing out Colossians with lots of spaces and all the verse and chapter numbers deleted. I encouraged them to scribble on it, showing them that mine was covered in arrows and underlines. People interact with biblical texts differently when they’re presented differently. So, this no-chapter and no-verse style was definitely a better presentation for the teasing out of logic. However, it’s much worse for finding the sentence you’re looking for, as we quickly discovered.
We started by reading all of Colossians together the first time we met. We finished by doing the same the last time we met. In between, we worked our way through the Apostle Paul’s letter line-by-line. So often we can’t read the Bible for ourselves because we have no sense of how this sentence sits within the whole, or of what’s coming next.
I did some preparation, but it only consisted of reading through the passage, highlighting sections I’d want to ask about, and looking up any particularly tricky sections to have some things to ground discussion with. I didn’t write clever questions. At the end one woman gave me the feedback, “I like that you didn’t ask clever questions,” which was good for my humility. What she meant was that she liked that I would simply read a few sentences and say, “What is this about?” until we understood what the text was saying.
We met over six Sunday evenings to read through Colossians, it was probably about halfway that the penny dropped for the group. I said less, they said more. They stopped just asking questions, and started offering answers. It may sound crazy but I encouraged them that the point isn’t simply to get the right answer, but to say something plausible. That’s the key. It’s important for learning that the group knows it’s okay to be wrong the first time you say something about a passage. Fear of being wrong or of what others will think shouldn’t stop people from talking.
If you want a group to read the Bible together then they will need to learn to play. By which I mean, they will need to feel free to suggest connections to other Scriptures or possible meanings, whether they’re right or not. Others in the group must feel free to gently question something that they didn’t think was right.
In my experience, this aspect of learning is so important. People believe that the Bible is God’s Word, so they want to get it right. This should be encouraged. Yet, the desire to not get it wrong can hamstring their ability to understand the text at all. We’re supposed to read the Bible in community, to spend time in the text together, and to learn what God is saying to us in the Scriptures (Col. 4:16; 1 Tim. 4:13; Ex. 17:14; Neh. 8:7–8).
When we learn to play: to have a go, to not be too concerned about failing, to be gently corrected if we’re not right, and to be encouraged for providing insights and connections others hadn’t seen. This relaxed, friendly spirit of inquiry is what you’re looking for when reading the Bible in community.
My favorite moment of the six evenings we enjoyed as a group was when a science teacher in a local school, challenged me on an opinion I’d just given. He challenged me using the text in front of us. He was right, I was wrong. It was wonderful! And it wouldn’t have happened before we’d sat with the text together. By “centering the text,” we “de-centered the teacher.” That’s a postmodern teaching philosophy I was instructed in, but it usually involves centering the student and it inevitably falls apart. When we center the text of God’s Word, instead, it’s powerful!
It helped whenever I moved myself away from being the clergy guy with the right answers, and instead focused upon the text. While I don’t have a problem with using the authority of my office as a pastor to tell people what’s true, I wanted them to see where and how and why it was true in the text.
My second favorite moment was the final session, when I asked them how Jesus had spoken to them through the text over the past few weeks. All seven of us spoke vulnerably about things that Jesus was changing in us as a result of reading Colossians together. I had the conviction that this was the right approach, but I did wonder if it would work at all. Usually, we read a couple of sentences and then attempted to apply it. I feared that holding the text in our heads strongly enough to be able to articulate an application was a bit too much. I needn’t have worried; I doubt all seven of us had the text in our heads, but Jesus’ does his work in his word. We learned that It’s okay to just read the Bible, talk about it, and trust that the Spirit will change us.
My primary goal for the group was selfish: I want people to read the Bible in community. I want people to spar with, consider with, and speculate with about the text. It refreshed me! And even though I’m a pastor, it wasn’t work.
All of my group wants to do it again! I’m hoping to plan another six Sunday evenings soon. We’ll look at something in the Old Testament and, I trust, encounter Jesus again in the text. I hope that at some point, some of my group members might be able to start their own groups and work through the text of the Bible with others. If my pyramid scheme, of sorts, takes off, then more people will be reading the Bible together and listening to Jesus in the Scriptures. That can only be a good thing.
Why not consider doing something similar in your church? It was extremely rewarding for me and for them.