Stretching Minds IV
If we want to stretch our minds, we need to hear the Bible. This is the form it was designed to be interacted with. There’s nothing wrong with reading—it’s very good—but it can be very solitary. It is good for us to read the Bible together and hear it together.
Most evangelical churches have less Scripture read in the Sunday meeting than has been true at most points in history. Often all we’ve got is the reading for the preaching. Yet, it’s good for us to hear the Bible, whether it’s explained or not.
Then, let’s come from another angle; each book of the Bible is a whole that is designed to be understood as a whole book. We should read it like that, but few do. Honestly, it’s difficult for the average contemporary reader to do that. We should encourage people to try but many will only encounter a whole book if it’s read to them or with them.
That is an argument for preaching through whole books section by section, but again the average church member misses a week or two (or more, sadly) and doesn’t really remember what happened three weeks ago. Just because the preacher can hold in their head the structure of the book we’re working through doesn’t mean most of their hearers can. Most of the congregation think about this for half an hour a week at most, so that isn’t surprising.
There’s something to be said, therefore, for setting up contexts where you can hear more of the Bible. Here are two very different ideas, one I’ve done and one a reader has done, for how to make something work.
The Bible Reading Group
I’ve led a few Bible Reading Groups, and worked hard at getting a weekly life group to essentially become this as well. You gather people around a table, eat together if you can, and then open the text tackling it in large sections. I generally find taking a chapter to two chapters a week is a good idea. I’ve done this in a limited way working through a shorter book (Lamentations, or Malachi) where the first night we read aloud the whole book and talk about it. Subsequent nights we work through sentence by sentence discussing what it means. Annotating paper copies of the text can help here.
I’ve written elsewhere about my experience there and what does and doesn’t work, but the aim here is to understand what’s going on. I always prioritise reading aloud either the whole book or the whole section each evening, as listening to the Bible does us good.
In a different setting, with an established life group, we worked through numerous books of the Bible. Starting small (we tackled Ruth first) helps so people can get to the end of something. We recently finished working through Exodus, two chapters a week. What with the way calendars and schedules work that took about nine months. We would hear the chapters read and then encounter them together with simple questions to guide a free-flowing discussion. We’d usually establish the flow of the story, then ask what people find strange or surprising, then ask how we can apply it, then what this passage tells us about Jesus before briefly worshipping him in song and prayer.
It’s a Bible study, and it’s nothing special in that sense, but what I don’t always see elsewhere is that we allow the text, including all its strangeness, to dictate our discussion.
I’m thinking on how to scale this model up to a wider church setting. I’ve run a few mornings working through a short book (2 Timothy, Galatians) where the whole book is read and people discuss on tables, but it’s naturally much more structured when you’re dealing with 40 people on six tables than ten around your own.
The important thing is that when people encounter the Bible together, they get all sorts of questions about the faith. Their minds are stretched. Sometimes they are surprised or offended. Let them be. Teach them to let the text ask questions rather than just imposing ours on it, but we usually have to get through our questions first to learn this discipline.
Hearing the Bible
After reading some of my writing on this topic a few years back, a reader got in touch to tell me about an event he’d run. He’d arranged for his church to have a dramatic reading of the Gospel of Mark, with members in the church reading sections that were up to a chapter in length and a short intermission part way through. They had 18 different readers.
There wasn’t, as I understand, structured discussion but funnily enough when people hear the Bible they want to talk about it anyway. Hearing the whole of a book gives you a much greater sense of the literary artistry as well as understand what the author is trying to do. Mark has very specific aims. He is laser focused on them. I imagine it was at times a breathless experience, it’s all so fast.
The break was planned to hit Mark’s hinge, stopping at 8.30, which I imagine was a moment in itself. It took about two hours. Those who attended reflected that the event was weighty, that they heard it like they hadn’t before, noticed the repetition of particular words and phrases, commented on the shift in the book as we hit Jesus’ last week, and the surprise of his teaching. Because they’d chosen Mark, and stopped at the shorter ending (16.8), it left the room with vital questions that demand a response. That’s Mark’s point as I take it: who do you say Jesus is? The speed and tone of the book shifts when Peter calls him the Christ and then we are left to ponder how we would answer as the women leave the empty tomb in astonishment and fear.
Listen to the Bible
You could do any of these ideas, you could do something else. The vital thing, in my opinion, is to get the people in your church engaging with the text of the Bible. If you’re a Pastor, try something. It won’t be perfect, but you’ll learn a lot from trying. Then try something that works better for your people. Let me know what you tried and how it went down.
If you’re not but you’d love to do something like this in your church, talk to your Pastor. They’ll have a good sense of which idea would work for you, or an idea to do something else entirely that would achieve similar aims. Or just gather a group of friends and listen to each other reading the Bible. That will do you good.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash
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