I look forward to many things in the church week, but perhaps few as much as the weekly Tuesday Bible study at noon. I have led this group ever since I first came to SSPC eight years ago, and while the participants have rolled over a lot over the years, it’s surprising the overall consistency. A core group has been with me almost since the beginning.
Discovering the Bible for Yourself
What amazes me is the excitement that the group brings to this work. I believe that having a Bible Study group like this is vital to any church’s ministry. Most people, even lifelong Christians, are unfamiliar with the Bible. We tend to bring all kinds of assumptions that may be true, or may not be true, or may only sometimes be true, that are based more on what others have taught us than what we’ve discovered for ourselves.
So the purpose of Bible study I lead is to enable students to discover the Bible for themselves. One of the core beliefs of Reformation Christians is “the priesthood of all believers,” by which Martin Luther meant that every Christian has the capacity and the responsibility to interpret Scripture without benefit of clergy.
Of course, Tuesday Bible Study participants do have benefit of clergy—me! But my goal is not to tell them what the Bible says, but to help them to discover it. The resources available to them include their own minds, experiences, and insights; and the opportunity to interpret in the context of a community.
Community: The Body of Christ
Community is important in this group. Over the years, we’ve had a broad mix of people—old and young, lifelong members and new folks and in some cases people who aren’t even members at all. One regular is a member of First Pres. Many of our new members have become active in the Bible study. A couple of folks are friends of church members.
We’ve had losses, too: former regulars include Tom Vaden and his first wife, Laura, and Betty Marrow, all of them active and regular as long as they were able. Our prayer time at the end is vital to our identity. People are very supportive and attentive to one another.
What do I bring? A good question, since quite often the group goes a direction that I’d never expected. Sometimes I even instinctively want to say, “No, don’t go there–!” but I try to restrain myself because my challenge is to trust the Spirit—trust that the direction the group takes is the direction most likely to enable us to discern the mind of Christ. Keeping my mouth shut pays off, as the group often gives me insights I would never have divined without their help.
Intensive Study
In anticipation of my sermon series on Job, the Tuesday study group and I engaged in an intensive study of Job. It was an honest conversation about doubt and the inevitable challenges of believing that God is both sovereign and good when we live in a world of suffering. It drew many people to Bible study who might not have come otherwise. To give you an idea of what I bring to the Bible study, I acquainted them with scholarship on Job, helped them contextualize it in the total corpus of Scripture, and introduced them to post-Holocaust literature about Job from Jewish writings and Archibald MacLeish’s theological play JB.
Right now we’re doing what’s known as “Redaction Criticism”—a comparative reading of the gospels, side by side, to see similarities and differences between them so that we can discern each gospel author’s particular perspective on Jesus’ ministry and how scholars determine the sources that each gospel writer used. It is intensive work, the sort of thing that in the past has been left to “experts”—but the point of this Bible study is that we’re all experts. Everyone has the ability and the responsibility to interpret scripture. My job is to provide you with the tools and the opportunity.