In this conversation, we pick up where we left off talking about the Bible. What is it, and how should it inform our lives and ministries?
Episode 027 – SHOW NOTES – The Bible and the Church Part 2
One of the mistakes we’ve made over the last several decades is that we’ve tried so hard to show how the Bible “relates” to people’s lives that we’ve eliminated what is unique, sacred, and divine about it…
If the Bible is just generalized life advice, we’ve actually domesticated the Scripture out of use… part of the job is to recover the uniqueness of Scripture…
We need to model for people that engagement with Scripture can take many different forms… it is a disservice to people to communicate to people a picture of engagement with Scripture in which it is uniformly ecstatic… sometimes it is, and sometimes it is not… we need to trust that God is in it…
As preachers, we need to realize that our sermon might be more Scripture than that person will hear all week long… if there’s any place where we can read lots of Scripture, it ought to be in church…
Two things that have been really transformative for our congregation (downtown) was (1) having Scripture readings in the service, which congregants lead… and (2) using the Immerse Bible plan… it is an arrangement of the Scriptures without chapters and verses which helps you become steeped in a section of Scripture… people had never read the Bible in big chunks before…
We preach through books of the Bible [at New Life] because there are lots of sticky pages in our Bibles that we never get to, and it’s easy for the preacher to just preach their greatest hits
What I’ve learned over the years is the value for the preacher of having “assigned readings”… that’s scary for charismatic preachers… but I’ve found that when you hold an assigned text against the life of the congregation, you will discover connections that you never would have seen otherwise…
QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM
- What are you doing to help you people fall in love with Scripture? What more could you do?
- Do your sermons model a rich engagement with Scripture? Or is Scripture a “pre-text” for your sermon? How can you start moving in a healthier direction?
- What is your philosophy of your church’s preaching calendar? Does it help people fall in love with Scripture? Why or why not?
RESOURCES
The Immerse Bible
Fee and Stuart – How To Read The Bible For All Its Worth (a simple guide for layperson or preacher to understanding the different genres of Scripture)