By Amy Butler
Lately I have been thinking a lot about the Bible. This is not surprising given my line of work, I know, but the truth of the matter is that the Bible sometimes gets lost in the busyness of doing church.
How many times, for example, does regular and personal reading of the Bible lose out to frenzied youth activities, laborious committee meetings or even frantic sermon writing? I hate to say it, but I find that my personal Bible reading sometimes gets sacrificed — very often for things that are good and worthwhile — but sacrificed nonetheless.
I have been thinking about this more than usual because I just finished a project with a group of colleagues working with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and Duke Divinity School Leadership Education.
The Pastors and Scholars Studio group, as we were named, was tasked with choosing a topic of interest and relevance for the modern church and seminary and exploring the questions surrounding it.
My group chose to study what we suspected was an increasing level of biblical illiteracy within moderate Baptist circles. Over the course of our exploration we surveyed hundreds of moderate Baptists and held discussion forums at several churches and seminaries. In our work we found some interesting trends.
One interesting result of the study was finding that the practice of personal Bible reading was the one factor impacting every question across the board. Do you know where to locate a passage in the Bible without checking the table of contents? The more you read your Bible in private, the more likely you are to be able to do that.
Do you use the Bible to make daily life decisions? The more your read your Bible in private, the more likely you are to use it to make decisions. The correlation continued throughout the entire survey. It turns out that reading our Bibles is an important practice for every part of our lives.
Could we have forgotten this important fact so many of us learned in Sunday school early on? As expected, it turns out that some people are reading their Bibles less and some people still make it a regular practice, but it’s getting more challenging.
One thing we heard in one of the church forums we led was the observation that we moderate Baptists have tended to surrender the Bible to our more conservative brothers and sisters.
In other words, quoting Bible verses and using the Bible to justify various controversial positions has become so associated with our ultra-conservative cousins that we want to do everything we can to distinguish ourselves from “those” kind of Baptists. For some of us, we’ve just let the regular Bible reading fall to the wayside, surrendering our holy text to try to define ourselves as different.
This is a mistake, because a third result we discovered is we love the Bible. We do. We hold it in high regard and revere it as a holy text. We don’t disregard it, as some would suggest. We turn to it for guidance and comfort and we consider it foundational to our faith. This result in the survey study was clear and unequivocal, and leads me to believe that we need the Bible, and we need more of it.
So where do we go from here? In my church we’ve decided to spend the summer getting to know our Bibles again, rediscovering why we need to read the Bible and determining to make Bible reading in vogue again.
We’ll start by examining familiar and often-misquoted passages, learn the books of the Bible along with our kids, read it out loud together, explore some biblical history, hand out Bibles to people who need them and maybe play a few rounds of sword drill to get us warmed up for the rigors of personal Bible reading.
Ultimately, I think I’ll only be thinking more about reading my Bible in the weeks ahead. And as I think about it, I’ll pick it up, open it, and read it!