Responding to an invitation from the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Virginia, Baptist Seminary of Kentucky has produced a Bible study resource that is available to Virginia Cooperative Baptists and others free of charge.
The study, titled “Faithful Curiosity: A Five-Week Study in Luke and Acts,” may be downloaded from the BSK website. The study deals with three passages from Luke and two passages from Acts. It offers Bible study methods and provides two interpretative essays on each passage. The writers are BSK faculty, staff, students and alumni.
In an introduction to the study, content editor Laura Rodgers Levens emphasized the advantages of studying Scripture in community and listening to various perspectives.
“Those of us who have studied Scripture for decades and might be called ‘experts’ acknowledge that the more we learn, the more we realize there is much more to learn,” wrote Levens, associate professor of Christian mission at BSK. “The challenge of studying Scripture continues, especially as we listen carefully to our community members and pay attention to the different contexts and viewpoints everyone brings to the study of Scripture.”
The resource’s design editor is David Adams, director of institutional design at BSK and an adjunct professor at the school. Writers include BSK professors Lewis Brogdon, John Inscore Essick, Dalen Jackson, and Mark Medley; adjunct professors Amber Inscore Essick and Anastasia Holman; staff member and adjunct professor Erica Whitaker; BSK student T. Devan Franklin III; and alumni Aaron Austin and Kelly Hale.
BSK President David Cassady noted the project demonstrates BSK’s commitment to scholarship and congregations. In a letter that prefaces the study, he wrote that BSK’s “primary commitment is to exercise together scholarly gifts and vocation as stewards of the mysteries in service to God’s church.”
The project grows out of a partnership between BSK and CBF Virginia that began in 2020. CBF Virginia provides financial assistance for Virginia students who desire to pursue “in place” theological studies through BSK’s distance education program.
Terry Maples, coordinator of CBF Virginia, said the study will help participants see the “power of the unhindered Spirit to change lives and systems.”
“Not only do the writers help us better understand the context in which the passages were written, they challenge us to welcome difference, reimagine the life of faith from the perspective of others, call us to stand up for the ‘bent over,’ to join the Spirit in challenging forces that limit access to the gospel, address white Christianity’s ‘diseased social imagination’ and disentangle the good news from cultural values,” he explained.
Mark Snipes, associate coordinator of CBF Virginia, said the resource exemplifies the fruit being borne through the partnership between CBF Virginia and BSK.
“Our budding partnership with BSK has already given new life to our organization, and this new Bible study series gives congregations in Virginia a practical, theologically sound resource that we could not have produced ourselves,” he said. “This is the power of partnership.”
Snipes will become CBF Virginia’s coordinator on Oct. 1 after Maples’ retirement.