ft. a discussion on private and communal studying of the Bible
The large majority of churches I encounter have a Sunday service of some kind and a collection of mid-week meetings where members of the church meet in smaller groups (usually around 10-15 people). We all know what we mean when we refer to ‘small groups’, ‘life groups’, gospel communities’ and the like. Or so I thought. It turns out, outside my own little family of churches, there are extremely diverse ideas on what is considered the point of these groups. This ramble focuses on:
- The point of meeting as church
- Why do this mid-week?
- Is this the same as a Bible study?
- What is the point of reading the Bible?
- What should small groups do?
- What should leadership look like?
The point of meeting as church
It is my conviction that our goal as churches should be to live out our faith, modelled on firstly, the life of Jesus, and secondly, on the model of the 1st century church as seen in the book of Acts and the rest of the New Testament. Acts 2:42-47 gives us a clear and concise view of what the gathered church looked like – what it could and should look like today. They were concerned with four things when they met:
- The Apostles’ teaching, which I think we can see as what we now have as the Bible. In my church context we believe in modern-time, lowercase, apostles. I think to a lesser degree, we gather also to be led by the people we’re led by – a possible application of this point.
- Fellowship
- Breaking of bread. Is this all types of eating together or exclusively communion? The former is an important part of fellowship, so it’s clear that both are important.
- Prayer
The goal of the church is the same as the goal God gave humanity, that he gives all of us. We find this first in creation and secondly in the passage in Matthew 22:36-40 where Jesus tells us the greatest commandment. At creation God’s people were told to live in the garden in relationship with God, told to subdue the world and fill it. The greatest commandment is to love God, the second is to love others. These are what we are made for: to live in relationship with God, to care for creation, to spread the dominion of God’s kingdom (his loving, wise, powerful reign) and to champion one another.
We also see it in the body imagery of 1 Cor 12.
The vision of the church is to be the living, breathing, moving, acting body of God. We exist for his pleasure and for his glory. We exist to bring the good news of salvation and redemption into our hurting, broken world. We exist to be God’s practical solution for the pain we see around us.
Why do this mid-week?
Meeting on a Sunday often leaves us in lack of fellowship. If our churches are big, we don’t have meaningful conversations over coffee. Introverts and the shy don’t connect. Small groups create cost-effective, location-practical ways of eating together, sharing our lives with a smaller group of people in a relationally sustainable way. To pray for one another from a place of really knowing what is going on in the other’s life. Big church is important. The gathered church is a celebration of God, it’s a celebration of being the body, it’s resourcing, it is a place of collaboration, it’s a place to serve, to be filled. It’s the church family equivelant of meeting up with all your aunts and uncles and cousins. But you also need time with your smaller family. Like in all things, we need variety to thrive.
Is this the same as a Bible study?
Churches I know treat this mid-week group as a Bible study. That’s okay, if the other functions are being met also in the full diet of Sunday + mid-week + general sharing of your life with your brothers and sisters. But my friend was shocked that at my church we don’t always read the Bible together on a Wednesday. Sometimes our meetings are ‘just’ prayer. Or reading a book about God together and discussing it. (I will caveat this with the fact that all these activities are infused with Bible truth and you’d be hard-pressed to stop people opening their Bibles even when the ‘activity’ isn’t Bible study.)
I was shocked to find their mid-week groups involved Bible study that was top-down and taught by the leaders of the group. Radically different to the group-led discussions that are our norm. The standard at our mid-week meetings are to be reading a book of the Bible together, or to discuss the preach from the previous Sunday.
On one level, the shock on both sides was just that we’re from different churches that organise things differently and on one level there isn’t anything wrong with that. But it made me think about the principles behind the thing. I think, my discomfort with the way my friend’s church does things rests in the way I see Bible reading.
What is the point of reading the Bible?
So many of the people I have met at uni seem to believe that the point of reading the Bible is to understand it. This is not an awful aim, but it isn’t the end goal. The pharisees knew the Bible better than the disciples did. Understanding it well is only a good thing if you have a greater goal in mind.
Why should we read the Bible privately? To know God more, to know how to live a life that pleases him, as a tool to become more like Jesus and to make him known. John Wesley described scripture as one of the three ‘means of grace’ meaning they help us on the journey, but they aren’t the destination. Reading the Bible to understand isn’t the point. Reading the Bible is in order to know God and in order to apply its teaching to our lives. No amount of Bible reading is going to transform your life or fix your problems. An encounter with Jesus is the solution. An encounter with Jesus is the start of a new way of living. Ongoing encounters with the person of Jesus is, in my opinion, the only way to truly live. And I believe the word of God is alive and active. The Holy Spirit makes it alive to us. And so you can experience Jesus through reading your Bible. It’s one of many ways of meeting with Jesus and a super important one.
No amount of reading your Bible is going to make you a better person. It is Jesus who sanctifies, it is he who transforms you. Not reading your Bible. Oftentimes the Holy Spirit makes us aware of our sin, of our need to grow, of the heart and ideals of God, through the words of scripture. But unless you’re meeting with Jesus, you won’t be transformed.
We read the Bible in community in order to help one another in this pursuit – the pursuit of God. This is why we preach, this is why we open the Bible when we meet mid-week. The entire point is to help us love God better, to love our brothers and sisters better, to love the lost better. Unapplied Bible knowledge is of no real use.
What should small groups do?
So my conclusion is that small groups should keep all four of the focuses of Acts 2 at the centre of their meeting together. This means the Bible should be so central! But in the sense that the focus should be on helping one another apply it to our lives individually and communally. Flowing out of an intimate acquaintance with one another’s lives. If your mid-week Bible study is just about receiving or discussing theoretical knowledge about God – if you’re mostly concerned with understanding the Bible – if you think that’s the end goal of Bible reading then you have narrowed your view of what the church is meant to me. You’re missing out on the lively, vital reality of church and the Christian walk.
Given that we have preaching on Sunday mornings, where one gifted teacher communicates knowledge and suggests application to the others, it seems silly to me to replicate that in mid-week groups. It is surely better to make the most of a variety of voices and a variety of wisdom. It is surely wise to hear people’s raw thoughts and have the chance to speak truth into their situations and their thinking. But this desire for top-down preaching grows out of the over-exaggerated importance placed on understanding. It comes out of a fear that our understanding will be hindered, and therefore the meeting will have been of no use, if we haven’t learnt something new. Sometimes what God wants to do with us is to remind us of something. Sometimes it is to take some of the knowledge we’ve stuffed into our heads and make it real in our hearts. We should give him space to do that.
I caveat this with the acknowledgement that of course we need leaders and wise people among us to guide conversation and correct people where they have an incorrect idea about God. But I also think that this is way more likely to happen if people are encouraged to share their thoughts and the leader/facilitator spends more time listening.
What should leadership look like?
This whole set of thought originated in a discussion about women in leadership. I have my own views on this – that it is only eldership that is specifically given to men and that any other type of church leadership should be open to both genders equally. However, this section exists to make one point only. If you draw the line at eldership, then women can lead small groups. Ideally you have both genders leading for pastoral reasons. But if you draw the line at teaching, like my friends’ church does, then you do have a problem with whether women can lead small groups in the absence of a man. This problem only really exists when you have a top-down, teaching approach to Bible study, and when you’re leading a mid-week Bible study, rather than a holistic community group. If you lead a community-motivated Bible study where the goal is for everyone to contribute and discuss, the leader is merely facilitating, and so even if you have a ‘no women teaching’ policy, then you have less of a problem (some problem still remaining with the idea of people occasionally needing correction, but surely an elder can be drawn in for this if it’s major? And that would be the expectation in contexts where women are released to teach anyhow!) Similarly, in the context of CU where there isn’t really an expectation that correction will be brought, and there’s no expectation of the leader having authority, there really shouldn’t be an issue with female leadership.
Conclusion
As usual, these are the thoughts of an opinionated 22-year-old and I’d be a fool to not be open to correction, adjustment, discussion. So please get in touch! I’d love to hear your thoughts on the purpose of Bible reading and of gathering as the church.