Our Non-agenda Bible Study

our staff gets together every thursday morning for an hour or so to read and meditate on scripture together. actually, one thursday a month we give ourselves to supplication..which will have to be a topic for another time. i have called it a "non-agenda bible study". basically it's just a retro idea--very retro--and not novel at all. before the printing press and wide-spread literacy, the primary way that people were exposed to God's word was through both an auditory and a community experience. folks would get together and someone would read aloud from a text and everyone would listen to it together. i am convinced that we are missing out on something amazingly rich in our church life these days. now that we all have personal bibles and personal quiet times, we tend to ignore this historically proven spiritual discipline and wondrous experience--how ironic. we read the bible silently to ourselves and we hear sermons about the bible, but rarely do we sit together in spiritual communion and community and listen to the scripture being read aloud and proclaimed,
last week we were reading out of a devotional paraphrase from the fifth chapter of the book of romans that I wrote back in the early nineties called the romance of romans. a visiting friend, marty, read the first half and then bob read the last half. (after we read we wait prayerfully and then simply begin to share what has impacted us from the reading. we often get into amazing discussions and we learn a lot from the Holy Spirit through one another on the spot. all this is without any preparation or concern about how far we get into the chapter.)
on this day, as we read about the worldwide impact of adam's "one act of disobedience" throughout every generation of humanity, and then about the "much more" amazing "one act of righteousness" of Jesus and it's impact on the whole cosmos, we were all progressively breaking down in tears of wonder, love and gratitude as we shared what had touched us. it's really good to cry (more like a gift of grace) with others when we're sitting at the feet of Jesus Christ with humbled hearts and teachable spirits. i believe that's the kind of thing that caused the moravians to view "koininia" as a sacrament.
anyway...the thing that hit me the most was about a terrible irony in the church world today in which there is so much avoidance of talking straightforwardly about sin. of course this is often the case because of an understandable reaction to the "gospel of sin-management" (as my long-distance friend dallas willard has called it) that has, mostly inadvertently, been promoted through the fundamentalism and evagelicalism of modern times. but the irony is that if we don't speak candidly and honestly about sin and its horrible consequences, then the marvelous work that Jesus accomplished to reverse it all through his work on the cross (and then, in his resurrection) is diminished and under-valued. as our Lord said in one place, "he who is forgiven much loves much". i guess this implies that if we never (or rarely) consider the "much" of which we've been forgiven, then our love will be less fervent. i do know that this thought is primarily why we were crying together last week and that our hearts were more deeply knit together in that amazing love.