On Saturday 4th February John Campbell, Principal of Northern College, Manchester addressed a group of over sixty people (Anglican, Methodist, Salvation Army, United Reformed) at Kingston Park Church, Newcastle, about enthusing people to engage with scripture. Trevor Jamison reports on what he had to say.
The first five things to do:1. Reverence the scriptures
2. Presume Biblical authority
3. Focus on ‘preaching’ and ‘teaching’
4. Treasure our Bible heritage
5. Keep reading the Bible in Church
Follow these and you can be confident you’ll put people off engaging with scripture!
When we ‘reverence’ the scriptures we make them unapproachable and difficult to read. In wider society claims to ‘authority’ are distrusted and off-putting. Depending on preaching (an activity with a poor public image) and teaching runs counter to educational understanding of how many people learn, by discovery rather than through instruction.
Treasuring our Bible heritage makes the Bible into a quaint artefact of a by-gone age, ‘experienced’ like a museum visit, not engaged with in everyday life. Liturgical use Bible is the end product of respecting communities. We have to get out there with the Bible and earn the respect first.
1. Respect the Text - acknowledge its diversity and awkwardness so that it can challenge us.
2. Be Upfront About Baggage – everyone comes to the text with preconceptions and experiences that affect how they understand it and interpret it. We recognise this in others and we should be open about our own position.
3. Recover the Story – look beyond the bite-sized chunk served up on Sundays to consider the whole story of a Gospel or unpack the story underlying a letter from Paul to a church.
4. Allow for Adult Listeners – allow for pain, fear, messiness, politics and a lot of interpretative sophistication on the part of every believer.
5. Dialogue With Diverse Voices – the understandings of different people and different cultures from around the world are available to help us see the scriptures in new ways.
6. Rediscover the Spoken Word- biblical stories were first told to be heard, not read. So why not spend some time together listening to the story e.g. The Gospel of Mark at one hearing.
7. Expect Engagement – explicitly invite openness, risk and reaction so that people can say what they actually feel and believe.
8. Interweave Worlds – encourage people to travel back and forward between the world they find in the text and the world they experience today.
9. Unleash Imagination – Anything goes as long as you are aware of what you are doing and why – such as creative retelling of the story from the perspective of one character, reading outdoors (listen to Jesus preach by a lakeside), whole church improvisation (not just David and Goliath, but other characters and the cast for Israel and Philistine armies), encouraging people to write their own psalms, poems or hymns.
10. Share in God’s Conversation –if we understand God as a friend who seeks us out rather than a totalitarian tyrant then that will affect how we read scripture.
This event was organised by an ecumenical group that works with ordained ministers in the North-East who are in their early years of ministry. Trevor Jamison, Synod Adult Education Officer, is the URC member of the group.