Reading the Bible
Dear Friends,
Reading the Bible is something a church like ours talks quite a lot about. We are, after all, an evangelical church, and that’s what evangelicals do. We believe the Bible, we take our stand on the Bible, we are known (sometimes with approval, sometimes not) as people of the Bible; so it stands to reason that we are people who read our Bibles. But do we?
A recent article in The Briefing has calculated how much of the Bible we actually do read. If we assume two readings of about 15 verses each on Sunday, we would read about 5% of the Bible in a year. If we add Fellowship Group to that, the figure rises to about 7.5%. If we also manage to read the same amount in private for five days each week (is that optimistic?), it could rise as high as a total of 20%. That would mean five years to read through the whole Bible (assuming no gaps or repetition).
Compare that with how much Scripture was appointed to be read in the Book of Common Prayer: morning and evening prayer, said over a year, would mean the whole Old Testament was read once, the New Testament twice, and the Psalms twelve times. That’s somewhat more than 20%!
Why does this matter? The fact is that people who know their Bibles well are far less likely to be “tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching” (Ephesians 4:14, NIV). They develop a ‘nose’ for what is right and true, because they know what the Bible says, and aren’t easily tricked by those who misuse it. And there’s no short-cut to knowing the Bible. We have to read it, or hear it read to us – whether that’s on our own, with a small group, or in church.
Chris Hobbs
Vicar