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Holy Week resources and reflections

Elders living, teaching the Bible

The Book of Order makes it clear: Elders “should cultivate their ability to teach the Bible. … ”  

This expectation has two major implications for elders: they are teaching, both implicitly and explicitly.

First, they are constantly teaching — by example. Elders need to watch themselves, to live circumspectly, seeking to exhibit the life of every Christian who is called to live by way of Scripture. Not everyone has the gift for classroom teaching but all elders, whether serving on or off the Session at the moment, are to demonstrate in all their actions that what they do is shaped by their knowledge of Scripture. And that is why we keep going to adult education classes and retreats and Bible studies, why we know that mouthing chapter and verse is nothing compared to living as people who have been and are continuing to be instructed in the word of God. 

How can elders model an authentic understanding of the role Scripture plays in a believer’s life?

Many of us know to go to Scripture when we, or someone we love, faces a crisis, when someone dies unexpectedly or is in an accident, or struggles to recover from illness, when a business fails, or there is dissension in the church. Some people think that the more Biblical verses you can quote or the more scriptural allusions you can recognize and pinpoint in the Testaments the “better Christian” you are. This popular term does not reflect the goal of serious Christians. We are looking to become more faithful Christians and the Bible offers us words and stories that point out the shapes and forms of faithfulness. The goal of Bible teaching and learning is that we discover the riches of God’s ways with humankind from the beginning and the better and worse ways that we creatures of God deal with those Godly ways. 

Secondly, the explicit goes on in classrooms with Bibles open.

My first word about elders teaching the Bible is a word of grace. Not everyone finds it easy to talk to a seatmate, nor to talk about what the Bible says to her or him. Maybe an elder feels the need to confess all they know about the book and prophet Hosea is that they have heard the word and have a hunch that it might be in the Old Testament. They think, Everyone but me knows just where to open the book. It is enough to make me swear that I’m too busy for this extra hour of church to come again. The best-kept secret in Christendom is the presence of a Table of Contents in every Bible and the realization that you’re not a bad person if you need to use it. Let the so-called saints flip their Bibles open all the time to the right page and God bless the teacher who says “If you look at the Table of Contents you will find Hosea every time you need to read it.”

The Book of Order says elders “should cultivate their ability” to teach the Bible; elders do not have to become Biblical scholars. Elders should be able to lead people in their relationship with Scripture, to encourage their use of the Bible as a gift from God for the living of our days, to help them to discover the ways in which the Bible speaks to the circumstances of our lives as individuals, as family members, as citizens, as members of a congregation.

Some elders will be very good at leading a class of children, teenagers, young or older adults in their use of the Bible. Some elders on the Session and after going off the Session can take an assigned text or follow a curriculum and make Bible study an attractive and useful opportunity for people. Others’ spiritual gifts do not seem to allow them to direct a class and use a prescribed lesson plan. All elders, though, should develop the capacity to ask, in all occasions of private, public, and church life, what guidance may there be in Scripture and to ask, as a Session meets, what guidance can the Bible offer in this aspect or dimension of life? 

Those who would teach the Bible need to understand how people learn.

Contemporary educator Parker Palmer has brought great insight into the conditions in which learning takes place. He names the primary task of a teacher as “creating a space where truth can be known.” An example: When I was a sophomore in high school my algebra teacher sent a group of us to the chalkboard to solve problems. One after the other everyone at the board finished her or his problem and sat down. I was stuck. I didn’t have a clue about how to solve my problem. The teacher said to the class, “We’re just going to sit here until Freda solves her problem.” Everything in me wanted to scream, “Well if I knew how to do it do you think I’d still be standing here?” The class sat and I stood until the bell rang and class was over. I knew then, when I was 15, what Palmer was pointing to. Learning requires space to try and fail without demeaning the learner.

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in Bible to know that the goal in teaching the Bible is to help people remain open to whatever possibility for growth and learning God intends in this part of Scripture. You can’t stay open to God’s word if you are feeling mortified by what you don’t know, afraid for what the process the teacher sets in motion will reveal to you and others about your paltry knowledge of Scripture or the possibility that you really don’t “get” the intention of the text.

I want to dis-abuse you of any notion that teaching the Bible is merely getting people to know what’s in it because what is “in it” is far more than that. Teaching the Bible is a task that must be undertaken carefully, gently, prayerfully, with a great deal of support to all, always in the hope that the Bible can become for everyone a “living word” and not only a history book.

Teachers must know their subjects and texts. Bible teachers need to know what the Bible says and how it relates to life today.

Robert McAfee Brown says in the classic, The Bible Speaks To You, that the Bible is a record of God’s search for man. What is revealed in Scripture is a living God in a relationship with living people.  

In that relationship, the Bible testifies to our search for God. God is revealed in historical events, the primary one being God’s revelation in Jesus Christ — God becoming one of us with the limitations of humanity and dying as the ultimate expression of God’s love for us. God’s ongoing revelation continues in the church where the power and presence of God is manifested in ever-new ways. Brown says that if we only look at the Bible, its statements and propositions, the image may be blurred, but if we look through the Bible, it serves as a kind of window bringing God and Christ into true focus.

Learner and teacher come to the time of Bible study humbly and expectantly.

We approach it together in much the way we approach worship on Sunday morning. As in worship, we come before God with a prayer, invoking or recognizing God’s presence in our midst, acknowledging that Holy Spirit will be at work in us to help us to see and understand and respond, grateful that we have in the person of Jesus Christ a much clearer picture of what God intends for us and all of humankind and we have, in fact, a living Christ who accompanies us through all of the vicissitudes of life. The prayer can be a simple, spontaneous one voicing the previous thoughts. If you have trouble hearing only yourself speaking, this can be printed and all can say the prayer together. You might ask if someone would look at the prayers in the book of Common Worship (which should be in your church library) and choose one for the following week. Don’t let something that seems right to do go by the way because you aren’t comfortable doing it.

The same can be said for reading the Bible aloud. Have people read a passage together or ask if there is someone who would like to read it aloud.

Entertaining a different point of view can be taught and learned. A person in a Bible class says, “I really do believe that 40 days and 40 nights of rain came on the Ark,” and someone else laughs or starts to question on the basis of superior knowledge of weather and ships or whatever and we have the beginning of the kind of tension, individual and group, that hovers in the wings of every good Bible class. A teacher’s role is to create space for opinions to be aired and then to allow for fuller expression by trying to get a clearer picture of why someone would think one way or the other. 

The Peace, Unity, and Purity task force that reported to the General Assembly in 2006 developed a plan for productive and faithful discussion of Scripture and other bodies of knowledge that was useful but not destructive to the searching participants. In churches and judicatories where they have tried this method there are reports that progress has been made. Who among us, when some particular person rises in a presbytery meeting to speak to an issue hasn’t, almost without thinking, tuned out that speaker? I know where he/she stands, I don’t have to listen. Studying the Bible isn’t about memorizing verses or building your fortress of beliefs. It is about opening yourself, along with others doing similar searching, to what God may be saying to you/us in the ancient stories and ruminations of our forebears in the faith, trusting that Holy Spirit will dwell among us, shape us into the beloved community, not allow us to buy cheap resolutions but find the way to go on together. And let us go on together.

Elders, as all who approach Bible study seriously, face what Peter Gomes, professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University and minister of Harvard Memorial Church, calls “the ultimate confrontation between self and Christ.” In his book, The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart, Gomes says: “The hope of the Good Book, the conviction of those who have sought to understand it with mind and heart, is that it will help us in the good life, the life that brings us nearer to God and to one another. Such hope animates us and, indeed, encourages us to use our minds and trust our hearts. … The Bible is a living word from a living God for a needy people. It is indeed the Good Book.”

 

Freda Gardner is professor emerita of Christian education at Princeton Theological Seminary, and was the moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in 1999.

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