Engagement....

Just returned home a short while ago from a gathering of our area Church of the Brethren Pastors.  For the past few months, we were reading and discussing The Tangible Kingdom by Matt Smay and Hugh Halter.  In that book, Matt and Hugh share a kind of  Bible Study method that I have used at Community of Joy and find invigorating!  So, I told the group that I would lead them through this process at this gathering today.

We all walked away from the gathering feeling that we had encountered the Holy Spirit in a powerful way and had engaged with Scripture and Community in a way that just might transform our lives.

The process is to read a passage of Scripture 3-4 times outloud and then ask 5 questions of the passage.  Always the same 5 questions! 

1. What did you like about the passage?
2. What didn't you like about the passage?
3. What don't you understand about the passage?
4. What do we learn about God from the passage?
5. If you applied one thing you learned about God from this passage to your life this week, what does it look like?

I find this process so helpful and engaging that if I were to plant a new church, rather than give a sermon each week, I would use this process to engage the Holy Spirit, Scripture, and Community in a way that would surely transform our lives - perhaps in greater ways than a sermon could ever do!