The past several years at Rockbridge I've co-directed or directed the Small Group Leaders' Training Track. During the course of the week, we teach future small group Bible study leaders how to facilitate Bible studies as well as how to build their future small group into a genuine community.
For the Bible study portion of the training, we teach them how to do Inductive Bible Study. Inductive Bible study is a method of studying the Bible whereby you work your way through a book of the Bible in order to gather the full meaning of what it has to teach you. This is in contrast to a deductive or topical study where we focus on one topic (for college students, usually sex) and then find different verses that tell us something about that topic.
Each week we get one or two students who ask in their evaluation why we only teach Inductive Bible study. Hear, oh people, to my reply: Inductive Bible Study is simply a better way to read the Bible. Let me count the ways....
1. Inductive Bible Study takes the fact that the author wrote a whole book on purpose seriously. What happens in Mark 6 has everything to do with Mark 1-5 and sets up Mark 7; what Paul's talking about in Romans 8 is only truly understood when we've read Romans 1-7 and then is qualified, clarified and developed in Romans 9. We only fully understand an author's meaning when we allow him or her to tell us their whole story.
If we watched t.v. shows the way that many Bible study guides have us reading the Scriptures, we'd be as confused about what's happening on "Lost" as most of us are about the Bible. Certainly we could do a deductive or topical study whereby we examined how various t.v. shows talked about God (or sex) and extrapolate some helpful themes or concepts about our culture's view of God (or sex). But that wouldn't be nearly as thorough a study as it would be if we actually watched and intimately knew all those shows, their stories and plot development and characters. We could then more accurately know what the heck the writers were trying to say and draw more substantial conclusions.
2. If I wrote you a letter, I hope you would read all of it.
3. A story: yesterday I took Davis to an indoor playground at our local mall. One child was somewhat aggressive and I was somewhat indignant at how he treated some of the other kids. Davis, of course, locked in on him and followed him around for a good fifteen minutes. The kid started to get a little feisty and at one point he actually head-butted Davis. The mom didn't see it, but I did and I went over to console Davis. While I was consoling Davis, the mom came over to me and said this: "I saw your son following my Justin. I just wanted to let you know that Justin gets a little aggressive sometimes. He's mildly autistic, and he's working really hard today to be especially gentle and nice. We're really proud of him."
My indignancy melted away to love and compassion for this kid. What changed? Context. Context changes everything. How I process and perceive and understand the dynamics of Justin head-butting my kid is completely flipped upside-down by the information supplied to me by the mom.
Sometimes we get head-butted by Scripture and we get disoriented and confused because we don't understand what's going on. Often this is because we haven't bothered to get oriented to the context. In Mark there's a great example. Jesus repeatedly tells people not to tell anyone who he is--he even silences the demons when they profess him to be the Christ. If you hit this on a random deductive study, you'd wonder what the heck was going on: doesn't Jesus want people to know who he is? But if you read carefully start to finish, you begin to see a pattern: in Jewish contexts, Jesus tells people not to tell who he is, in Gentile contexts he tells them to tell everyone what God has done for them. The point? Jewish understanding of Messiah is too loaded with the wrong expectations, especially early on in Jesus' ministry. Jesus wants time and space to re-define Messiah a little bit. Context helps us to see this.
Okay, of course there's times and places for a good deductive/topical study of Scripture. But honestly, the main reason people like them is because they're easier. Inductive is a more faithful way to read the Bible (heck, to read ANYTHING) and it's more work for us as readers. It's just easier to have Beth Moore or some other Bible study guide guru tell us ahead of time what the passage is going to say so that we don't have to bother thinking or engaging with it ourselves.
And that's what I've got to say about that.
8 comments:
Alex! Right on, man, right on!
Bring it!
Also, did I mention that I am now attending a Small Group Bible Study using Beth Moore as the main content? I AM GOING ABSOLUTELY BONKERS! I know that she has some good things to say, but I would much rather get into the text with this group of girls than sit around and watch a video of Beth for 30 to 45 minutes. (not to mention that half the time--on this particular study at least--I find myself thinking, "where did she get this interpretation? This may be true in the Bible, but it certainly did not come from this passage" or I'm suppressing my great desire to interject and say, "you know, let's just look at the text and see what it tells us, because I am not sure that Beth is 100% right about this one"....
It may be easier to have it pre-packaged, but once you've tasted of the goodness of inductive study, it makes it so hard to be satisfied with the whole "fill in the blank" type of study.
Awesome post!
Well said.
All points are fantastic, but I especially liked #2.
thanks to the stokes family for talking back to me. kellsey, you're not alone. like wild at heart, beth moore is almost too easy to mock, so i'll refrain from any added mockery here. suffice to say that kelly's experience in a beth moore study was equally painful...and also extremely perplexing as all these women seemed to fall at the feet of her video's and worship the t.v. she appeared on.
I refuse to do Beth Moore unless I HAVE to, and God has been good enough to let me wiggle my way out so far, but I've been called out to defend my BM prejudice on more than one occasion, but usually when I do, someone tells me that if only I did one, I'd love her and start worshipping her videoed image as well. Whenever I walk in on someone doing one, she's always talking about her hair and/or hair products...
I don't know what it is about "grown-up" small groups. I've never been in one woman's bible study or co-ed adult small group that was just an inductive bible study. At best, it's the NavPress LifeChange series, which I find a bit monotonous, but better than some alternatives.
Anyhow, I really wanted to comment to let you know I've clipped and quoted you on my blog. Good thoughts, here!
What do you IV peeps always have to be so dang solid and refreshing??
Now, this is a certainly a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but sometimes I wonder if we mock too much in our IV circles. There is something unsettling about how we, myself included, manage to critique and criticize so much in the Christian subculture, and, passively, pass judgment on those who embrace the things that we find too shallow or not up to par. I just wonder if there are more redeeming ways for us to go about discussing things that are hard in the Christian world. Sure, Christians make idols out of people and Bible studies and books and music in the Christian subculture. I'm not saying that idolatry is OK. But let those who are without idols cast the first stone; perhaps us "hip" Christians make idols out of our being "above" what the general masses are digging at the moment. I certainly have been and am guilty of that.
There is something that kind of saddens me about seeing Ashleigh, an IV student, finding our comments about Beth Moore and Wild at Heart "solid and refreshing" (although perhaps her comments were specicifally about Alex's blog posts, which ARE solid and refreshing). We are discipling our students in how to respond to the Christian subculture as we respond to it, and like most things that we do, sometimes we get that right and sometimes we miss the mark.
The fact is that it IS easier to do a Beth Moore study, and many of our friends don't have the time or luxury or training to sit down and spend an hour in Scripture each week to prepare for a Bible study. Let's celebrate that, in Kellseys' study for instance, there are women gathering together for fellowship, that Christ is in their midst, working by the power of the Holy Spirit, and that our dear and wise Sister, Kellsey, is in that mix to not only love and be loved by those women, but perhaps to truthfully and lovingly call the group to look carefully at the Scriptures and see where Beth might be off-track. And let's work together to disciple and "send out" more students who can be Bible study leaders and good small group members, transforming the Church from the inside out. I would hate to see students leave IV and not fully invest in a church or small group community because their only options might be a Beth Moore or Wild At Heart study. There is value in community, and by being in that community with open, loving hearts, we can be available agents for whateve the Holy Spirit might want to do in the midst of that group. My wife almost did not participate in her women's small group (which is now doing a Beth Moore series), because of her preconceived notions about the women there. God is using her in that group, and for her the time is less about Beth Moore (although she is learning in her study of the OT) and more about being with her friends.
It's an old saw, but it bears repeating now and then: "A text without a context is a pretext."
Thanks for saying that, Marshall. It made me really sad to read this blog and see people tearing Beth Moore apart... she's a sister in Christ, you guys. And I've never read anything of hers, but I know people who have had good lessons learned in their lives with her help. Just because you don't like her or her style doesn't mean she isn't doing what God called her to do. We should all be careful not to idolize her or anyone else, but even if we do, that isn't Beth's fault.
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