Reading the Bible In Community | Guest Post by Lisa Hensley
There’s more to Bible study than personal quiet time
This month’s guest post is by
. I first “met” Lisa on Instagram and over the last few years I have enjoyed following her journey through seminary. As a brand-new mother I have been encouraged by the intentional way she juggles motherhood, ministry work, and school, allowing each role to inform and refine the others. The word “balance” appears often in the social media posts of working moms, but it’s a goal I’ve never reached and don’t think is worth chasing. Lisa seems to get that. Today, she shares the “all-in”, committed approach to reading Scripture in community that she applies to the rest of her life.
A few days before I gave birth to my third son, I woke up early, propped up my iPad at the kitchen table, and sank into a chair. Even at nine months pregnant I was dragging myself out of bed to sit alone and read the Bible. This practice was ingrained in me by my childhood church and stayed with me as an adult. I wanted to know God’s story and what God had to say about me and the rest of the world.
I still practice this habit of a personal quiet time, but I now find it inadequate on its own.
Scripture was designed to be read aloud and it has been historically read aloud to groups. One of the most memorable books I read in seminary was Santa Biblia by Justo Gonzalez. In the book, he compares Scripture to a landscape and explains that we are all looking at the landscape from different perspectives. This metaphor has helped me understand that people standing in other places see things that I would never notice. When I read with someone standing in a different place, my understanding of the landscape is enhanced by their perspective and experience. My love for God is deeper because of our shared love of His Word.
My perspective of the Bible is incomplete by itself. I am culturally removed from the people of the Bible. I live in an individualistic society, not a collective one. Though I read as an Appalachian woman, and Appalachians are often poor and less educated, I still come from a culture of power and not a people on the margins like the people who wrote the Bible. Deeply understanding the Bible can only happen through a conversation with others and with the text. Dr. Esau McCaulley writes, “biblical interpretation is not a one-sided monologue. The Black Christian brings his or her questions to the text and the text poses its own questions to us.”1 Despite my best intentions, I do not possess the tools and perspective to read God’s story well alone; I need the questions of a community.2
Each of us reads the Bible with a specific lens. Western scholarship has historically normalized the white and male view of Scripture and listed everything else as additional or contextual, but the truth is that “there is no such thing as a neutral, deculturized, or de-contextualized point of departure as we engage with the biblical story.” Our location “inevitably marks what we see or hear and what we remain unaware of or indifferent to.”3 We are missing out when we only study the Bible with people who are like us.
Some of us have an advantage in hearing these other perspectives. You might live in a diverse area of the country. You might attend a church that is multiethnic and multigenerational. You might be in a small group that includes both men and women, people of varying socioeconomic backgrounds, or both Democrats and Republicans. But some of us may not have these advantages. When I lived in Kentucky, over 95% of the population in my county was white. Some of us have to be more creative in order to read Scripture with a diverse community, and we will only do that work if we think it really matters.
Often when we think of diversity we think primarily of ethnicity. But while ethnicity is certainly one form of diversity, I don’t want us to stop there. I encourage you to consider country of origin, class of society, gender, occupation, age, disability, and neurodivergence. Greater diversity in all these areas means more discomfort—people will have viewpoints, opinions, and perspectives that will cause tension and disagreement. But those differing perspectives will open our eyes to new ways of viewing God and viewing the world. While it is still my custom to read the Bible on my own—and to be cliche, in a chair under a blanket with coffee early in the morning—one of my highest priorities has become to study the Bible with a diverse community.
If you are interested in studying the Bible in a diverse community, you can start even if you have never done it before.
1. Gather your people.
Maybe these people are already gathered for you. Perhaps you’re already part of a small group. Even if it’s all married couples between the ages of 30 and 33 who are expecting their second children, start with those people. Maybe you attend a tiny country church with a handful of grandparents. Start there. Maybe you and three single friends meet for coffee once a week. Ask them to read the Bible with you. If you don’t already have people, consider who to invite. Gather your neighbors. Reach out to three people who are in three different decades of life. Invite someone who voted differently than you in the last school board election. Fill your living room or the coffee shop with people who do not look or live like you do.
2. Provide resources.
My favorite way to lead a Bible study or Scripture reading community is to have the group focus on reading the text while the leader studies and adds insight from outside sources. By taking on this work, the leader creates a lower barrier of entry for participants. They don’t have to do homework. They don’t have to feel equipped to read through theological tomes.4 The leader resources him or herself and shares what they find with the group. This also means that no matter how diverse the in-person group, these resources can introduce almost limitless diversity.
Look for YouTube videos by people older than you, commentaries written by women or majority world scholars, books by authors of other ethnicities. Read a commentary by a scholar from a different denomination or find a sermon by a medieval Christian. These believers who are far removed from us by time, location, or stage of life can teach us more about what it means to follow Jesus. Marva Dawn writes, “We need the entire Christian community in order to learn to be Christian.”5
Use the resources you find to develop questions for discussion. As you study, mark quotes that you want to read. Share shorter YouTube clips with the group before your meeting. Use the materials you find and introduce your group to the authors. Give your people the gift of what you discover.
3. Intentionally point out what the diversity adds to the study.
Studying the Bible with a diverse community will introduce more tension than reading it by yourself. As your group walks through points of tension or disagreement, be honest about what the group is experiencing. Be quick to point out how your diversity enhances and changes your understanding of a passage. Read a quote that you had never considered before. Share a differing interpretation. If you are calm and unrattled during uncomfortable moments, your group will also learn to relax. Pray that your group discovers the beauty of knowing God in these different ways and that they learn to appreciate this tension for the rest of their lives.
You will be tempted to skip forming this type of Bible reading community. Reading with a diverse community is hard at times. It will be easier for you to pick up what you already know and what everyone else is reading. It will be more comfortable for you and your group to hear your own perspectives repeated. But that ease will rob you of the beauty of the church. If you embrace the work that gathering a diverse community might require, everyone will benefit.
Resources To Get Started
IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament, New Testament
Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black (Downer’s Grove: IVP, 2020), 73.
In Reading the Bible Latinamente, the authors point out that Hispanic readers of the Bible read straightforwardly and believe it is a source of life. They also point out the need for balance between intuitive and scholarly approaches to Scripture. This statement is especially pointed toward scholarly approaches to Scripture and more relevant for a white audience who often finds themselves centered in conversations about faith. Ruth Padilla DeBorst, M. Daniel Carroll R., and Miguel G. Echevarria, Reading the Bible Latinamente (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2024), 22.
DeBorst, 11.
I do think there are entry points to theological writing for everyone.
Marva Dawn and Eugene Peterson, The Unnecessary Pastor (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2000), 31.
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This reminded me of Fr. Ernesto Cardenal's book The Gospel of Solentiname. He was a Nicaraguan priest who recorded conversations among his parishioners about the gospel reading of the day. Their insights are so different than those I hear from white Americans. Social location matters. Thanks for this!
If you’ll indulge my habit of playing “six degrees of the Gospel of John,” this syncs up well with a new commentary on John I just started reading, by Martinus de Boers. He argues that “A Johannine school of writers is thus responsible for G[ospel of]John and E[pistles of]John. The activities of this school included, as did the activities of any ancient school, ‘teaching, learning, studying, and writing.’ The conclusion that the Gospel in its final form is part of the literary legacy of a Johannine school means that more than one individual had a hand in the completion of the Gospel, as indicated by 21:24-25.” He then says in a footnote, “There are reasons for thinking that women as well as men could well have been members of this school.” I’m convinced that is the case. The sensitivity John shows to the unique emphasis on and perspective of women makes most sense from the hypothesis that women contributed, in some manner, to the Gospel text. If this is true, or at least plausible, it provides a great biblical reason for reading the bible in a diverse community: it was composed in and by a diverse community.