Sermons and deep study are gifts, and yet Scripture was never meant to be brokered by experts. It’s alive. It breathes. And most of history, God has shaped God’s people through reading it out loud, together, and letting it speak. Here’s what that can look like: read it in community, ask it open questions instead of demanding answers, and let it walk you straight into prayer.
The Room With No Speaker
About 20 years ago, my church brought in Alan Roxburgh to teach. Alan is the kind of guy who gets flown around the world to talk to church leaders, so I showed up ready to take notes. When I walked in, about 180 people were already seated around round tables, which struck me as a strange setup for a lecture. I figured someone had mixed up the room booking with a wedding reception.
Alan got up, and instead of opening with a story about some conference in another country or an insight he’d unearthed in the Greek, he opened a Bible. He asked us to do the same. “Turn to Luke 10,” he said, and read the first eleven verses out loud. Then he paused, and read it again. Then he said we were going to ask the Holy Spirit to illuminate the passage for us, and he read it a third time.
That was basically his whole lecture. He asked us to turn to the people at our table and share what we’d heard. The room exploded into conversation. For the next half hour, he wandered from table to table asking people what they were noticing, and hardly said a word of his own the rest of the night. What we were doing I later learned was called lectio divina, an ancient spiritual practice designed to allow God to speak through the Scriptures for a community. At the very end, Alan offered one line as his actual teaching: the Spirit of God is among the people of God. Can we trust that’s true?
I’ve thought about that room a lot since. Alan had every credential in the world to stand up and tell us what Luke 10 means. Instead, he handed the text back to a room full of ordinary people and trusted that God would show up in the middle of us. He flipped the whole thing. And it worked, not because of anything special about the people at those tables, but because when you hand the Church the Word of God, it comes alive and starts speaking on its own. Hebrews puts it better than I can: the word of God is living and active. It doesn’t need us to activate it. It just needs us to open it up together and get out of the way.
As we seek to recover the power and aliveness of the scriptures for ourselves, here are three steps I’d suggest.
- Let Scripture Gather a Community
The first shift is a little counter-cultural: Whenever you read Scripture, try to do so out loud with others. That might be a bible study on a Tuesday morning, or a Tend group meeting on a Thursday night, or with your kids as they fall asleep.
Here’s a stat that stopped me in my tracks. Nearly half of people who go to church every week, 46 percent according to the latest State of the Bible research, aren’t regularly opening their Bibles on their own between Sundays. When researchers asked why, the answers weren’t complicated. People don’t have enough time, and they don’t know where to start.
I don’t think that’s a failure of willpower. I think it’s a symptom of us assuming personal, solo, silent Bible reading is the only real way to engage Scripture, when for most of church history it wasn’t even an option.
For most of church history, Scripture was something people heard read aloud in a room together, not something they curled up with alone, all the way from Moses through the early church and for another 1,500 years after that. Right up until the printing press made personal ownership of a Bible possible.
Solo devotional time is a wonderful practice, and I want to keep encouraging it. I spend time almost every morning reading the daily lectionary and journaling my prayers. So I’m a believer in solo devotional time. But let’s also not lose sight of the communal way of reading Scripture that sustained the people of God for millennia, long before any of us had a Bible of our own to tuck under our arm.
One of the dangers of only reading scripture in private is something we call confirmation bias. You are likely to pay attention to things that affirm your existing choices and preferences. In community, we get a much fuller picture of who God is and the life God invites us into.
The New Testament scholar Esau McCaulley makes a similar case. Writing about different people, different cultures, and different life experiences all sitting together under the same text, he put it this way:
But if we all read the biblical text assuming that God is able to speak a coherent word to us through it, then we can discuss the meanings our varied cultures have gleaned from the Scriptures. What I have in mind then is a unified mission in which our varied cultures turn to the text in dialogue with one another to discern the mind of Christ.
That’s not a threat to the authority of the text. That’s the text doing exactly what it was designed to do, reorienting a whole community as they seek to embody the kingdom of God.
If you regularly attend church services, you probably hear Scripture read out loud fairly often. So why isn’t that enough? Some churches read only small portions of scripture and others read it at length. So, depending on your church’s practices, it might be plenty. But this brings up the second shift. It’s not only that we need to hear the scriptures with others. We also need spaces for the Scriptures to come alive in our lives.
- Let Scripture Breathe with Questions
The second shift is a small one that changes everything: let the Scriptures breathe with questions. This is the difference between deductive study, where you start with a doctrine and mine the passage for proof texts, and inductive study, where you sit in community with the passage first and let questions lead you somewhere your group didn’t plan to go.
Eugene Peterson spent an entire book making this case. In Eat This Book, he writes the following.
We are fond of saying that the Bible has all the answers. And that is certainly correct … But the Bible also has all the questions, many of them that we would just as soon were never asked of us, and some of which we will spend the rest of our lives doing our best to dodge. The Bible is a most comforting book; it is also a most discomfiting book.
Similarly, Karl Barth said, “I have read many books but the Bible reads me.”
If you’re gathering people around a short Scripture passage, here are some questions that might help Scripture come alive in your group:
- What do you love about this passage?
- How does this passage challenge you?
- What questions does this passage bring up for you?
- What does this passage teach us about Jesus?
- What other stories in Scripture, or in our own lives, does this remind us of?
- What does this passage teach us about ourselves?
- Who does this passage remind you of?
- How does this passage help us pray?
None of those questions require a seminary degree to ask. They just require a willingness to actually notice what’s on the page instead of rushing to the takeaway.
- Let Scripture Guide You In Prayer and Action
The last move is the one that ties the whole thing together: letting the text walk you into prayer and action instead of ending the conversation once everyone’s shared their thoughts. Peterson described this as the natural next step of spiritual reading, where meditation on the words leads you into an actual response to God rather than stopping at intellectual agreement.
Here are some prayer prompts I keep coming back to, especially after a group has just sat with a Gospel passage:
- If Jesus were here right now, what would you ask Him?
- What might He say to you?
- What question might He ask you?
And to help your group live the Scriptures, here are some additional questions:
- What is one small thing you can do to live by this passage this week?
- Who is one person you can share this story or truth with?
Sit in that for a minute and the Scriptures stop being an ancient document you analyzed and start being a north star for your community.
That’s what happened in that room with Alan Roxburgh. Nobody left with a tidy three-point outline. We left having actually met with God in the text, together, out loud, with our own questions still hanging in the air. The Spirit of God really is among the people of God. I’ve come to trust that’s true, one more time, every time I hand the text back to the room instead of trying to interpret it by myself.
If you are tired of a one-sided experience with Scripture, create a free Tend account and start a group of your own. You’ll get materials that help you read Scripture in community, letting the truth of God shape your community of faith.
FAQ
What is inductive Bible study, and how is it different from deductive study? Inductive study starts with the text itself and lets your observations and questions build toward meaning. Deductive study starts with a conclusion or doctrine and looks to the text to support it. Both have their place, but inductive study is especially suited to group settings because it makes room for more than one person’s questions.
What is lectio divina? Lectio divina is an ancient practice, formalized by monks in the medieval church, of slowly reading a passage multiple times, sitting with it in meditation, responding to it in prayer, and letting it shape how you live. It isn’t a technique to master so much as a habit of returning to the same text with fresh attention.
Do I need theological training to lead a group like this? No. The Roxbourgh story isn’t meant to show you that you have to be a trained theologian to let Scripture speak. It’s meant to show the opposite: even some of the best trained theologians prefer to stand aside and allow the Scriptures to speak to the community. The role of a group leader is mostly to read the passage well, ask good questions, and get out of the way so the Spirit can do the rest through the community itself.
Doesn’t this replace sermons or personal Bible study? Not at all. Sermons and personal study are both good and valuable practices. This is simply an additional way of engaging Scripture that recovers something the church practiced for most of its history, reading the text out loud, together.
How do I start something like this with my own group? Pick a short passage to read out loud. If you don’t know where to start, pick a paragraph or two from the gospels, ideally a story or a teaching of Jesus. Then ask one or two of the questions above and let the conversation go where it goes. Trust God’s Spirit is alive in the room, inspiring the group through the story.
