Reading Scripture Together as a Spiritual Practice
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
Ordinary Time is the season in which we practice life alongside the Resurrected Jesus. Through the Spirit Jesus is personally involved in our discipleship. Jesus has not left us as orphans. He participates in our formation as we attend to his presence.
Christian communities have always met Jesus together in the Sacraments. Those of us fortunate to have access to the scriptures have also heard his voice in their words. And just as the Sacraments are something we celebrate together with Jesus, reading scripture together helps us hear and respond to the voice of our Master and Friend.
Listening to the Spirit
Our fellowship has a long history of richly detailed Bible study. That has its place when we have questions about what the Bible says. Reading scripture together is different. Bible study can provoke or satisfy our curiosity. In contrast, Bible reading in community is focused less on what we are learning and more on who we are becoming; or even better, who we are being revealed to be. Instead of studying scripture, we read it aloud and listen closely for the Spirit’s message for us in our time and place, and especially for our community.
Our case study
In our GC Durham Connect group, we’re connecting with God and with one another as the scriptures guide us into our place in God’s life and his place in ours. For twelve weeks at a time, after our meal we gather in a family room with comfortable seating. One facilitator takes us through a series of readings agreed to in advance: Ephesians a chapter at a time, or selected readings from Isaiah. One of us, not necessarily the facilitator, reads; all of us listen. We’re listening for phrases or images that strike us: points of intersection with our life stories; expressions of God which deepen our faith; good news we discover and our hopes for how it can help our world. When we hear, we share what we have heard. We challenge one another to listen and share more.
This kind of engagement with God through the Sciptures has elements in common with Lectio Divina, but it doesn’t have to be exactly that. Our method is less structured and more conversational. We prompt one another to receive God’s comfort and healing as he corrects our misconceptions. We learn more about one another and our individual life stories and as we do, our sense of who we are as a community becomes more clear.
Practically speaking, our Connect Groups take about two hours: one hour for food and conversation; thirty minutes for reading together; thirty minutes for prayer. Because we’re listening together instead of teaching, we don’t have to spend hours preparing, although it is a good idea for the facilitator to be familiar with the work in question. For our Ephesians reading, I listened to Ephesians in audiobook form during my commutes. I also spent a few minutes each week planning two or three questions to kick off the discussion.
Here are some tips that can help.
- Think chapters, not verses. Reading long passages helps reduce the interpretive risk of reading verses out of context.
- Agree on using a single, natural language translation if you can. This reduces tangents about variant wording. Ask open-ended, probing questions. “What does it mean for you that ‘God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family?'” “What has it been like for you to ‘grow in your knowledge of God’?”
- Wait expectantly. Allow plenty of time for the Spirit to speak. If you beome uncomfortable when no one has spoken for two or three seconds, silently acknowledge the discomfort and continue to wait.
- These meetings aren’t about teaching, so you don’t have to have every answer. If the discussion begins to head into points of confusion or controversy, recognize what’s happening and bring the discussion back to the community. “That’s an interesting question. Can we think about that for next week?” “That’s a hard situation. How is God for us in this?”