Pastor Ryan started teaching a Sunday school class on how to read the Bible. He mentioned something briefly in his introduction that was very interesting - The majority of believers in the past would have learned the Word of God in a corporate setting via preaching and public reading, not from their own Bibles.
Think about it.
Until the invention of the printing press, copies of the Bible were written and bound by hand. A laborious and time-consuming process. Until the Reformation, the Bible was not written in the language of the average person in the pew. Also the cost would have been prohibitive for the average person. But even after the Reformation, how long did it take for copies of the Scriptures to be readily available? Was it after the Industrial Revolution that books became more affordable via mass production? Even then, there was the issue of literacy, which I don't think became as widespread until reforms in public education.
This brief aside in Pastor Ryan's class got me thinking. The first and obvious one is to not take the Word of God and its availability for granted. Secondly don't stop reading the Word at home but at the same time, don't ignore the importance of the Word in the context of community. In other words, don't assume that learning is just an individual thing where I can go off in a corner with my Bible and books for the benefit of me, myself, and I.
This reminded me of No Little Women where Aimee Byrd makes the case that the preaching of the Word is the primary means for the building up of all believers. This should be a given, but there are plenty of churches that emphasize subset/silo ministries (e.g. women's ministry) or even direct people to parachurch organization as their main source of spiritual food. This seems very different from what would have been practiced in church history and also consumeristic too.
The importance of Christian community has been on my mind quite a bit of late. I'm hoping to start reading Bonhoffer's classic Life Together as soon as my copy arrives in the mail. I also started reading You Are What You Love by James K.A. Smith. This sentence jumped off the page in the preface:
Think about it.
Until the invention of the printing press, copies of the Bible were written and bound by hand. A laborious and time-consuming process. Until the Reformation, the Bible was not written in the language of the average person in the pew. Also the cost would have been prohibitive for the average person. But even after the Reformation, how long did it take for copies of the Scriptures to be readily available? Was it after the Industrial Revolution that books became more affordable via mass production? Even then, there was the issue of literacy, which I don't think became as widespread until reforms in public education.
This brief aside in Pastor Ryan's class got me thinking. The first and obvious one is to not take the Word of God and its availability for granted. Secondly don't stop reading the Word at home but at the same time, don't ignore the importance of the Word in the context of community. In other words, don't assume that learning is just an individual thing where I can go off in a corner with my Bible and books for the benefit of me, myself, and I.
This reminded me of No Little Women where Aimee Byrd makes the case that the preaching of the Word is the primary means for the building up of all believers. This should be a given, but there are plenty of churches that emphasize subset/silo ministries (e.g. women's ministry) or even direct people to parachurch organization as their main source of spiritual food. This seems very different from what would have been practiced in church history and also consumeristic too.
The importance of Christian community has been on my mind quite a bit of late. I'm hoping to start reading Bonhoffer's classic Life Together as soon as my copy arrives in the mail. I also started reading You Are What You Love by James K.A. Smith. This sentence jumped off the page in the preface:
discipleship needs to be centered in and fueled by our immersion in the body of Christ.Something worth thinking about.
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