Mennonite Weekly Review

ELKHART, Ind. — Coming to the biblical text hungry is one way Mary H. Schertz described the kind of Bible study modeled at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary’s Pastors Week Jan. 25-28.

Praying at the end of a small group discussion time during Pastors Week are Bock Ki Kim, pastor of Vision Mennonite Church, London, Ont.; Todd Friesen, pastor of Lombard (Ill.) Mennonite Church; Mindy Smith (back to camera) from Faith Mennonite Church, Newton, Kan.; and Eileen Saner, AMBS librarian. — Photo by Mary E. Klassen/AMBS

So on Wednesday of the week, participants were asked to fast until they received communion in the late morning worship service.

Schertz, an AMBS professor, and Rachel Miller Jacobs, a former pastor and current doctoral student, led the group in what they called “reading the Bible confessionally” and “reading the Bible contemplatively.” Schertz also described it as “reading the Bible as if our lives depended on it.”

Each day, a text from Luke became the focus of a three-part movement. First, the text was read, and this reading came from a fresh translation by one of the two leaders. Then the group was invited to “let the text read us,” by taking ample time for participants to reflect on how the Scripture speaks to them in their ministry and how their contexts speak to the text. The final movement was adoration and worship focused by the text.

This way of reading the Bible grew out of what Schertz called a “general sense that somewhere underneath our well-nourished exteriors, our busy and successful lives, our abundance of achievements and success, there are some ways in which we are still starving. Many of us seem hungry, some desperately hungry, for something more.”

Schertz initiated this three-movement approach several years ago in a weekly Bible study with pastors sponsored by the seminary’s Engaging Pastors program, and she has continued to practice it with additional groups. From these experiences she has come to several convictions.

“The Bible is missional,” she said. “The Bible draws us to God. We come to the Word to reorient our feelings and passions to the feelings and passions of God. That seemed to me to be a missing piece in my experience of teaching the Bible in the church.”

Jacobs concluded: “For [the Bible] to become lively in your life, there has to be some intersection between our lives and the text… . It must draw us into actual relationship with God, into adoration and worship.”

After the movement of bringing our current contexts to the text, the third movement — worship —is the path back to God.

“The last act of reading confessionally restores us,” Schertz said. “Paradoxically, our greatest emptiness is also our greatest fullness.”

The 150 people present joined in communion each of the three mornings of Pastors Week. Assisting Schertz and Jacobs with the worship were Barbara Nelson Gingerich, managing editor of the Institute of Mennonite Studies, and James Nelson Gingerich, medical doctor from Goshen, as worship and song leaders.

Jacobs led a workshop on reading the Bible with youth, and Jennifer Davis Sensenig of Harrisonburg, Va., led a session on re-reading the Bible with Jesus at the center. Leonard Dow, pastor of Oxford Circle Mennonite Church in Philadelphia, led a workshop on worship as the invitation to radical hospitality; Jim Loepp Thiessen shared his experience with the Gathering Church, which engages its neighborhood; and Cyneatha Millsaps, Bonnie Neufeld and Chuck Neufeld led one on becoming an anti-racist church.