More input into the Brain of Bennett this week: I’ve been at ‘Sow’, a church-planting conference.
As well as enjoying the teaching and the chat, I’ve been struck throughout the event by the image used on all the backgrounds and billboards – a picture of an open Bible surrounded by shoots of growth in fertile soil (you can just see it at the top left of the photo). I cant stop looking at it!
That image speaks to me of ‘planting’ the truths of the Bible in fertile earth – not worrying as much about buildings (or boats), traditions or structures, as living out the hope and love and truth of God’s word. Planting living faith rather than an institution.
It’s making me think a lot about the importance of the Wordlive connection in Dock-World. (If you’re new, Wordlive is a multimedia way of engaging with daily bible readings through a website or podcasts; it crops up often on these blogs (though possibly not often enough!) and it forms the core of our chat at the Dock Walks each week.). As there isn’t (at present…) a forum in the life of The Dock for a weekly sermon, Wordlive is the way that the Dock community centres itself around the Bible. Its a daily discipline in which we can encourage each other, hold each other accountable, help each other through questions and struggles with the difficult bits.
That’s definitely been my experience over the last few weeks. Two weeks ago, the readings for the week were from the Old Testament book of Song of Songs – a beautiful but very obscure and confusing part of the Bible! And last week the readings were from the new Testament book of Romans – huge meaty wodges of theology, often hard to grasp. The Wordlive readings were great for my discipline – forcing me to read and engage with parts of the Bible I might’ve been tempted to skip. And the podcasts and website did a fantastic job of drawing out clarity, understanding and application from even the most obscure passages.
But the real key was the conversation at the Dock Walk each Sunday as we discussed our questions from the past week. New perspectives and insights, welded to the background and grounding in the passage that was supplied by Wordlive day-by-day; I could feel doors opening up in my mind as the passage came to life like never before. I’m finding it to be an absolute revolution in my own love for Scripture.
But of course with Wordlive the initiative lies with you. I can’t make you connect to it from day-to-day (any more than I could make you listen to a sermon when I was a ‘regular minister’, I guess!). As Dock-world grows, I would love to keep trying this experiment – trying to find more and more venues, opportunities and settings to connect around the Wordlive readings. To be, in the great phrase of one of the speakers at the conference, people who “live our normal everyday lives with the Bible open”.