On Sunday our church completed a summer activity called The 90 Day New Testament Challenge. It was actually pretty simple. I asked our congregation to read through the entire New Testament over the course of 90 days beginning June 1. I believed that this would be an important piece of our summer strategy, given that we committed our Wednesday nights to serving our community though an initiative called "The Summer of Love." To encourage our people to stay with the task, we developed a blogsite, www.nt90.com, to give people a chance to read entries, find a reading plan, sign up for daily text message reminders, and to post comments. So what was the take away from this promotion? What did we learn from our shared experience? Here are a few things that I learned and hope that others learned as well.
First, the New Testament is a primarily missional document and should be read with that in mind. For example, the Book of Acts has no ending. The story just stops, as if to assume that the second and third generations of believers would continue to walk in the same path. As we read the New Testament, we were able to understand the mission of the Kingdom past and make associations with the mission of Kingdom present. Like those whose “sentness” has been documented in the grand story of the New Testament, we too have been “sent” into the world to be the presence of Christ.
Second, there is a unique power that comes when the people of God are immersed in Scripture together. I enjoyed every conversation that I had with others who were taking the journey. Bible reading is intensified when it is a shared experience.
Third, the people of God are informed and encouraged by the ancient story. We were able to identify with many of the experiences we discovered in our reading. We felt things, saw things, and shared in things that Jesus and the apostles felt, saw, and shared.
Finally, the mission of Jesus is sustained and energized by the written word. Scripture reading provided spiritual sustenance for the unique mission we undertook this summer with The Summer of Love. To intentionally engage our community this summer apart from the steady ready of Scripture would be the equivalent of an athlete going to the game with an empty stomach. In John 4, Jesus told his disciples, “I have a kind of food that you know nothing about.”
At the beginning of our challenge, I pointed out that it takes 28 days to create a habit, whether good or bad. My prayer is that the completion of the challenge will not be an end to an accomplishment, but rather serve as the initial steps of a lifelong discipline of daily Bible reading.
First, the New Testament is a primarily missional document and should be read with that in mind. For example, the Book of Acts has no ending. The story just stops, as if to assume that the second and third generations of believers would continue to walk in the same path. As we read the New Testament, we were able to understand the mission of the Kingdom past and make associations with the mission of Kingdom present. Like those whose “sentness” has been documented in the grand story of the New Testament, we too have been “sent” into the world to be the presence of Christ.
Second, there is a unique power that comes when the people of God are immersed in Scripture together. I enjoyed every conversation that I had with others who were taking the journey. Bible reading is intensified when it is a shared experience.
Third, the people of God are informed and encouraged by the ancient story. We were able to identify with many of the experiences we discovered in our reading. We felt things, saw things, and shared in things that Jesus and the apostles felt, saw, and shared.
Finally, the mission of Jesus is sustained and energized by the written word. Scripture reading provided spiritual sustenance for the unique mission we undertook this summer with The Summer of Love. To intentionally engage our community this summer apart from the steady ready of Scripture would be the equivalent of an athlete going to the game with an empty stomach. In John 4, Jesus told his disciples, “I have a kind of food that you know nothing about.”
At the beginning of our challenge, I pointed out that it takes 28 days to create a habit, whether good or bad. My prayer is that the completion of the challenge will not be an end to an accomplishment, but rather serve as the initial steps of a lifelong discipline of daily Bible reading.
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