183. Bible Study Season Begins
After five months of going through COVID-19, church bible study season will now resume. During the pandemic, the focus was to bring our Sunday service online as best as we could. It required a lot of research, experiments and time to adjust to a new way of ministry.
As we are slowly passing that phase, I feel that it is time to focus on studying God’s word. We had to cancel our summer bible study term due to the pandemic. And as not all people are comfortable meeting in a small room still, we are offering bible studies online for this term. I am not sure if we will offer them online next year, but that will be up to how the pandemic pans out.
I initially planned to offer Transforming Life this year, but since it is a group-sharing based course, I figured online would not be the best medium for it. I will be offering Living Life and New Life online for this term as they are lecture-style courses.
We emphasize three areas of ministry for balanced spiritual growth, which we call Three-Axis: House Church, Sunday worship, and Life Bible Study. I am thankful that our members have been faithfully engaging in online Sunday worship and online house church despite the challenges. I hope the online Life Bible study series could spark new growth in our members. For youth, we are offering Starting Point online as well.
Some might wonder, “Why is Bible study important”? It is because it adds “structure” to our thoughts about God and people. Many people only listen to a Sunday sermon without an in-depth Bible study. As a result, they often have a fragmented, unorganized idea about God, which can hinder living out their faith effectively. We, humans, are a logical being, so it becomes difficult for us to apply things without an adequate amount of information given. Due to the diverse audience and the time constraint, we cannot go into too much detail about the background and context of the text during Sunday sermon. But in Bible study, we can provide an overview, explain the context, and present frameworks to look at the Bible text in proper perspectives. What would remain as fragmented information from past sermons will become more organized and concrete through Bible study.
