What is Contextual Bible Study?

A Practical Guide with Group Studies for Advent and Lent

John Riches

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780281061983
• eBook ISBN: 9780281065752
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Estudios bíblicos

Contextual Bible Study (CBS) by John Riches is an exciting approach to group Bible study for beginners, experienced readers and people of all ages and from every walk of life.

Contextual Bible Study allows people to shape their understanding of the burning issues of the day. It is a method of Bible Study that both established Christians and those new to the Bible find empowering, insightful and even life-changing.

John Riches offers a wealth of practical guidance on how to make CBS work for you, and how to start a CBS group in your local area. It also provides accessible Bible reading material and stimulating questions to use during Lent and Advent, along with inspiring stories of Contextual Bible Study in action.

By reading and applying the guidance in this book group Bible study will never be the same again.

Part One

A LIFE-CHANGING APPROACH TO GROUP BIBLE STUDY

1

CBS: What is it? Where did it come from?

The name Contextual Bible Study (CBS) may not be familiar. It is a way of reading the Bible in groups, which over the last 50 or so years has spread across the world from Latin America to South Africa and from there to various parts of Europe, including the UK. Our group in the West of Scotland has been working with it and finding it fruitful for the last 15 years. As we use it, CBS is a prayerful way of reading the Bible in a group, which allows the group to explore the text together, to read it closely and carefully, and where appropriate to explore its literary and historical context. And having done that, it enables the people in the group to shed light on their lives and their contexts – personal, local, familial, national and international.

As its name suggests, CBS is a method that encourages readers to read the Bible in ways appropriate to their own contexts and which allow them to engage in dialogue with one another to address current concerns in the light of the biblical texts. Typically, it will be facilitated, rather than led, by someone who will guide the group through a series of questions which help them read the text closely and in ways which enable them to hear the different voices contained in it, and to discern the resonance between their own context and the text itself. This may (or may not) then lead to the group formulating some plan of action arising out of their discussions. Or it may lead to a widening of people’s horizons, experience and understanding. The questions put to the text play an important role in the process. They are designed to be open questions, encouraging people to explore the text and their own reactions to it. Above all, it is a method which encourages participants to engage in open dialogue with each other in the light of Scripture.

From South Africa to Scotland

Contextual Bible Study in Scotland began as a scholarly exchange. In 1995 Professor Gerald West of the University of Natal visited the Faculty of Divinity at Glasgow University. At a packed public lecture, he explained the CBS methodology pioneered at the Institute for the Study of the Bible (ISB) in Pietermaritzburg, a process whereby, during the apartheid era, socially engaged biblical scholars read the Bible with groups of very poor and marginalized people. Meetings held in segregated townships gave people courage to oppose the harsh conditions under which they lived, sometimes leading them to formulate and carry out often costly programmes of action. West was a missionary for the movement; he urged upon his hearers that it would be equally feasible to use his methods in other contexts.

After the lecture, those present – biblical scholars, theological students, ordained and lay church leaders – began to explore what it would mean to use CBS locally. Where might they find groups of poor, marginalized people in the West of Scotland? And was it possible to read the Bible with such people, with the kind of transformational effect that West described? Might such ways of reading the Bible encourage community activism, enable people in Glasgow’s East End and peripheral housing estates to bring change to their communities?

The CBS Group, formed shortly thereafter, was an ecumenical group made up of members of the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Glasgow and clergy and lay members from across the churches in Glasgow, most of whom had received formal training in reading the Bible. The group set about its new mission with commendable dedication; some months were spent practising the CBS method and thinking about who the ‘poor’ and ‘marginalized’ might be in the Scottish context. Clearly the poor were the economic poor, whose paucity of material resources restricted their opportunities regarding education, employment or housing. Among the marginalized were the disabled, prisoners and former prisoners, women, gay and lesbian people, ethnic minorities.¹ However, although CBS was ready for its debut, there was a peculiar complication. The South Africans had resolved to work only with organized groups of poor and marginalized people, those who were active in the fierce political struggle of the apartheid era. Finding similar groups in the West of Scotland who would be interested in Bible study was more difficult.

In the CBS process, context is seminal. Concerted groups of poor people, ‘the organized poor’, were easily identifiable in the black townships of apartheid South Africa. Moreover, the Bible enjoyed wide respect and authority among all sections of South African society – black, white, liberal and nationalist – and was used freely in debates on both sides of the political conflict. The Bible had a particularly precious meaning to the poor in this context: Eric Anum, a Ghanaian Presbyterian minister who studied at Glasgow University, described the Bible as ‘an icon of their hope for life’.²

By contrast, in the West of Scotland, CBS found organized groups committed to working with the poor and marginalized – for example, charities working with the homeless or ex-offenders – but not ‘the organized poor’ per se. Moreover, far from enjoying wide respect, by the end of the twentieth century the Bible had lost its place in Scottish life. In 1997 the historian Callum Brown observed, ‘In extremely large numbers, the people have stopped going to church, stopped becoming church members, and no longer recognise a substantive religious influence in their social lives.’³ Thus for many poor, marginalized people in this context, reading the Bible was counter-cultural and unnatural. Whereas in South Africa Gerald West found the Bible such a pervasive text in the lives of most people that it could easily be deployed as a resource to help the poor, this was not at all the case in the West of Scotland.⁴

Development in Scotland

Although it proved difficult to locate and read with ‘the organized poor’, the CBS team in Scotland began reading the Bible with a number of groups, often church groups, committed to helping disadvantaged people, as well as with churches in the East End of Glasgow. One of the first studies the team undertook was with an ecumenical study group in the city’s inner East End, where it was agreed to read some of the psalms of exile. As is described in more detail later in this chapter, these chimed in with the situation of the churches in an area that had seen rapid social change and the breakdown of former communities. In Hamilton, Lanarkshire, an ecumenical group working with the homeless met to study Psalm 94. Verse 20, ‘Can rulers be allied with you, who frame mischief by statute?’ prompted a discussion about recent legislation on housing benefit. When members of a church housing initiative, a housing association, a centre for the unemployed and local churches met with CBS facilitators to read James 2.14–17, the conversation centred upon ways of assisting unemployed and homeless people in Clydebank.

During this initial phase, the CBS group was still exploring and experimenting with the methodology of CBS. A group member recalls, ‘We were in one sense learning to unlearn a lot of what we brought with us from historical critical studies of the Bible.’

Gerald West, in common with others, had distinguished different ways of reading a text: reading to distinguish its historical content and meaning; focusing on the text itself, its narrative, argument, ideas and metaphors; and reading it in the light of certain shared concerns and questions. (These ways of reading are explored in more detail in Chapter 3.) For those schooled in historical criticism, the temptation was to delve into the reality behind the text and to get so caught up in that enquiry that there was never time to ask what its relevance might be to the present context. In consequence, the CBS Group soon found itself focusing very much on ‘reading the text’, exploring the stories of the Old Testament and the Gospels as stories, and savouring the rich poetry of the Psalms.

The group was beginning to focus on ‘reading with’ others: entering into conversations with different groups, learning to see and hear the texts afresh as they were reflected through other people’s experiences. The early CBS experience of reading the Bible with groups active in working with disadvantaged people proved that such encounters could lead to lively discussions. Socially concerned biblical scholars and socially active groups had plenty to say about Bible texts on themes of social justice. Such sessions offered the participants mutual encouragement and reinforcement.

There were times when this led to a genuine exchange of views: a conversation could open up new perspectives and help members of the group see themselves and their lives in new and transformative ways. One such early experience, that of a group working with prisoners and ex-offenders, is described below. Resonance between the early church’s grappling with racial and social diversity in Galatians 3, and its overcoming of those forces ‘in Christ’, could speak at a very deep level to people caught in similarly destructive divisions in Glasgow’s still heavily sectarian East End.

CBS outside a submarine base

In November 2006, as part of the year of protest at the gates of the Faslane Trident submarine base, a small ecumenical group of seven protesters shared a CBS session based on Luke 12.49–53, ‘Jesus the cause of division’. It was a beautiful, crisp, early winter’s morning. Few of us had ever met before. We stood near the gate, beside the security fence and razor wire, with guard dogs barking occasionally in the distance – and nuclear weapons lurking probably nearer.

After hearing the different initial reactions to the passage, we named the tensions that we could find within it. This led to a discussion about how Jesus might have understood tensions that he and his followers faced, the opposition which they encountered from people in positions of power in their society. Only then did we begin to explore the tensions experienced by Christians today, specifically by Christians opposed to Trident.

The final question asked what each individual would take away from the experience. The overriding impression was of the incongruity of sharing Scripture so richly with a group of strangers in such a beautiful landscape but in the shadow of nuclear destruction. Maybe this was not incongruous at all.

Yet at other times the conversation failed to rise to the level of real dialogue. The readers and the groups had pre-formed views and the discussions moved along predictable lines. Some of the participants in these early sessions mentioned that they felt that the CBS facilitators had a ‘hidden agenda’ and ‘imposed their views and questions on them’.⁵ Essentially, therefore, such sessions were closed readings of the Bible. And a closed system is ultimately unfulfilling. The CBS method, it was becoming clear, was not a fail-safe approach, but one which required constant thought and reflection on the part of all, and in particular of facilitators, if true dialogue was to emerge.

This is a continuing question for any discussion group, whether centred on the Bible or not....

Table of contents

• Cover page
• About the Author
• Dedication
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: A life-changing Approach to group Bible study
• 1. CBS: What is it? Where did it come from?
• 2. CBS: What will it do?
• 3. Ways of reading the Bible
• 4. Different readers – different meanings
• 5. Running a Contextual Bible Study
• 6. Real-life stories: CBS in action
• Part Two: Contextual bible Studies for advent And lent
• Using the studies in this book
• The Gospel readings for Advent
• The Gospel readings for Lent
• Notes