Inaugurating This New Discipline

Posted on by Calvin H. Wang

In fall 2023, a group of us at Philadelphia Chinatown’s Chinese Christian Church & Center made a plan to read the Bible together in one year. As someone who had generated not a little notoriety for doing it regularly, I shared the following to help us get started:

 

What We Believe

  • As disciples of Jesus, we believe 4 things that theologian David Bebbington identifies in 4 words: activism, biblicism, conversionism, crucicentrism (https://www.nae.org/what-is-an-evangelical/)
  • Being biblicistic in the best way requires us to know God’s word as recorded in the Bible. We cannot practice what we don’t know.

 

Reading As an Individual Discipline

  • As a personal practice, I am by no means the only person doing Bible reading; I just happen to be extremely verbal about it.
  • I began in high school and read a few times through college before stopping for many years. I began again and stopped again after finding it boring. Or so I thought.
  • Even now, I definitely don’t read with perfect engagement; but each year builds upon the accumulating familiarity and understanding. 
  • It’s only by reading the whole work that one can begin to appreciate the connection of figures like Moses relative to Joseph. By reading you can best appreciate the place of Balaam’s story and the fact that he’s not even a Jew when he becomes a “prophet” of God. 
  • Through Bible reading I can now say that one of the greatest influences on the maturing of my faith has been this discipline which I now begin for the 25th time.
  • I have my own Bible-reading plan, but it isn’t for everyone. And it’s most notably missing a digital communal element.

 

Reading As a Community Discipline

  • A Bible-reading mobile device application like YouVersion allows us to read together and encourage each other. True, we can laugh about seeing each other’s reading lapses to say “You haven’t read in 6 days,” but we’ll certainly cheer each other’s progress.
  • We haven’t failed at reading the Bible, we just haven’t finished trying. Let’s do it for the sake of the gospel.

 

Just Read It 365

 

2023’10’01’U

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