Jen Wilkin on Recovering Bible Literacy

This paid message is from GLU, a technology platform for the faith ecosystem. Thousands of churches, ministries, and organizations are working to help people flourish. These interconnected efforts form a vast faith and flourishing ecosystem. One that runs on mission moves on trust and is powered by capital. GLU is at the intersection of this faith ecosystem. Discover how GLU can help you have a bigger, mission impact at GLU.com. I think the most foundational thing that the church has lost sight of in the last 30 or 40 years is that at baseline, the definition of a disciple is a learner. Hello, this is Russell Moore, and this is the Russell Moore Show brought to you by Christianity today. Here, we look for signposts in a strange time by standing fast to what really matters. Kingdom over culture wars, truth over tribalism, pilgrimage over partisanship, sanity over cynicism, witness over winning, and Christ over everything. Today we have a conversation to do just that. Hey, everybody. Today I wanted to let you listen in to a conversation I had a few days ago with Bible study teacher, Jen Wilkin, who was on a live conversation that we had that was only for Christianity today's subscribers. Now, if you're not one of us yet, and you don't have a subscription yet, click in the show notes, and you can do that because we're going to have a lot more events like this coming up that are unique for CT subscribers. So let's listen in. Here's my conversation with Jen Wilkin. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this Christianity today subscriber only live event. I'm Russell Moore, really glad to have you with us today. And one of the conversations we're going to be doing these pretty regularly with folks that you want to hear from and one that a lot of you have wanted to hear from is Jen Wilkin, who is a reader favorite. And she has a new essay called Go and Make Learners in the print magazine. It's called that online. It's called The Great Omission. And she talks about how one of the key parts of being a disciple of Jesus is knowing and learning and teaching the Bible. And this is a really important question at any time, but I think it's an especially important question right now because it seems really, really difficult. And a lot of people are having trouble knowing, how do I study the Bible? How do I even keep the attention to read the Bible? And then how do we teach the Bible in church context or parachurch context when Bible literacy seems to be down attention span seem to be down mentoring seems to be I mean all of that is remixed in a lot of ways. So one of the things that I love about Jen Wilkin is not just the way that she's able to write so effectively and clearly, but also the way that she's able to show people how to do this in really practical ways. So I'm going to go through and start talking through some questions that have come in already will do that for about 15 20 minutes and then we'll turn over to your questions live. So if you have a question for Jen type it in the chat and we will get to it in the meantime. Thank you for subscribing to CT Jen Wilkin of course for those of you who don't know her is an author and Bible teacher Dallas Texas. She's been leading Bible studies in home context church context parachurch context for a long time. She's been one of the key advocates for Bible literacy and has really been working and leading in this area in ways that are unparalleled Jen thanks for being with us today. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm so glad to get to talk about this. One of the things that you talk about your article are some sobering statistics. You talk about the state of theology report from life way research and ligand error ministries looking at where Christians are on basic Christian belief. What do those studies show? It's pretty sad. It's pretty terrifying, but maybe not completely unexpected. I mean some of the statistics that we put in the article and this is just a sampling of what I would describe as a horror show. In response to the statement God accepts the worship of all religions including Christianity Judaism and Islam 47% of evangelicals agreed with that statement. In response to the statement everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God. I'm talking about the doctrine of original sin, very basic doctrine. 64% of evangelicals agreed that everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God. And I'll just give you one more. In response to the statement Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God. So now we're looking at the divinity of Christ, the dual nature of Christ. 28% of evangelicals agreed that Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God. And I just want to hear the word evangelicals when I say that. This is not someone else. This is not mainline Protestants or whoever you think might be the person who would answer this question this way. It's those who have professed, hey we think the Bible is important and we should know it. You know that last one really surprises me. Although I saw an article just this week in the spectator I couldn't actually get to the article because it's behind the paywall. And I've got a password somewhere but I couldn't find it. But the little first paragraph is talking about they had apparently focus groups of Gen Z people who were reading the Bible and they were really repulsed by Jesus because one of them said, this is my favorite thing. He seems to have a Messiah complex. If you can unsulfugiously say that. So what's going on? I mean, how does that happen? It doesn't happen all at once and it doesn't happen because of one factor. But you know, the even the ones that I cited in the article are ones that even with a baseline knowledge of Scripture, you would know the Bible does not support them. In some cases one verse would address some of those misunderstandings. And so, you know, I think the most foundational thing that the church has lost sight of in the last 30 or 40 years is that at baseline the definition of a disciple is a learner. It's someone who is learning what it means to be a follower of Jesus and to take learning down to that most base level understanding of like, what does a first grader learn? What does a second grader learn? There are actual learning outcomes associated with taking in information for the purpose of being able to teach it to someone else. So I'm now I'm keying on the great commission where it says that word to make disciples and teach them to observe all that he has commanded. So we're talking about not being able to pass on the good deposit that was passed to us. And when we start to define discipleship is primarily about doing missions or about doing evangelism or or any of the other things that are definitely a part of discipleship. But then this other thing falls to the wayside. Then we find that we have well intended well connected like communities been a big a big focus of the church for the last 40 years well intended well connected, biblically ignorant followers of Christ. And we're not going to be able to follow him the way that he wants us to. So if we don't know what the Bible says and I think that's what we're seeing is that we don't know I mean think about how Sunday school was largely offloaded by a lot of churches about 15 to 20 years ago. The simple church model became attractive for its simplicity. But I've joked that one day I'll write a book called the oversimplified church. So what's happening is when you don't have learning spaces with learning outcomes you end up with nothing more than discipleship groups that are often peer led and tend to focus mostly on application or feelings based or story based questions. And we're really getting on one of my crusades these days because it's kind of like you and see us Lewis says if you aim for heaven you get earth too if you aim for earth you get neither. It seems to me that there was a model that had flaws. Of course everything is false. There was a model of Bible learning that actually also produced community. As people are learning together and to say let's put that aside and just have community often you don't get the community and you don't get the Bible already. Yeah, that's right. And I you know and I see this all the time because my role in the local church has been to build these Bible study spaces and the typical thinking even among discipleship pastors is well those are not a front door to the church and those aren't places where people connect because it's just dry cold dead knowledge. But you know your kindergarten class was a place where you made friends why can't your Bible stake and we see the opposite you know we see especially in a culture where like the home group model the commute whatever your church calls a community group grow group you know there's a million different names for them. That's a group that typically you're supposed to visit once and then sign your life away to and the thing with these classroom spaces which I'm advocating that the church re-pulled. prioritize is that they typically start and stop. And so they give people a chance to dip their toe relationally into a group of people with not as much risk involved as when you show up for the home group that's like, OK, you're our people now and we're going to do life together. Now share your most intimate secrets. And if you say, well, this isn't really for me now, it becomes a big relational sort of problem. And I want to be clear, I like community groups. I'm not, I don't, I'm not saying stop doing community groups. This is an emphasis question. What about people who say, well, people are just too busy right now. It's not like it was before. They've got soccer practice and working two jobs, all that kind of stuff. How do you take that into account without lowering the bar? Well, we live in an age that loves the idea of exceptionalism. So I see it a lot with parenting. You know, it's like, oh, well, that worked for your kid, but it wouldn't work for mine. My child is always the special case. And so then I'm not beholden to any best practice associated with parenting because my baby is special. And I find this a lot in the way that churches think about discipleship as well. It's like, well, that might have worked at your church, but my people, they're too busy and they wouldn't do that. And I like to remind people that people are always going to be busy doing the things they care about the most. And one of the reasons that people don't consider being busy about the things that the church is offering as something to prioritize is because of the way that we've apologetically presented what we're doing. Like a lot of times we're like, don't do any homework. Just show up. And, you know, we just want you to be here. And we get it. You're busy. And that's the opposite of what the CrossFit gym told them when they showed up at the door. It's the opposite of what the whole 30 people are saying. And the thing is is that our people are doing hard things that take a lot of their time because they think they're important. They don't think what we're saying for them to do is important. And that's on us. That means that we have not messaged something the way that we should. And I always like to remind people that there is a church that's down the street from mine that does this really, really well. By the time their student ministry has finished high school, they will have done Old Testament theology, New Testament theology, and basic doctrine. They leave knowing that. And their adults are very well educated in their sacred text. That church is the Mormon church. So I ask you, why are the Mormons able to compel their members to come and to learn and to dig? And we aren't. I think that's a strong indictment on because we're the OGs. Like we're the ones who used to do this really well. But it's been deprioritized. And some of that's because we are in a-- we're not just in an age of theological and biblical illiteracy. We are in an age of general illiteracy. But that's not foreign to the church. That is why the church was the first major impulse for any kind of broad stretch education, Christian or otherwise in the culture, because the understanding was what people are educated. They're better able to govern themselves and so on and so forth. It's one of the marks of an ordered society. Well, one of the things, too, what you're saying at the Mormon example is it also disproves the logic that says, well, we want to move from learning this stuff to doing emissions and doing active evangelism, because they're doing those classes. They're doing that, too. And they're sending them out on the mission. Let's go to some questions from some readers who've already sent some in. And then we'll get to the ones that are live. We've got one from Suzanne, who says she's really discouraged because she sees a lack of curiosity about anything that goes beyond kind of simplistic answers to practical life tips, kinds of things. And she's saying, how do you encourage or create curiosity when it's not there? Well, so this goes to learning theory, right? And what learning theory tells us is that the mind is not prepared to receive new information that's going to stick until dissonance has been created. And what discipleship models that the church has embraced over the last 30, 40 years have done is they have said exactly what the culture says. You don't need to feel dissonance. Dissonance is something that we need to remove. And so that dissonance was either removed in the form of, we're just going to tell you what this says, and you're going to take our word for it. Or we're going to gloss past the pieces here that are the real soul suckers, the ones where if you're just sitting at home reading your Bible and you hit them, you're like, what? So like, for example, in judges, when the concubine is cut into 12 pieces and sent around to all of the different tribes of Israel, when's the last time you heard a sermon on that? That means that people do not have any resilience around dealing with dissonance. Nor do they really even value dissonance because I can Google an answer to something. And what we don't understand is that unless you sit in that feeling of, oh, I don't think I-- I understand this. Much less, I don't know how to apply this, right? Then when the aha moment comes, whether that's through you're in a discipleship group and you find it the way forward together, whether it's you're sitting under teaching by someone who knows more than you do, but that moment isn't going to stick. It's just like when you Google something, you may learn the answer, but you're going to Google it again 10 days later because you didn't fight for it. And so it didn't lodge in your head the way that things used to lodge in our heads before we had so much information just readily available at our fingertips. And so many of us who are in church leadership are hesitant to say, you know what? This should be hard. And it should be confusing before it's not. These questions are difficult. And when we only give people application questions, and we don't ask them to do the work of comprehending an interpretation, then we say, we don't want you to feel dissonance. We just want you to have useful things that are completely detached from the rest of the learning process, which diminishes their usefulness significantly. Paul writes in and asks, he's asking about children, but he's not asking about children's ministry or even parenting. He's talking about how does he encourage his adult children and grandchildren to become more biblically literate? Yeah. Well, adult children is possibly harder. I mean, I've looked back that people have these assumptions about what the Wilkins must have done in order to have their own children. Love the scriptures. I'm sure you have this as well in your experience. And so they picture us all like sitting down doing these inducted Bible studies together at dinner every night. And the truth is, Jeff and I were both concerned about imposing some sort of habit on them that they didn't internalize. And so we did not prescribe those things for them, but we were doing them. We were in dialogue with each other in front of them about these matters that we were-- the questions we were having or confusion that we had. And we did invite them into those conversations. But in terms of like teaching or demanding a habit of them, we did not do that. We did teach them how to do those things. We didn't demand that they have a daily quiet time, as I like to say it. So to parents who still have children at home, I want you to be at reassured or perhaps chasened that definitely more is caught than is taught. Our children valued it because they saw that we valued it. But one of the lovely things that I've seen with my own adult children is that they invite their sister-in-laws or their brother-- they're gathering others and saying, hey, let's go through the study together. And there's really no better community group than the people who the Lord has ordained for you to be in community with for all of life. And so I think that's a good thing you could start to do as you could reach out. And with all the virtual ways that we can share resources now, you can do a Bible study with your daughter or your son who lives on the other side of the United States. It's kind of great. Yeah. And if you don't frame that as, I'm concerned about your biblical literacy, let me help you. But hey, could you do something for me? I'd love to study the Bible with you. Yeah. Hey, you lazy dumb dumb. Yeah, a lot of people would love to do that. Yeah. Yeah, really. Jim asked a question that I think is really good. He says, what about the fact that you've gotten a lot of places, people who will say, kind of their criticism of the church is, well, I'm just not being fed. And I need deeper Bible study. And usually when somebody says that there's all kinds of underlying spiritual problems here. And so he's saying, how do you get a depth of study, but also a humility that doesn't create that knowledge puffing up mentality? Yeah. This is actually a question that I get fairly commonly. And Jim, it's a good one. I do want to just say that all indicators are telling us that very few, if any, members of our churches, are in greater danger of biblical arrogance than biblical ignorance. We just don't have very many people who actually know the Bible so well that we don't have anything to offer them resource wise. And then I would just add to that that in my experience with doing line-by-line studies of entire books of the Bible, we found those spaces consistently to be the great leveler between people of different maturity levels. Because since the Scriptures continue to do their work on us, because they're living in active no matter how many times we go back to a book that we may have studied before, we never outgrow the process of going through a book book of the Bible and learning or relearning or deepening our understanding of it. And so a small group in a Bible study that's going through a line by line study of a book of the Bible may have someone who's a new believer and someone who's been a believer for 40 or 50 years and they are moving forward, both of them are moving forward in their understanding. And that younger believer gets to witness the older believer still drawing things from a text that they may have seen before. So it's turned out to be a beautiful thing. But I think someone who says, "Oh, I've already studied the book of Romans. I don't need to study it again," is telling you something about their understanding of what the Bible is and how it works. I'm not asking questions. I'm going to broaden her question out just a little bit because I think it hits multiple different things here because I've seen you teaching the Bible to people who may have different kind of interpretations on all kinds of things. So you're teaching first Corinthians and you have people who might have different understandings of what communion is. And you know, you're teaching people of Biberno's and baptism is so forth. And I'm not asking you specifically about how do you know when you're in a text or you're trying to teach people and it actually applies to something that's going on right now in their community. How do you know whether to hit that directly and directly or just to leave it? Yeah, well, that would depend a lot on depth of relationship, nature of relationship with the person that you want to have a conversation with. But I think one of the things that we bounced right past when we're feeling that, oh, I think this is like relevant to what's happening right now is that there are actually three levels to application. And sometimes we go immediately to the third one, which is, how do I use this for me and for now? So the way that I will sometimes help people keep in mind these three levels is for me and for now is the third one we get to. The first one is what did it mean for them and for them? So in other words, I got to put myself in the skin of the original heurs as much as possible. And this is to make sure that we submit ourselves to a basic rule of interpretation, which says that a passage or concept or whatever cannot mean something to me that it could never have meant to the original heurs. That actually takes a lot more work and attention than many of us have been trained to give it because we so often are just given the for me and for now question to answer. So the first question we ask is what it mean for them and for them? And then the second question is what is it meant for us and for always? In other words, how has the church understood this to apply for the last 2000 years? We have a wealth of recorded interpretation, good thinking about things. So once you have looked at what it meant for them and for them, what the consensus has been on what it means to the church of all time, then you're in a much better place to assess whether the thing that you're thinking might apply to your current situation in a particular way actually does. So I would say start by asking, do I the one who is seeing this potential application have a good grasp on how application plays out as it relates to the scriptures in the first place? I want to move into some of our questions are coming in live. This sort of plays into this. Somebody asks, what does Jin Wilkin think about the renewed interest in pre-modern exegesis? Says, I'm thinking about the work of Craig Carter and others to bring back the early and medieval churches theological interpretation of scripture. And so he says, do you think this is a good thing that will help us or not? I'm not familiar enough with that to be able to give you a good answer. Do you have any thoughts, Dr. Moore? Are you probably no more about that than I do? I think in some cases it can go too far as anything can, but I think on balance, it's really been a needed correct recovery. Recovery, yeah. Recovery of the whole, yeah, we're studying with the whole church. But somebody had written in and asked about John, says specifically about small churches. And says, what about a church? We've got a church of about 50 people. We don't have the ability to do a lot of targeted Bible studies and so forth. And we can't have a lot of small and micro groups. So how do you do that when you're in a smaller setting? Gosh, I fantasize about being in a church that size. Sometimes I know it has its own set of strengths and drawbacks. But if you have 50 people coming to your church, I would think you could have a straight up Sunday school hour that happens before the gathering where you are using that space to encounter the scriptures in an active learning environment where there's participation, where there's back and forth, where there's dialogue, things that don't typically happen during the sermon unless someone gets rowdy. So I would say that you are probably ideally positioned to have both an active learning space and the more passive learning space at the sermon happen all on Sunday morning when people have already come. You don't have to lure them back another time of the week. So just do it with what you have. Yeah, get everybody in a room and do it. Yeah, absolutely. Somebody said, you know, you talked about, for instance, how many sermons have you heard on the cutting into 12 pieces and those sorts of really hard texts? How do you help people with passages or scripture? Not just those that are kind of disturbing, but that feel like a slog to them. So you live edicus. Yeah, if it's boring to me, then I'm probably missing something. And that's not to say that there are not passages or scripture that are more boring than others to modern ears. I fully acknowledge that there are, but a lot of times we are more bored than we should be because what have we forgotten? We've forgotten that first question we were supposed to ask, how did this hit the ears of them? And then like, was this boring to its original audience? I tend to think if it was that boring, it wouldn't have been so carefully preserved all of these years for us. And so I mean, apart from obviously the work of the Holy Spirit, is the Holy Spirit into super boring writing? Does God want us to just learn to not be bored? You know? And so things like Leviticus, for example, Leviticus is written to the children of Israel who are on their way to the Promised Land and they have a recent memory of what it meant to be slaves in Egypt. And so so much of what Leviticus is doing is setting them apart from where they just came from and where they're headed toward. So imagine how Israel heard these things. It's saying, you know what the sexual morays or lack thereof were of the Egyptians. And guess what? It's the same way in Canaan. So when they read those passages, they're thinking, wow, Yahweh is not just the only God. He's a much better God than the gods of Egypt or the gods of Canaan. We have modern day gods with their own sets of morays and their own sets of blind spots. So when we read through the passages in Leviticus, are we seeing how they push against even our modern conceptions of what's acceptable and what's not and are carving out of distinct people? You know, land allotments? Yikes, right? Unless you begin to see that God is doing a creation work. It's a well-ordered creation narrative. And it ties to other pieces of Scripture. A lot of the reasons we find certain passages to be boring is because we're taking them out of context of the entire sweep of the biblical story, which most of us don't really have a grasp on. Yeah. Ryan asks, how should AI be used or not used in Bible study? Do you have any practical guidelines about this? I was just talking to my husband about this last night. So you could take your pastors, sermon, and upload it to AI and it will generate discussion questions for you. Whether it will take into account learning theory is another question because that requires that the person who's asking for the questions have a grasp on learning theory. And so most people who are generating questions for small group discussions, whether they're coming up with them themselves or whether they're asking AI to do it, don't always know what a good question is to begin with. And so what they're going to get out is only going to be as good as their own understanding of what they are trying to accomplish. You're not just trying to accomplish people having interesting things to talk about for 20 or 30 minutes. It's on you to ask, what should they know when they're done? What should they have internalized when they're done with this conversation that they're going to have with each other? And the best way you can know if someone has actually learned something is that they are able to turn and tell it to someone else. So when you leave your small group tonight, could you actually turn and tell someone, these are the three things that I pulled from my pastor's sermon that are helping me be a better critical thinker. They're not just shaping the way that I feel or what I do, but they have changed my thought process. You know what I do sometimes that I found has been really helpful is to after I've written the Bible study, then to go in and argue with AI about it. Because what I'll say is here's what I'm saying. Imagine somebody who has never been in a Christian context before. What gaps are they seeing in here? Argue with me. And sometimes that's really helpful to have this kind of debating back and forth in a way that would be awful. I mean, if you're just creating AI content where you have the person hasn't struggled with the text. I mean, Even if you know all the right prompts, you don't have the power that comes with that. But having that kind of helped me with my blind spots to figure out where I'm just assuming stuff. Help me to get to that 28% of people who think Jesus has a Messiah. - Yeah, yeah. - I think that can be helpful. - Well, and I'll tell you the kinds of questions that are never gonna get thrown into just your typical small group setting or were rarely going to be our comprehension questions because they don't fuel discussion. If you say how many times in the passage was the word thrown mentioned, say if you're studying revelation, well people think that is busy work. They don't understand that what it does is it heightens your awareness of what's going on in the text. And since they don't value it, they either skip it or they just take it off of the questions to begin with. And I would fully agree that comprehension questions don't have a great place in a small group discussion, but they should have a very important place in our personal study time. Because what happens is we don't ever actually focus on what is being said. We move straight to what does it mean and how should it change me? And so whatever it says, we are like, oh, I got that, I read it, I've got it. You know, and we just were not that good at reading. And so when I write curricula, I actually weigh the questions pretty heavily toward comprehension-based questions because that's when interpretation and application begin to actually come alive for people because they've seen for themselves. And not all comprehension questions are created equal. That's why I think good curriculum is very important. Curriculum that isn't just asking questions to keep a small group busy, but that is training the learner how to intuitively ask better questions on their own whether they're using a curriculum or not. - Well, we've got a lot of these intuitive questions coming in right now. And one of them, I think, is really important before we go forward is Linda, who says, can you define learning theory? - Well, I mean, learning theory is a pretty broad field. And so I would encourage you, if you're interested in thinking about how to apply learning theory to Christian education spaces to just find some decent books on learning theory period. But one of the best people that you could learn from in my experience with regard to Christian education would be the late great Howard Hendrix of Dallas Theological Seminary, who was just masterful at being able to lead people through the learning process to actually have them internalize in a sticky way with their learning. Like one of my favorite things that he says, one of his principles is never do for your student where your student can do for themselves. And so that's actually a good parenting tool as well. If you want a little freebie, never do for your child, what you're talking to do for himself. And yet what we've often done with the way that we approach Christian education is we infantilize our learners. We treat them as though they're not capable of doing things that they are absolutely capable of doing because we think they're boring or repetitive or not useful. If we the teacher don't think that it's that useful, they pick up on that immediately. And so there's a big disconnect among Christian educators about the fact that they're actually educators. They're not babysitting people having application-based discussions. They're supposed to be achieving learning outcomes. And those things happen in an order. I mean, this is another thing. But we haven't really gotten into it. Like, it's not choose your own adventure. Imagine if your first grader was showed up the first day of class and they were like, you know what? You let us know what you're interested in. And instead of in the first grade, these are the things you're going to learn so that when you get to the second grade, you can build on top of that. But many Christian adult discipleship departments and churches have never even thought about a scope and a sequence to what they're trying to do. And so it's no wonder that we produce people who can't articulate basic doctrine and fail a basic pop quiz over Bible facts. Hey, we're going to take a quick break. Stick around for the rest of the conversation. This paid message is from Tendo House Publishers. What if your Jesus is shaped more by culture than by scripture? We've created a personalized savior who exists to meet our individual needs and bless our lives. We've made him into a life coach, a therapist for our anxieties, a political ally. That Jesus is safe, manageable, convenient. He fits comfortably into our lives without disrupting them too much. The Missing Messiah, a new book by Kyle Eidelman and Mark Moore, helps us understand how Western culture has gradually reshaped Jesus into our image and recognize the difference between a personalized savior and a revolutionary king. It's about the true cost as well as the true gain when we stop treating Jesus like a spiritual accessory and start following him as the Messiah. If you believe there's a more dangerous, more majestic Messiah than the one you've inherited, visit missingmissiah.com to learn more. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] I'm going to take a moment of personal privilege and ask a question that is not in the chat, but they came to me this week. This is from a college age. Christian does a lot of Bible study. It's really biblical, he literate. He says there's a Bible study on his campus. It's not that good. He wants to meet Christian girls. Yes, he does. But he feels like a hypocrite because he says, I can't go to a Bible study for the wrong reason. I can't go there to meet somebody. And I had an answer that, but I'm curious what your answer would be. Hi, and my colleagues, JT, English, and Carl Warley have a mantra. All theology is done in community. It doesn't mean that you don't do theological work or Bible literacy work on your own, but it means that the work you do on your own should always be pulling you into a discussion with others. And also, I would argue because people are given the gift of teaching into spaces where you can learn from those who are further along the path than you are. So he does not need to second guess himself for a desire to go to a Bible study where community is a function of what they're doing. God bless them. That's so much better than the dating apps, isn't it? That's what I should say. And he knows if he won't be able to start to raise the quality of the study itself, I would hope he'd have a dual purpose, like make that place better, and go find you some lovely, biblically literate woman. I told him, not only are you feeling guilty about what you should feel no guilt about, you're actually doing great. That's right. Yeah. We have somebody who writes in and she says, and I know this is kind of teed right up for you because she says, her frustration is, she goes to a lot of Bible studies and the Bible studies that she is available to her, are women's Bible studies and they tend to be focused on just emotion. And kind of what are womeny branded things in that context. And so, I mean, first of all, why does that happen? And secondly, what can you do if you don't have any alternatives? Well, so I fondly refer to this as the estrogen pond. And it happens for a lot of reasons, right? It happens because so often the person, typically a man who is responsible for adult education doesn't perceive that what the women are doing should be a part of the scope and sequence of adult education. Instead, women's ministry is seen as this thing that is nebulous and he couldn't possibly understand because it's this women are such a riddle. And so we're just gonna put that over here. And it's gonna, and some, some dear sweet woman is gonna run that and God bless her. She can check in with me every now and then but as long as she's keeping them happy, right? And so you get this space where what's happening if a man were to walk into it or a lot of women too candidly. And they're like, I'm sorry, what are you doing? But the man in charge is probably gonna be like, you know what, it's just 'cause I don't understand how women are different than men. Now, women are different than men. One of the funniest things that we witnessed at the church where I was serving was when we had the men and the women studying the same curriculum. You know, the men were in an all-male environment, the women were in an all-female environment with their own teaching teams. And the men came because they wanted to have a thought level discussion of the text and in their small groups, they had always been pressed to share their feelings and that wasn't their favorite. The women came because they wanted to have a feelings level conversation and they wanted to connect to one another relationally. So the things that we were policing for the sake of the learning outcome were different. The women leaders were telling the women, hey, we need to get back and have this thought level conversation. And the men were having to say, hey, it's time for us to talk about how this is hitting you personally. And so these doothed play out differently, but I just like to remind everyone, we are all human. Women are human, men are human. And so learning is something we all do. So for this woman who's frustrated with the quality or the nature of what she's encountering, I always like to point out that you have a living room. And that means that you have a place where you can start to do something different. There are good resources out there that will resource you at the thought level first, allowing your mind to inform your feelings. Because I mean, our feelings are real, but they're not reliable. And you should have feelings level discussions, but not until you have wrestled intellectually with what you are grappling with in the scriptures. I would argue. - That's really good because it seems like what you're saying here is, yes, men and women are different, but what you're actually doing is not saying we're going to exclude this part that part, but you have to pull it in a different direction sometimes to create the distance. Yes. Well, the messaging has been so strong to women that many of them who spend all week long in jobs or places that require high-level thinking skills, they associate church with a place where they turn that off and turn on their feelings. And that's just patently false, you know? And then the men are supposed to feel in the same way that the women do, you know? So I get frustrated with people who talk about the feminization of the church because I think that's used in a very blunt force trauma way. But I do think that men have been pressed, especially by a pure small groups model, which a lot of church is adopted, and to, you know what, are you even really a Christian if you can't talk about your feelings? And it's actually great to have spaces where the primary goal is to talk about what we're thinking. Yeah. Darleena asks a question that's really related to this, which is to say, should we have Bible studies kind of segregated by men, women, or by age, or by young professionals, or these sorts of things? Should you do it that way? Or is it better to have kind of a multi-generational, multi-kind of background Bible say? So in terms of whether we should just have, you know, separate men's and women's learning spaces, I would argue it's a both-and. There are different dynamics that play when you have places that are gender specific, and some of those are extremely valuable to me, and I think should be valuable to the church. The quality of sharing that you're going to get is going to be different and of a different nature when you have the vulnerability built around single-gender spaces. But I think you shouldn't only have those. I think you need places where brothers and sisters in the family of God are interacting with one another at both a thought level and a feeling level, and those spaces tend to be pretty rare. Should we divide things generationally? I think you could make the argument that there are times when you would want to do that, but any evergreen learning space that you have, so in my world, that means we're doing Bible study 22 weeks out of every year, and we're always going to be in a book of the Bible going through it from start to finish, and in evergreen space that someone can come into, regardless of spiritual maturity, regardless of life stage, where we're communicating things, it basically an eighth grade reading level because that's an accessible level to communicate things at. I would argue that ideally those spaces are, whosoever will may come, that you do as little niche programming that's an evergreen space as possible, and that you use like a six-week thing or a four-week opportunity if you want to do something for a particular age demographic or life stage. Lose asks a question is really good, and I want to expand it out just a little bit. What are your thoughts on biblical literacy in low income, low education populations where there's a low level of general illiteracy and education? How do you deal with this? And I would say one of the biggest problems I see is not just that. Yes. It's a low level of in almost every cohort of being able to concentrate because of the way that our minds have been remixed by algorithms. Sure. How do you deal with that when that's the case? So this is a question that the church has asked for 2,000 years. And one of the easiest solutions in an illiterate society, when to think about, you know, before the printing press, when maybe the only book that you were going to be able to sit down with was a copy of the Bible because it was the thing that everybody had. The Bible was used to teach people to read, much less to teach people how to read what the Bible was communicating. And so we have this wonderful literacy tool at our fingertips at all times. And then I just want to reassure you, if you're not sure where to start on focusing on Bible literacy, the simplest, most underutilized tool for building Bible literacy is repetitive reading, just repetitive reading. And so if you can sit with someone who perhaps is not even a strong reader and read with them, ideally, if you have enough trust and relationship built to where you might read aloud and a readable translation. So probably not the King James version, even though I know that that's the one Jesus carried everybody. If you will get a readable version and then sit and read it with them, take turns reading portions aloud, help them with the words that are hard and then maybe get a second readable translation. So maybe start with the CSV. And then after you've read it through in that, read it through in the NIV because that's going to help show where translators have picked particular ways of translating words that are similar but not analogous and it helps you get down to the interpretation level a little easier. That is such low hanging fruit to just have reading groups. In my own church, there are groups that get together and just have public reading of the scripture together. They just sit and read the scriptures. Never underestimate how much progress simple tools can give with people who have been in the Bible a long time and with people who may be struggling with basic literacy issues. Cali asked questions can be fair. Not only do I know this can be relatable to everybody who's ever tried to teach a Bible, but I know it is just on the basis of other questions that are kind of echoing in the same way. She says, "What do you do when you're leading a small group Bible study and you are met with?" This is the exact word with repeated and prolonged silence after asking questions. Yeah, this is amazing. Okay, so I'm like, I'll just sit there and be like, "I can stare at you all day. You're not going to wear me down." But a lot of people don't love that. And so one of the best things that you can do, and this is funny because this was a big problem in the men's study initially, is nobody wanted to say a word because in the women, we had had the women's study a lot longer and they were more discipled into the process of the small group. They knew there was an expectation that everyone would contribute. So first of all, you have to set that expectation up front before the study begins. You say, "My expectation for this time is that we will all participate." And to that end, if that's not going great, then what I'll do is beforehand, I'm going to email out, "Hey, will you be ready to answer this question or this question to certain members of the group?" So you can set things to where there's less of that, but a lot of it is you begin to build a culture where the expectation is that this is a time where everybody is going to contribute. Another thing you can do that's a little more subtle, like let's say you find yourself in the middle of the semester and people are not cooperating, is you can have some allies, some people who you know you can call on and say, "Hey, will you be ready to jump in if there's a prolonged silence?" And then after you answer, maybe you can look to your right and say, "I don't know, season what do you think?" So that it's not the group leader carrying all of the weight of trying to draw people in. But it takes time to build a culture of conversation in a small group. And this is why here's another pro tip for you, and at least in my opinion, this has been really helpful. Some churches believe that they have to bust up holy huddles. In other words, if a group has been together for a semester or more, then they have to mix that up so that people don't just sort of get ingrown. I actually disagree with that. I think that it's very hard for people to develop vulnerability. And so our philosophy was always, you can request to be in a group with people who you know. You can request a leader who you already are comfortable with. That group needs to be open to take new people as well. And everyone needs to have a normative experience of the group. But if you already have hard one intimacy with people, we're not going to tear that away from you. Put you in a group that's been turned over and asked you to answer vulnerable questions again. One of the things I think, and some people have kind of hinted in this direction, and I think it's a great question. One of the things that I think people might be surprised by with people who've taught the Bible for a long time, like you and I have, is that I have never in my life responded to a question by thinking in my mind, what an idiot. It actually is in livening and helpful when somebody says, "Hey, wait a minute. Who was Peter?" Yeah. You know, who is this figure? And I mean, that actually is a great question. And I love hearing that kind of thing. How do you communicate to people that they're not going to be kind of treated like they're in a statistical knowledge quiz or something where when they say something, you're like, "You obviously have never read Bart's Church dogmatic." I mean, I know there's not the way that you teach, but how do you communicate that up front? Okay. You're touching on a couple of really important things. So one is the expert amateur divide that a lot of people have imbibed. And that is that there's a person who is leading the group or who's teaching us who is the expert. And then the rest of us are the amateurs who sit in the seats. And the amateur never is going to move from being an amateur to anything else. So I'm just here. I'm here to take in whatever the person who has more knowledge is doling out. But I don't understand that they got there by the very process that they're inviting me into. And so the teacher or the group leader has to give a true humility around, "Hey, I am a co-learner with you." And I see myself as a co-learner. I may have more natural curiosity. I think that's what a teaching gift is, is someone who has a little more curiosity than the person sitting next to them, natural curiosity. But my job is actually to enliven that curiosity in those who are sitting in the group. And so with the group, they need to perceive that they are on a trajectory. They're not supposed to always just be learning what I say and taking my word for it. But then also within the group what I have found particularly in women's circles is they are not accustomed to answering the question, what do you think this means? When they hear that question they go to what is the right answer? I have to come up with the right answer or I have to guess what she thinks and give her, you know, and so they don't understand a group discussion as a place where you are allowed to give your best guess, where you are allowed to give a shaky answer or a wrong answer and that then the group is going to discuss it together and see if they can move the conversation forward and until a small group becomes a place where we can give intellectual honesty about what we do and do not know, then it's only going to accomplish so much from a learning outcome standpoint. And so again that setting of expectation so before any semester of Bible study we train our small group leaders into hey you're going to tell your group I expect you to give your best guess after you've spent your time in the text before you got here you're not always going to get it right and that's okay we're going to treat each other with dignity and respect we're not all coming from the same background we don't all have the same exposure to the same degree of learning or the same depth of learning and we are all co-learners on this path together and so we're going to treat each other with charity and respect and there are no there I people say this all the time there are no dumb or wrong answers but you can build that culture over time where people actually believe it and they don't see it as just a nice thing to say and that's when things get real. Camille asks what do you think about the physical space for teaching the Bible and what she means by this is how do you recommend creating a space for learning when having a cross in the sanctuary makes a statement if you're in the sanctuary that's different than being in a place that doesn't have that kind of feel for some people if there's a classroomy sort of vibe they get thrown off by that and other people if there's kind of a living roomy kind of vibe they get off thrown off so how do you sort of figure out what's the space that we ought to do this? There's never a perfect scenario I have battled the pros and cons of any given space nigh on these many long years I have had to teach in the sanctuary where the sanctuary seats over a thousand and we have to cut off enrollment at 500 so we're you know only filling part of it and it's dark and I'm up too high you know it doesn't feel personal at all I've had to teach in my living room where there were really wonderful things about that that I miss constantly and then there were also drawbacks there as well because maybe a child threw up on the carpet five minutes before everybody was showing up I'm talking about you Claire Wilkin so or you can be in a classroom space and people are like oh you know this feels kind of cold and dead so much of the success that you're going to have in that space has to do with your awareness of that space's strengths and limitations and your willingness to address them openly and then mitigate them by your communication style by the way that you're inviting dialogue all of those things like I believe when I'm in a room with 500 women I still need to keep the teaching dialogic because I remember how important that was in a living room but it's a different way of pulling that off than it is when I'm in a living room but because I know the value of it I'm going to fight for it and so I think so much of this has to do with the awareness of the teacher or the person hosting the space of what the space can and can't do and then working to make sure that you are maximizing the things that does well and mitigating the things that might be more of a challenge we opened by talking about a survey a national survey do you think it's a good idea to give an internal survey to your church or your Bible study along those lines to kind of find out where everybody is or is that too cold and clinical for that kind of space I actually think it's essential and this is something that I do a lot of times when I teach on Bible literacy as I will let everyone know just how bad things are and everyone's shaking their heads about how bad things are and then I give a 20 question pop quiz to the room and it's pretty embarrassing like it's a secret we are all hiding of like oh you know I don't want anybody to know that I could know this better and so when you give the diagnostic it does a couple of things first of all it dispels the notion of exceptionalism that this is not a problem in my church it's a problem in other churches and then it invites a level of vulnerability because you begin to realize like what I will do when I give this pop quiz is I say now raise your hand if you got 16 or more right well about four hands go up in a room you know a large room which then I say to everybody else hey look around you you're not alone we're all in this so let's acknowledge that we have room to move forward and now let's do that together but what often you know you think about like people who have a problem with spending money they don't start by making a budget they start by figuring out where they've been miss spending money yeah and so that's what the surveys do they help you realize oh shoot I do have a spending problem I've been spending too much time in devotional or topical content and I don't actually know what the Bible says that's why I like actually with that state of theology survey they have a tool that you can use in your local church and I'm actually in conversation with life way about developing a Bible literacy survey that you can use in your own church here's the other problem I see this all over the place people who do have theological convictions and they know the right answers they can't answer the deity of Christ and they can't answer the virgin breath of Christ what they can't do is to tell you what Hosea is yeah or we're fine exactly or vice versa yeah I find in the Bible study space a lot of times people are are not as doctrinally well versus they could be if if someone has not introduced doctrine to them as it has occurred in the course of a Bible study and that's what we call a virtuous circle is that doctrine is helping us understand scripture scripture is helping us understand doctrine so we need both and it does tend to get siloed okay last question and I have for you how does somebody know if they are gifted to teach the Bible if maybe they haven't had the opportunity to do it yet people will ask me like hey when did you discern a calling in the ministry and I'm like I don't know about 45 minutes ago when I looked over my shoulder and realized I've been doing it and so I my friend JT actually helped me with this he said people who are called to teach are usually already doing it like despite whatever hardship or obstacle that was in the way they have found their way into a space to do it and so when someone comes to me and says hey I think I should be teaching the first question I ask is where are you teaching now they may not be teaching in the moment you know I've certainly as a woman I've gone through life stages where that was not in the cards for me for perhaps a prolonged season of time but you know I started by teaching seventh grade girls because I was too young to teach actual full grown adults and no one should have taken me seriously to do so anyway well I wasn't doing that initially thinking maybe I'll get to teach women I saw a need in the church and I just went and did it yeah and so I think if you're asking is this something that maybe I'm called to do one of the assessment tools you can use is where have I already gone and tried to do this despite the fact that literally no one else cared about it nobody wanted everything was hard about it and I did it in my three people in the break room at work exactly and I'll tell you Elizabeth Woodson who she's now a published author and she's putting out marvelous resources and she and I worked together at the church but when I met her initially she asked to get coffee with me and I always say everybody gets one coffee and I went to coffee with her and she said I wondered if you could look over this curriculum that I have been working on it's a curriculum over Jonah so I said sure I said well who are you teaching this to and she said oh I have three women who come to my apartment each week and we sit we go through this curriculum and I knew that this was a soulmate and she truly is and so I would say if you're asking that question ask yourself do I feel that kind of a drive around this because that's a big indicator that probably the Lord is stirring something in you that's going to grow. Well thank you all subscribers for being with us for this special subscriber only event and thank you Jen Wilkin and if you haven't seen read her article yet check it out and I think it'll be really helpful thanks Jen Wilkin for being with us today thanks so much for having me on. Thanks for listening if this episode meant something to you share it with a friend and leave a review of the show wherever you listen it helps others mind the show until next time remember the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not the darkness will not the darkness cannot overcome it this is Russell Moore onward. The Russell Moore show is a production of Christianity Today it's produced by Leslie Thompson Clarissa Mole is the executive producer and the associate producer is Mackenzie Hill. This episode was mixed and mastered by Gavin Morris with video production by Sam Cedar. Eric Petrick and Mike Cosmer are the executive producers of CT Media Podcasts and Matt Stevens is senior producer thank you to John Gara for allowing us to use his song "Citizens as Our Theme" thanks for listening ♪ In all sizes love has a million disguises ♪ ♪ But winning is simply not one ♪ This episode is brought to you in part by the Table Podcast from the Hendrick Center at Dallas Theological Seminary. I'm Darrell Bach, one of the hosts, and I invite you to join us to discuss issues of God and culture, which includes anything and everything. Listen on your podcast app or at dts.edu/thetable.