Today I finished a book about a theological foundation for the church. It's one of those books that once upon a time I would have absolutely loved for its eye-opening view of the church. About 20-25 years ago, as I began ministry, there were a lot of these new viewpoints of Churches of Christ that ended up in print. I have many of them on my shelf...a few are excellent, most are ordinary, and a few are terrible. I also own some of the counter-reactions to this written by those who were terrified at the thought of change. A few were well-reasoned and helpful but most were simply fearful rants about 'change agents'.
As I get older and have now spent almost 24 years in full time ministry, though, these kind of books just don't appeal to me anymore. Maybe it's that absorbed their content so fully that they don't have anything to say to me. But I think that the more likely answer is that I now am more interested in reading the Bible again. Perhaps these books pushed me back to being more Biblical, and if so thank you, but I am more and more fascinated with what a two-millennia-old collection of Hebrew and Greek texts has to say about the church and about God and about my own faith and about the reality of the world around me than I am about what non-inspired people have to say on just about anything.
Not sure exactly how I came this way, but I love the Bible so much more than I used to. I used to think of it as something I had to read as a good Christian, and something I had to mine as to be a competent preacher. Do I read the Bible more than I used to? Not really...right now I am doing a daily Bible reading program on my app, and I'm not preaching any more exegetically than I used to (I've always depended upon thru-the-Bible to set up most of my preaching). But the Bible seems now more alive to me than it ever did before.
I'm sure if I was to forensically examine this, I could give great thanks to many good Bible teachers I've had in the past, or books that have pointed me in the right direction. But I wonder if the real gamechanger was when I started to take the Psalms and the Prophets more seriously. That happened around the same time, not long after we moved here 13 years ago. They are Scripture, but they are a very different kind of Scripture...not law, not story, but rather poetry and prophetic correction. I always thought of Scripture in terms of those first two, but even though other poetry interests me not at all, and prophetic correction even now can seem a bit overbearing, I think pulling these into my frame of mind has given me the closest hope of grasping the totality of God's story as I have been able to get. It's still not complete, of course, but no longer do I look at Scripture and just sigh and think that it's too big, too inaccessible.
