Studying the Bible Together on Campus at The Emerging Scholars Blog

From InterVarsity’s Emerging Scholars Network

Studying the Bible Together on Campus

This was the top hit on my Creative Commons' search for "Bible study." Insert your own metaphor!

Today, I’ve been invited to a faculty Bible study at Northern Kentucky University, and I hope that my schedule will let me attend. InterVarsity is committed to building “witnessing communities of students and faculty,” and group Bible studies are an integral part of those communities. With our upcoming ESN Book Club discussion of The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, we’ll have more opportunities to talk about communities of Christian scholars. (Spoiler! Chapter Six is titled “Building Academic Communities.”) The ESN Book Club starts on Wednesday with a post from Tom. If you still don’t have your copy of Marsden’s book, search your local library or download the Kindle edition. (Did you know there is a free Kindle iPhone app? But I digress…)

Photo: Bible Study BBQ by amanky via Flickr

ESN’s partner, InterVarsity Faculty Ministry, has created a number of Bible study resources for faculty, and I think graduate students would benefit from them as well. Faculty Ministry has collected a few Bible studies written specifically for faculty. On Friday, FM published a new Bible study on 1 Peter, along a daily quiet time guide and several essays related to 1 Peter by Bruce Winter, Miroslav Volf, and Gilbert Meilaender.

If you’ve had good experiences with on-campus Bible studies, how did they help you? What did you study? And, if your experience have been, er, less than great, what were the problems? Did you encounter barriers specific to the academic context?