Reading With ...

Most of my seminary studies have involved reading scripture or theology or philosophy (alone). Last week I read culture (in a group). In my class “Congregation as Learning Community,” we complied a list of cultural events occurring over the last century. Our list included a wide variety of happenings: the Great Depression, the lunar landing, the birth of TV, the internet, Ipods, the New Deal, McDonalds, Barrack Obama, and even blockbuster movies like The Lord of the Rings. Once our list was compiled, we talked about the challenges imposed upon and opportunities offered to the church by such cultural events. While our conclusions themselves were interesting, the process itself most captured my imagination.

The list we created, one of richness and depth, was the product of our group. No individual in our class could have created that list alone. Each member brought with them their unique way of remembering and interpreting history, cultural, and the church. As a group engaged in such reflection, we experienced the ideological, and perhaps even the epistemological, equivalent of ‘safety in numbers.’

This experience continued to solidify a theme I have been learning the past few years. Put simply: whom you ‘read with’ matters. Gerald West’s The Academy of the Poor: Towards a Dialogical Reading of the Bible speaks to this point. West proposes a reading methodology that seeks to move past dominant readings of biblical texts. It does so by involving both ‘educated’ and ‘ordinary’ readers into reading communities. Such a method uses dialogue and diversity to create a thicker interpretation of a text. By engaging West’s method, ‘educated’ readers distance themselves from reading ‘for’ a group and move closer to reading ‘with’ a group.

Both my reading of West and our group reflection underscore the need to create diverse reading communities in our churches. For West, the typical missing ingredient in a reading community is the voice of the poor. Our missing ingredient might be different, but I would venture to say that most of us have neglected part of West’s reading group recipe. What would it look like to diversify our bible studies? Who could we invite to widen our perspective? Perhaps our challenge lies even further upstream: do we have friends who are different from ourselves, whose different perspective would invariably help us see the fuller meaning of scripture? So the pertinent question for a contemporary church may not simply be, “Are we reading scripture?” Rather, we should ask our churches and ourselves, “Whom are we reading with?”