I have been running a successful bible study for the past eight years. Have you ever done this before? What is your background as far as scripture goes?
The most important thing that I can say right now is don’t be over serious-let humor abound. Be enthusiastic at all time. Even if your doing Leviticus , make it as interesting and fun as possible.
Amen.
I attended a study at a Christian Reformed Church and the first thing I can say about it that it was friendly (generally). (I always considered myself to be a guest there, and I left when things came to the point where I was not treated like a guest.)
Parish bible studies are quite often about personalities and who gets along together. I’ve had a priest with a licentiate in scripture study who ran the study like a class. It was hard to get a word in edgewise. I think he lost a bit, not to open things up a bit and find out what questions we had about scripture.
I’ve only seen Catholic Bible studies conducted in a rather strict format. There seems to be a lot of paranoia that anybody interested in the Bible is a Protestant, frankly or an incipient Protestant. I don’t know where that comes from.
There should be a friendly way to pull people in who want to come there and give a sermon, instead of just sharing their insight. and, there has to be as friendly a way as possible to reel in people who are just dead wrong about what the Catholic church teaches.
I was in a group with our pastor. I sense the people there just wanted to rub elbows with him. (If he wasn’t there, they wouldn’t come to “just” discuss the Bible). Anyway, there was a retired physician there. He expresed the opinion that people who “did good things” went to heaven. the priest decided to tackle this heresy head-on. Well, I sense the doctor was so mortified, that he and his wife never showed up again, after being publicly corrected by the priest.
I’ve seen behavior problems at the CRC study, too.
I’ve seen this, too, where “this person” was chosen to conduct the bible study, even though “this person” didn’t really know enough to do it. I left, partly for that reason, but also because I didn’t like the Little Rock study that was chosen as our basis for Bible Study (too much reading, too many questions to answer, questions not used as a springboard for discussion, just used dryly, like we were taking a test, etc. I went to another local study group, where the leader seemed very opinionated and was a control freak [long story]).
So, my humble plea – be friendly and supportive of others who are not experienced at Bible study.
.I was very reluctant because I never could speak in front of a bunch of people.I would stammer and freeze up. Well it was so much on my heart that I knew that I had to do it.I had to step out in faith and that God would supply all that I needed if He wanted me to do it. If you are called you are already being blessed and supplied with all you will need- even if you dont know it yet.