Speaking of the need to make the old prophetic faith rooted in old treasured texts credible for today, Walter Brueggemann wants the church’s pastoral task to be committed to the hard work of recovering a style of discourse that makes real now, in concrete ways, the significance of the old message. This needs not just heroic work by a pastor, but “an entire community of . . . believers who trust its own way of speech.”28
4. The Style of Bible Study Used in the Workshops
My aim in the workshop is both to present the best scholarship I can and also to wish for readers to be open with the biblical text, and to want it to lodge and abide in themselves. (I distinctly remember in Sunday school, at the age of seven, thinking to myself that Daniel could not possibly have survived in a den of lions! What was important was that I was not shocked or fazed by the thought of alternatives.) It means that to take part in a Bible study is to accept that there will be “traditional” as well as “liberal” or radical views of event and meaning. Discourse over a passage will contain different points of view. Attitudes will be not only cerebral but heartfelt, and even unconscious. So the aim is both to maximize scholarship (as well as I am able) and also to want others to be nourished, “enfaithed.” Finding a way through the minefield of Johannine scholarship is as tricky as finding a way through the territory of the human personality! The academic is fascinating, and traditional methods of criticism valid and essential; whilst the personal is also fascinating, essential, and valid in its own way.
Practically all the workshops have been worked through generally, and particularly in a group over about fifteen years in the Enfield, London Circuit of the Methodist Church. I am deeply indebted to them and to all the groups I have worked with, all faithful and adventurous. I take a leadership role, using a table or lectern to set out notes and books with quotations. This could be called a “tutorial” role. But with pleasure, and I hope some skill, I recognize that the group (of which I also am a member!) has a life, an energy, a cohesion, and a fellowship (koinonia) and will settle the text down into itself, the group, and find it full of significance.
So the method of study includes both a traditional one, a historically based discussion utilising knowledge of the text through the familiar criticisms, and also a recontextualization through meaning felt in group sharing, through social interaction. These “social means” (John Wesley’s term for sharing personal experience in caring groups) extend the traditional hermeneutic stances. Speech exchange patterns and the interaction of different “voices” in a group illustrate “subtle interpretative interaction” and suggest “a hermeneutic at work . . . that is not driven by a quest for knowledge, but rather by relational concerns; and by the hope that in their ‘fellowship’ and learning together they will discover insight.”29 The groups are indeed meant to do “Bible study,” but in the context of personal activity. They are what we call “experiential” or “empirical.” They look at a text and relate to it, to their inner world, to each other, and to the group process. They practice biblical interpretation in a faith community. “[A] social interactionist approach recontextualizes understanding of biblical interpretation.”30
In analyzing speech exchange patterns and the interaction of different voices in the group that connect a passage to personal experience, Todd notes that the leader with a tutorial style “projects the possibility of a particular kind of response,” but when he also “invites people to identify their own experience . . . the effect is striking.”31
Sharing personal material and story is facilitated by the questions asked. They have the effect of contextualizing the passage in our own experience. When the right questions are asked, people are set free to relate to the passage in themselves. The questions are the key. “In the question lies the answer.”32 They will reflect the mind of the facilitator, but will also open the doors of opportunity, opportunity for the members to speak their mind, to open their minds to the text and to each other. Asking the right question is signally important.
Boxes are used as a simple device to separate sharing activity from the unfolding commentary. Inside the box are one or more questions designed carefully to encourage personal sharing. They are not intended for discussion, but for sharing, with the framework of experience suggested in the passage which is being studied acting as the holding background. Time must be given to this, for members of the group to enter in to the narrative, together with entering into themselves. Where more than one question is suggested, they should be taken one at a time for the fullest benefit, and used to journey step by step along the inward and the exterior road. The pertinence of the passage, experienced through the question, is for self-awareness and deeply personal sharing. Because we open the text, we are enabled to open ourselves.
5. The Workshop Style: In Particular,
the Nature of Sharing in Small Groups
The advantage of a workshop style is that it provides the opportunity for a variety of distinct yet interrelated elements. A session can include straight teaching, discussion, personal reflection, sharing in pairs or small groups or in the whole group, debriefing together, and activities. There is flexibility and openness, separateness and togetherness, hard work and humor, giving and receiving, waiting and watching, and above all mutuality. Members of the group can be pressed to the utmost of their learning capacity. They can also press for slowing down and for explication. The more we know about the text, the world behind and within, the better. This is the context in which we can search the world, our world in front of the text. Yet we must move beyond the cerebral to the affect. We bring our whole self to the text and experience it in community. Reading John is both an individual and corporate activity. As interpreters we live and work in a collegiate enterprise.
Our fellowship is foreshadowed by the intimate relationships portrayed in the text, between men and women, insiders and outsiders, searchers and believers, unbelievers and followers, and the leader. The trust (belief) of which we read is practiced by us. So the golden thread that holds the tapestry of interaction together is the practice and awareness of personal sharing. All the other elements are important in their turn and are given reality by the encounter between persons that is taking place. Sharing takes place throughout, but especially in response to the bidding, “Share how you feel . . .” So we need to be quite clear what it involves.
What is new in the experience is a “new way of being oneself and being with others”33 and being prepared to entrust our joy and suffering to the other. We shall live (even if briefly) in liminality, on the border between, in the space between, parts of ourselves, and between ourselves and others. Others will hear that “I am.” And I will hear them saying, “I am.” This is what “I am.” And that is a very Johannine expression!
Sharing is a distinct activity. It involves talking about oneself. It is not discussion of ideas. It is a specific discipline, easily learnt but hard to practice consistently, needing constant watchfulness over oneself, one’s thought about oneself and the language to express it. That sounds pretty bleak, but it is the richest form of communication. It is vastly more than the cerebral communication of ideas, though precision in ideas is not discounted. It is full of affect. It is the royal road to truth and comfort in the truth.
I started my first “Care and Share Group” in 1973, long before banks became “listening” and co-ops (a series of grocery and bank cooperatives in the UK) became “caring-sharing”! Training in Clinical Theology Association workshops and growth groups alerted me to a different style of meeting. I was the minister of a large Methodist church of over five hundred members; I was attending a lot of meetings, but began to feel I was not “meeting” people. I was usefully busy, leading a hectic life, with much pastoral visiting, and realized that there was no way I could care for everyone. People had to care for each other and be trained for it. The more insight and skill they had, the better. So I began to offer pastoral training courses, and continued to do so throughout my ministry! The core of the training was a new way of talking and listening to each other.
I was due to lead a house group one night and simply had had no time to prepare a talk. I nervously asked the members to share how they felt about their relationship