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When I became a Christian in my teens I started going to church. There was also a small Christian Union at school I had to start learning what it meant to live as a Christian, but I did not have to learn the basic Christian stories. All through school from five upwards I had heard the Bible stories every day in assembly and at least once a week in ‘Scripture’, as we called our Religious Knowledge classes. I knew what being a good Samaritan meant, I knew about the prodigal son, I knew why Jesus was called the Lamb of God, I knew about Noah’s ark and Moses in the bulrushes.
Learning the stories of Jesus
Recently a friend who is a reception class teacher in an affluent area registered disquiet at the small but growing number of five-year-olds who are not toilet-trained, cannot tie laces, and lack simple social skills. She might have added that only a few of them know any Bible stories. Many of us, as well as our children, simply do not have the opportunity to learn the stories of Jesus and the Bible in the easy, everyday way that it used to happen. So when adults become Christians today and go to church, start mixing with other Christians, go to home groups and listen to sermons, they are sometimes very puzzled because they do not know what is being talked about.
You don’t, of course, have to be well educated to be a Christian, but it is interesting to ask the question—how much do I need to know in order to consider myself a Christian? Many people believe in reincarnation. Is that a Christian belief? What happens if someone asks me about that? Am I able to explain why Jesus died? Could I explain why many Christians think abortion or pre-marital sex are wrong?
Of course, being a Christian is about faith first. It is possible to be a deeply committed and passionate follower of Jesus, but with little formal knowledge of the Bible, Christian history, doctrine or theology. It is equally possible to be a highly able academic teacher of Christianity and the Bible and not believe any of it. The most import-ant thing of all is faith, not knowledge. But if we do not know very much about the God we believe in, then we may be misleading ourselves, and others, about what he is like and what he expects from us.
Our commitment
Certainly we need to know at least as much as we know about anything else, whether it is law, history, baby care, ceramics or gardening. Our commitment as disciples of Jesus, among other things, is a commitment to learn, study, understand and apply all the Bible tells us about him. It is possible to know a great deal about the Stock Exchange, Manchester United or how to make patchwork quilts, and know very little about the faith that should be the most important thing in our lives.
If various pointers are right and biblical knowledge among Christians is falling, what do we do about it? As individuals we need to renew our commitment to read our Bibles, and our Bible-reading notes, every day if at all possible. But many of us may well learn better if we can get together with others, two or three perhaps, and share what we have learnt with each other.
Churches need to encourage Christians to read and understand the Bible. We may need to ask questions about how adults learn, and change the way we do things in the church. But in some ways the Bible itself gives us some of the clues. Within its pages, every possible way of teaching and learning is illustrated: stories, history, poetry, parable, drama, one-to-one teaching, singing the words, simply doing what it says in neighbourly love in action. We need, within the church’s teaching and learning programmes, to allow the enormous variety of the Bible to guide us into a far more exciting, risk-taking, open-ended, question-asking way of learning together, in which we all learn from each other and build up each other in our biblical knowledge, understanding and response.
Margaret Killingray is a tutor at the Institute for Contemporary Christianity in London. She has assisted Dr John Stott and others in running Christian Impact conferences here and overseas, and is the author of The Way to Live. Margaret and her husband, David, have three daughters and four grandchildren.
This article first appeared in the January - April 2000 issue of Day by Day with God.