I have just spent a happy couple of hours with a couple of clergy, diocesan officers and a PhD student at Chester Diocesan Church House discussing how the Bible can be used in urban areas.

I have become a fan of using the Bible as story or dramatic narrative for as Louise Lawrence writes, ‘Stories and memories, both remarkable and mundane, connect people and places in assorted and surprising ways’.[1] I could wax lyrical about how using the Bible as story opens up many possibilities for both evangelism and discipleship, as people enter into the story. Hence, I find much to agree with in Eugene Peterson’s comment: ‘The story that is Scripture, broadly conceived, is the story of following Jesus. The Christian community has always read this story as not just one story among other but as the meta-narrative that embraces, or can embrace, all stories’.[2]

I am also aware that we need to re-engage people with the Bible through a variety of different media.

As I finished sharing about my experience of using the five-act drama, a la Tom Wright, refined by Craig Bartholomew and Michael Gohen, and by Sam Wells and Scott McKnight, and offered the assembled gathering a copy of my way, there was a tentative voice.

The PhD student has been doing some qualitative work looking at the bible with working class men from non-church backgrounds. At the beginning of his research, he had asked the group (all from the same factory) what they understood by the Bible. While some said ‘a story book’ which usually meant and therefore not true; the vast majority thought of it as a ‘moral guide’ or ‘instruction book’.

As a ‘moral guide’ it had no authority when it conflicted with life, and ‘like all instruction books’ it was on the shelf but seldom read.

It is hard work making fresh connections between life and the bible; it may even be harder than those of us who are already on the way think.