The Bible Challenge

So Bishop Douglas decided to participate in the Bible Challenge and invited Bishop Curry, Bishop Ahrens, and the Diocesan staff to join with him. Then an invitation went out to the entire Diocese via their Weekly eNews. You can read more about the background of the Challenge in the diocesan article.

Lois, our priest, brought the Challenge to the congregation, first to Holy Needles, our prayer shawl ministry, and to the monthly Practicing Prayer group. She then sent an email to the parish, which we posted on our Being Community blog to provide a place for conversation. Some of our members have undertaken the challenge. After looking at the various options, I chose the Chronological Reading Plan from One Year Bible Online, one of the resources recommended by The Center for Biblical Studies.

The movement in the Episcopal Church seems to have begun with the Rev. Marek P. Zabriskie, rector of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Fort Washington, PA. Its roots, however, are deeply entrenched in the Evangelical/Fundamentalist streams of Christianity. The One Year Bible originated with Tyndale House Publishers, and the One Year Bible Online site uses that name with permission from Tyndale.

I've provided lots of links here, so you can go peruse all of this for yourself.

I have mixed feelings about participating in this whole enterprise, but it has been a long time since I read through most of the Bible as a participant in Education for Ministry(EfM). I chose the chronological plan in part because of my experience in EfM. And I find it really interesting that an organization that appears to be fairly Evangelical/Fundamentalist in its outlook provides a plan for reading the Bible that doesn't follow it strictly from the traditionally accepted order of books. It seems even some of the more conservative Christians are engaging in a bit of one or more of the historical critical methods of looking at the Bible.

So I guess we'll see where this goes.