When Professor Dru Johnson began teaching an introductory Old Testament course to college freshmen, he regularly heard from his students that they read the Bible every day. Many of them even had verses memorized. But as the class began to study the Old Testament together, the students were shocked by the stories, theological conundrums, and insight into the character of God they found there.
How could this be? If they were reading their Bibles daily, wouldn’t they be familiar with, at minimum, the book of Genesis?
Not necessarily. Johnson found that his students reflected a greater American Evangelical trend: many people who have a daily “quiet time” aren’t experiencing Scripture within its broader context.
“When my freshmen described their daily quiet times, I began to understand some of the disconnect,” Johnson explains in a recent article for CT. “They lacked extended communal readings of Scripture where it was safe to interrogate the text and puzzle over its meaning.”
The problem isn’t daily devotions. The problem is daily devotions as a Christian’s only engagement with Scripture. Johnson hopes that families and churches will reclaim the act of engaging the Bible communally—perhaps trying practices like Lectio Divina together. In doing so, they’ll not only spend regular time in the Bible, but truly get to know “the whole counsel of God” (Romans 15:4).
