2026 June news-letter article

Hello friends,

If you aren’t a regular attender of Adult Bible Study on Wednesday evenings, let me challenge you, now that the kiddos are out of school, and it is still a plenty light at 7:30pm, to join us in the Sanctuary as we wade into the summer.  If you have particular supper traditions at particular times, or if you need to be home and readying for bed by specific times, I respect that too; but let me challenge YOU to watch our Adult Bible Study sessions via YouTube on Wednesday evenings, or another time.  It is worth noting that you cannot experience the sweet fellowship of brothers/sisters in Christ on YouTube.  Since it is going to be so light out, so late this summer (and so hot), you can go with a friend or few down to Main Street and grab some ice cream before heading home!  That’s just another benefit to such a Wednesday evening excursion!

I don’t mean to be ham-fisted about this plug, but I do want to earnestly commend to you the Roll Through the Bible series we are presently in the midst of during our Adult Bible Study sessions.  It has been so fun for me to teach in this series, and from what I have gathered from so many of you, it’s been fun to hear too!  We are clipping along at a one-book-per-week pace.  It’s been a challenge to distill a 35-chapter book down to a one-hour study (minus prayer request time = about 48 minutes).  Needless to say, each week, there has been much left on the “editing room floor”, but the study has been fun for me.  This is a very different pace of study than we are accustomed to, but this change of pace is helpful in a few different ways…

First, y’all know I love the “weeds”.  I like to go slow, digging into the depths of God’s Word, walking through passages, paying attention to details and soaking up everything I can learn along the way.  In this “Roll Through” series, we aren’t crawling, or walking, or even running; we are “flying over” a book from a 5,000- or 10,000- or 15,000-foot level.  If a book has only four chapters, we can swoop down and see more of the “trees”, but to see all 50 chapters of Genesis in one evening, we had to pull back on the joy stick, climb pretty high, and see only the large “forests” along the way.  This inability to go slow and pay attention to detail naturally allows us to pan out, seeing the over-arching story of redemption from Genesis to the Revelation.  This pace of study causes us to maintain a focus upon God’s grand story, and helps us to see how a particular book fits into the broader whole of the bible.

Second, a fun effect of this pace of study is to side-swipe really great stories.  Obviously, we couldn’t spend more than about 60 seconds on the low-light of Tamar & Judah (Genesis 38) while we “flew over” Genesis.  My hope, is that several of you went home and read through that chapter on your own time later that week.  Along the way, I have attempted to make a point of mentioning high-lights, and low-lights, along the way.  I hope you will read these stories, or vignettes, on your own.  What always amazes me, is how God works even through the sad moments of failure, profound sin, or hurt.  So, by joining us for this “Roll Through” series, your appetite might be whetted to further investigate the weeds of particular stories on your own!

Third, by deliberately charging through the whole bible, we will roll through books that perhaps you haven’t studied before, or that you may not have read in a long time.  I don’t think I have ever preached from Song of Songs, and rarely do we spend time studying random passages from relatively obscure minor Prophets.  This series will force us to touch all the books, even the ones we rarely touch, and this is a very good thing!  My hope through this is that God will elevate our individual levels of biblical literacy, which will advance our church’s corporate degree of biblical literacy.  My hope is that we will stumble across random stories that you learned many moons ago, but you can’t even remember where they are in the bible.

Fourth, and this is not in stone yet, but Pastor Pat and I have nearly decided that we are going to NOT adhere to canonical order (the order of the Table of Contents in your bible).  Instead, we are mulling the idea of trying to maintain (as best we can), a chronological order.  My hope in this effort will be to help us see more clearly how the various sections of God’s Word fit together according to the time line.  We aim to complete the Old Testament, circle back to the O.T. over-view, review the four centuries between the testaments, give a New Testament over-view, and then moving on into Matthew!

Finally, this pace of study will give us the freedom to pause and restart the series.  None of us thought that we began this series in February 2026, only to take 66 Wednesdays in a row to mow through it all (we blew that in March!).  We will have advent events, alternate schedules, social evenings, guest speakers, and perhaps inclement weather again.  That will result in fits and starts, and it will be alright.  We aren’t bound to a hard, fast time table; we will get through the 66th book whenever we get through it!  I have so enjoyed our Roll Through the Bible thus far, Pastor Pat has enjoyed it thus far, and many of you have already expressed to me that you are enjoying it thus far.  My hope is that more and more of you will come to enjoy it too!  Historically, Baptists have claimed to be “the people of the book”; this is a great way for us to put our money where our mouth is.  Isn’t it a good thing to be continually renewed in our love for God, by falling in love with Him over and over again by studying His Word?

Holy Bible, book of love, tell me of our God above;
He who made me loves me still, helps me know and do His will.
Holy Bible, once again tell of God’s great love to man;
how He gave His only Son, how Christ died for everyone.
--A.J.