One Minute Bible - I Must be Grumpy
23 04 2008
I must be grumpy, because I seem to want to rant about the things going on around me. First, I offend most of my staff with the “conspire” post and now I will probably offend most of the youth ministry blogging community with this one. Well call me grumpy, but I really just don’t like this:
“You’ve committed yourself to more Bible reading plans than you care to admit and you’re 187 chapters behind in your latest attempt. If this sounds familiar, then the One Minute Bible for Students is what you need to get back and stay on track.” - blurb for the book
I definitely understand the need for baby steps in taking on new disciplines, but this seems to say to me that I am really asking too much of myself or my students to commit to reading the Bible more than a minute a day. This really fits the attitude of, “C’mon, that’s really asking a lot of someone to do something like that and actually be committed to it.”
Honestly? I spend more time than that brushing my teeth everyday (well almost everyday). I spend more time bathing, more time looking int the mirror, more time wondering if I like carrots, or just day-dreaming. I certainly spend more time doing the “important things” of life, like watching TV and listening to music and updating my Facebook page. How could I be expected to keep up with that too?
OK, this is a rant, and I certainly understand and appreciate what Doug Fields and his staff are trying to do by making the Bible less daunting and more accessible to people. It’s not really their fault that we are lazy, unappreciative, uncaring babies who can’t feed ourselves. This one just stuck in my craw. Thanks for listening. It took me about 5 minutes to write this so I guess, with continued effort, I could write the 5 minute Bible in 365 days. Wait for it… wait for it…
:)
I have a similar problem, actually two similar problems…
when I get asked to resource people, to help them with their ministry with young people and discipleship/mentoring I go into the conversation with a number of ideas that regularly get served back to me with comments like “that sounds like a lot of time” or “don’t you have anything quicker and easier?” to which I want to scold the people because time is one of those things that needs to be put into our ministry with young people, adn mentoring above all else takes time and needs time…
the second issue is that one minute studies develop biblical literacy, first of all I dont want my ministry to be broken all the way back to biblical literacy = discipleship as there is a lot more to it, and frankly biblical literacy it only a small part of it, more time needs to be put into biblical action, the working through the beatitudes so that the blind see, the poor are blessed… it’s the focus on biblical literacy that produces bible studies with fill in the gaps (which are painful) or studies that do not lead to action in areas of mission and justice…
anyhoo, gotta move on, my laptop has cut of circulation to my left foot and it’s pins and needling all over the place….
Digi, amen and amen to your points. Thanks for commenting.
Recently, I broke down a day for my students like this. 100% is 24 hours devoted to God, 50% is 12 hours and so on. We got to .78% of our day ended up at 11 minutes. So giving God less than 1% of our time would be 11 minutes, how pathetic to go to 1 minute!
I stopped reading this post at the one-minute mark so I may have missed your point. I believe that reading the Bible in one-minute increments is great training for proof-texting. Isn’t that a good thing?