By Dr. Scott Hahn
Kimberly and I have a dream.
The dream is this: that whenever a new Christian family moves into town and asks their neighbors where they can find the best Bible study in town, they'll be pointed to the local Catholic church.
I'm excited to report that the St. Paul Center has taken the first big steps toward making our dream come true.
Over the past year, Kimberly has been piloting "From Genesis to Jesus" - the first in a new series of Bible studies that we've developed especially for use in parish settings.
Response to this new initiative has been overwhelming. Now we're ready to announce the next phase in deploying our new Parish-Based Bible Study Program.
The program will provide parishes with all the tools they need to run the best Bible study in town. We'll offer student texts, instructors' manuals, and PowerPoint presentation materials. We'll also provide training for pastors and other parish leaders - to increase their "biblical fluency" and equip them to lead these studies with confidence.
After a nationwide search, we've brought on board Karl Orbon, a gifted communicator and administrator, to head-up the program's implementation. Together, we've mapped out a launch strategy that will have the program up and running in various parts of the country next year. To read more about Karl's work, click here.
There are other good Catholic Bible studies out there. But there aren't any that even try to do what we do with our new parish-based program.
Most Bible studies tend to focus on individual books of the Bible. They study one book at a time, chapter by chapter, verse by verse.
We read the Bible the way the Church reads the Bible in the Liturgy. In each and every Sunday Mass, the Church shows us the promises of the Old Testament and how they are fulfilled in the New Testament.
The Church does this because that's the way the New Testament writers, following the example of Christ, read the Old Testament and wrote the New.
When we read the Bible this way we see the themes that unite the individual chapters and verses into a single narrative of the history of salvation. The written text becomes the Living Word and we join our lives to the realities that make up the great story of salvation told in the Bible.
That's our dream - to raise up a new generation of Catholics who will read the Bible this way and share the life-transforming experience of our Lord's first disciples.
After traveling with our Lord on the Emmaus Road, these disciples declared: "Did not our hearts burn within us as He opened up the Scriptures...yet our eyes were opened in the breaking of the bread."
November 2004
