Articles

At its heart, St Jude’s Bowral is a bible-believing and a bible-teaching church. But what does that actually mean?

Every legitimate church gives a central role to engaging with the Scriptures. The reading and exposition of Scripture has been part of Christian gatherings since the time of the apostles, just as the reading and reflection upon the Hebrew Scriptures was a central part of synagogue gatherings before the time of Jesus.

Like all faithful churches, every Anglican church ought to be bible-believing and bible-based. Since the 16th century, the Church of England recognized a critical role for sustained engagement with the Scriptures as a key strategy for the reformation of the English Realm. In one of the prefaces of the Book of Common Prayer, Archbishop Cranmer anticipated that “the people by daily hearing of holy Scripture read in the Church might continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God and be the more inflamed with the love of his true religion.”

In line with this emphasis on Scripture as the means of national reform, access to the Bible in English was championed. The shape of the Book of Common Prayer and its language was saturated with the words of Scripture. This even found expression in Elizabethan church architecture, which placed neither an altar nor a pulpit in the most prominent place, but rather made the focal point the Bible on a lectern.

To be bible-believing today is to make God’s Word the test for all that we believe. Only doctrine that can be proved by Scripture is to be believed as ‘an article of the Faith’ (Article 6 of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion).

We are not the arbiters of what is right and wrong when it comes to theology, ethics or religion. It is God  by his Word  who  sets  us  on the right path. This means that he chief task of a minister, and the chief activity of church life, is to read, understand, and apply the Word of God.

Because God’s Word has been given to us in the form that it has, 66 books written by human authors under the inspiration of God’s Spirit into real historical contexts, the best way to read the Bible is book by book. That is why most of the preaching and teaching ministry in our church moves systematically through whole books of the Bible. We ask what this part of Scripture meant to the original hearers, so that we might know more deeply  what  it means for us today. The Bible has been written for us, but it was not written directly to us.  

The right posture of a Bible reader is humility. We expect God’s Word to contradict us and correct us because we are imperfect sinners shaped by non-Christian culture and thought. When that happens we must find ourselves saying “God is right and I am wrong.”

To do the opposite and make God’s Word agree with us and our culture at each point is to reduce God to an impotent idol of our own making.

We believe that the word of God written is powerful and that the Spirit is able to transform lives as he writes God’s word on human hearts (see Article 20 of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion). This is what we hope for and pray for in our church. That we might be so shaped in heart, mind, soul and will by the Scriptures that we might “be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” (Romans 12:2)

We believe that the word of God written is powerful and that the Spirit is able to transform lives as he writes God’s word on human hearts. This is what we hope for and pray for in our church.

Rev Dr Gavin Perkins

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