About this resource

Welcome to a five-week Bible study that encourages curiosity and deep reflection in a group setting. The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Virginia has invited Baptist Seminary of Kentucky to provide curriculum for Sunday Schools and other small groups that study Scripture together. As a seminary, we aim to share with you how we study the Bible together while providing information about the Scripture text and possible interpretations for our current time. Within these pages, you will find interpretive essays and Bible study methods offered by BSK professors, staff, alumni, and students.

We at BSK are the first to acknowledge that the work of studying Scripture is never done and cannot be mastered by one person. Those of us who have studied Scripture for decades and might be called “experts” acknowledge that the more we learn, the more we realize that there is much more to learn. The challenge of studying Scripture continues, especially as we listen carefully to our community members and pay attention to the different contexts and viewpoints everyone brings to the study of Scripture. We practice a balance of listening to the text, studying about Scripture, and listening to one another. In all of this, we pray for faithful interpretations that shape us to encounter God and live faithfully in the world. The interpretive essays you will encounter in each week of study reflect this balance and model the diversity of interpretation that is possible when studying Scripture.

We are also committed to sharing our knowledge with the wider church in a way that builds up church members and ministers. In past decades and even today in some circles, sometimes the flow of scholarship from seminaries to churches has been unidirectional and unbalanced. Many assumed seminaries held the important information and handed it on to ministers and churches, but there was nothing for church members and ministers to teach one another or to the seminary in return.

At BSK, we aim to disrupt those unbalanced expectations. We want to provoke further interest in Biblical information and interpretation methods across the wider church as a means of encouraging congregations to interpret the Bible together and seek more learning together. To fulfill these aims, this Bible study is built in an “all-learners” style that is flexible for different group setups.