At the Murwillumbah Seventh-day Adventist Church (NSW), members are getting excited about giving Bible studies.
Committed to their mission statement, “To know Jesus and to make Jesus known”, the church developed a training series in 2021 to prepare church members to fulfil both areas of the statement.
Focusing on the growth of biblical knowledge, the first part of the series consisted of a church-wide Bible journal and reading plan through the Gospel of Mark. The reading plan was accompanied by the weekly podcast “Untrained” that explained each week’s passages.
Planning the second phase of the training, Murwillumbah pastors Ashley Smith and Boris Jovinov realised that one of the major reasons that church members were hesitant to give Bible studies was because they don’t feel qualified to teach the Bible, and they do not have a good framework or resources to teach the Scripture.
To solve this problem, they launched the Simple Truth Bible study project, a series of 20 Bible studies that cover each of the Adventist fundamental beliefs in seven passages or less. Written in a question-answer format, with a Bible verse to answer each question, the studies also have a short paragraph of commentary explaining the verses.
With the new initiative, church members have started giving Bible studies and shared several testimonies of the success they’ve had.
