A journey in bible study

Serdang Church has organized a seminar on Biblical Exegesis in 1986. I was then a fresh graduate from Seminary Theology Malaysia and was posted to Klang Wesley Methodist Church as a pastor in the month of June. I was informed that a delegation of 10 members had signed up for the seminar. I was impressed by the effort initiated by the Serdang church to organize a seminar on such an important subject. I was convinced that organizing such seminar was the right thing to do because it would help Christians to appreciate the right approach to study the Bible. It is always the desire of most thinking Christians to obtain proper Bible knowledge by developing the correct method in Bible study. Such desire is commonly shared by Christians from all denominations. The 10 Methodist members who had signed up for that seminar that was organized by a Reformed Baptist Church simply prove the point. The organizing committee should have made it its aim to promote Bible knowledge by imparting the knowledge of Biblical Exegesis in the subsequent seminars, then it would have been able to reach out to a larger group of Christians in the Klang Valley.

The golden opportunity was given to Serdang Church and it started well, but unfortunately it slipped away into a wrong direction. The subsequent seminars and conferences moved quickly to focus on themes and issues that only interested the Reformed members. The response from other denominations was not so good; at least, the 10 Methodist members did not show up for any seminar after that. Since then, the Reformed Baptists became more and more inward looking and moved into a direction of division by entangling with unending doctrinal dispute. Each one held on to his own interpretation of the Bible. Elders and members from the same fraternal were hard working in proving to one another that who is truly “reformed” and the end result is that many were hurt and disappointed. Elders are pointing fingers at each other and calling each other names that are less than being kind. Elders and churches are afraid to do anything right that is out of the reformed frame work for the fear that they might be branded as un-reformed. The situation is very much like what is reported in Judges; “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (21.25).The strangest thing is that all these took place while we claim that the Bible is our final authority and the 1689 Confession our common consensus. In this sense, the reformed Baptists are not in any way different from the other denominations.

The question now is how to pull the Reformed churches out of this muddy puddle? We have tried the Reformed distinctiveness and it did not work. We have tried waving the 1689 Confession and it became the cause of dispute. We have laid our hands on many other attempts but we have not tried hard enough with the exegetical study of the Bible. Shall we?