Lectio / Dwelling in the Word

We believe that missional life is about God at work amongst the ordinary men, women and children of a local church. God’s fresh directions almost always come in the form of ordinary men and women, risking, testing, and experimenting out of a conviction that God is calling them into their neighborhoods and communities. The myth that has misdirected the church in the West for a very long time is that it is only the educated, the professional or the specially gifted who can do this work of listening to God through Scripture. It is, however, practically always God’s ordinary people who discern God’s activities in their contexts. A primary way this happens is as people learn again to listen to Scripture together.

Dwelling in the Word is a variation on the ancient Christian practice of lectio divina which is a form of reading the Scripture in ways that assists us to allow God to shape us in and through the text.  Instead of trying to use the text for some new thought or as a means of encouragement and fortification for the day, with Dwelling in the Word we seek to allow it to be the means whereby God encounters us.  Lectio divina is a way of overcoming our barriers so that we become more open to God before Scripture. Lectio divina helps us learn how to listen to God again, rather than use the Scripture as some tool for meeting our own needs or justifying our biases.

God is deeply engaged in our churches, in our lives, and in our world – and lectio divina invites the Holy Spirit to enliven the Bible texts in our lives so that we become more aware of and responsive to what God is doing.

dwelling in the word

lectio

scripture

workbook