I’m not going to make promises here that the Bible does not. Bible study is not a magical formula. Going to your church’s Bible study (or one hosted elsewhere) will not bring a yes to every prayer and success in all your endeavors.

Bible study itself, the act of hiding God’s Word in our hearts, does bring promises that the Word will change you, transforming you to be like Christ, and that it will bring fruit in your life and the lives of those around you. I think private study is commanded, beautiful, and essential. However, I would hold that meeting together to study the Bible is a gift within the Church.

When studying in a group, a particular principle is present: iron sharpens iron. It is in community that a certain kind of shaping takes place. Scripture along with people serve as the tools God uses to mold the believer. “So one person sharpens another” means the gifts, differences, sameness, and experiences of other believers is a tool in God’s hand for your good.

So, in light of that and with what I’ve experienced and witnessed, I want to offer a few good reasons to enter into the world of Bible study for the sake of Christian community and a few helpful hints as well.

The benefit of wisdom, gifts, and experience

In many women’s Bible studies, you’ll find a group of women of different ages, varied stages of life, diverse experiences in the church and in life, and at different places in their Christianity.

Likewise, the Bible tells us we are ‘many members in one body’ with different giftings. When we press in to the community that Bible study offers, we bring our own gifts and we sit with the ones that are different from ours.

Gathered around the table, Bibles open to the same passage, are years of wisdom and experience that, when added up, are priceless. Because a group of Bible believing women, studying the Word, reading about it, listening to others’ input, and doing this all for years equals a whole lot of God’s work on hearts and minds in one room.

And here’s what I’ve experienced in that environment:

I’ve sat as a newer Christian while an older woman explained a verse that I’d always heard presented in a ‘do your best’ and ‘try harder’ Christianity and show how it pointed to Christ and God’s work in us.
I’ve heard one of the youngest girls spell out the big truth or the rightful encouragement or conviction the passage brings that other women remember for years to come.
I’ve watched the whole room stop when the hard truth comes easily from a woman’s lips because that hard truth was made real and raw in hard things.
And I’ve also seen the mundane comments, said amidst a discussion, that have fruit in a believer’s life much later on-a seed planted and watered set to bloom in the future.

Old and young, new and mature, weak and strong gather. And with them, the joy and grief of this life mingle along with the wisdom and care that is characteristic of a Christian community. It’s a community well worth seeking out.

You may come to receive the wisdom and experience, the blessing of someone else’s gift. But might I say, God will use you too in the lives of other believers with the specific story he wrote for you and the gifts he has given you.

A meeting of ideas

We study the Bible to know God. Through that, we also come to recognize what he is not.

This is important because we are confronted with different ideas about God all the time. They come from the world, from inside the church, and, sometimes, from us. Ideas are not the dangerous thing, but rather having bad ones go unchecked against the truth in the Bible is the real pitfall.

This is another area where having a community of believers who meet to discuss Scripture can safeguard the believer. Community can help:

Ask good questions and challenge ideas. Community can keep harmful ideas from taking root with a simple ‘where do you find that?’ or ‘what do you mean by that?’. Sometimes, it’s with others that bad ideas meet their match in the wisdom and knowledge of other Christians when we are stuck in our head or listening to unsound voices.
Keep the big picture in mind. Focused on one passage, it can be easy to neglect all the other parts of the Bible that apply. It helps to have others ready to remind you that the precedent for all that right living in the Apostles’ letters is couched in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and that he did and does the work or that the weird Old Testament story does point forward to Christ.
Remind of the gospel. And speaking of Christ, we are so prone to forget the gospel. In the Bible study setting, other believers sit ready to preach the gospel again or couch that (possible rightful) conviction in the good news you that Jesus saved us from our sins.

Having believers who care for God’s Word gathered around the table, at the ready to speak truth and challenge lies and to swing the pendulum back in the right direction, takes the weight off to know it all at once.

Let the Word wash over you

A few years ago, a dear friend professed to be struggling to read the Bible study passage each week. She was, objectively, in a rough season. My advice was to come anyway and sit.

Because other sisters in Christ were reading the passage. Hearing Scripture secondhand does not take away its power to encourage, convict, change people. ‘The Word of God is alive and active, sharper than a two-edged sword’ and that means that its words have the power to transform even if you come limping to hear them.

Now, not all Bible studies might have this philosophy. But I felt like the best move was to still bid that woman to come. Because even if she was feeling overwhelmed or at sea in her circumstances, we could do the reading for her. We could share the big truths across the table and the truth would wash over her. In every season, the truths of Scripture are essential and sometimes those truths have to be delivered through community.

The firmest foundation

I’ve experienced both the tension and pain of navigating relationships in the church as well as the beauty in Christian friendship and love that heals, comforts, shares, laughs. The latter makes it well worth it and Bible study is a place for those friendships to form.

Some of my greatest friendships stem directly from Bible study. And it makes sense when you think about it. We met while focused on the firmest foundation there is-God and his Word. God used the tool of Bible study to deliver me into friendships where, maybe, we have no business being together otherwise. But we have this thing, this hope, this common ground, this God.

And short of close friendships, you also gain consistent presence. I am not having coffee or planning play dates with every woman around the table. And yet, each serves as a consistent, God-fearing presence in my life week after week. God blesses through the one moment during weekly study and the deep, present friendships.

Of course, this isn’t a guarantee. People in the church, relationships and community, can be messy. But the mere possibility of dear sisters becoming friends for a season or a lifetime is worth entering in and forming those relationships. God made the Church to be a bright and beautiful thing, a community that, done right, makes people marvel at the gift it is.

Where do you find this community and what do you do when you can’t find it?

I once doubted I would ever find a Christian community which valued study of God’s Word. My experience led me to believe that my hunger for the Word would be dismissed-even scoffed at. I had unkind words thrown my way and threats that if I showed too much interest in context, I would need to keep that to myself.

Of course, you might run into this sort of thing too. A church itself could be unhealthy or abuse Scripture. The Bible study you walk into doesn’t study Scripture well and in context (or at all). That’s tricky to navigate, but important to name. I encourage you to keep looking for a community of believers who hold God and the Bible in high regard.

Because the truth is: Christ sustains his church. So, there will always be Christians who have care for and take care with what he has revealed in the Bible. These women who read the Bible and let it shift things in their hearts do exist because God has promised that they always will. So might I encourage you that there are groups-Bible studies-out there that are doing their level-best to faithfully and rightly study the Word.

If you’re wondering what you should do next and a sound Bible study that studies the Bible itself as the norm is not available to you, take heart. God works where he places you, whether it’s a season that’s more isolated or one that abounds in Christian relationship.

Everyone’s story is different and we are placed in different situations, but one of these should be an option to get started on entering in:

Read books like Women of the Word by Jen Wilkin which serves as a great guide for how to approach the Bible in your independent study or when you do have the opportunity to study in community.
Find a study you can do by yourself, work on a reading plan, or find an online program or group. Private, independent study is essential and the Word is ‘alive and active’ in the most isolated of seasons for the believer.
Invite a friend or two to do a prepared study with you. Many great prepared studies exist that grow you in what the Bible says and what it means.
Seek and signup for a local women’s Bible study which looks at whole books of the Bible from all parts of the Bible as the norm and who take care to look at it in context and see how it points to the character of God and the work of Christ to save us from sin-women who always have the gospel and the big picture in view.

In the end, God’s promises hold true whether you are in a season of searching for community or you’ve found one that values God’s Word. But I encourage you to look for the relationship of the thing and consider studying the Bible in a community that loves God’s Word and see how God uses it in your life and the lives of the women with which you meet.

I cannot promise that this will go perfectly. The promises that apply are that Scripture is ‘alive and active’ and that God is ever at work forming believers to be more like Jesus. A community of believers bent over Scripture together in a women’s Bible study is one tool that God can use to bring those promises about in our lives.