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Ministry Apps: Using LifeGuides

By Douglas Connelly

If you have used IVP’s LifeGuide Bible Studies, you know that the strength of this series is the way the guides lead people into a deeper interaction with the biblical text and then to relevant application of the text to their lives. You should also know that LifeGuides can be used to enhance and enrich your ministry as a pastor.

I’ve used quite a few of the study guides in my own preparation for teaching. As I led a small group focused on prayer, I worked through Lynne Baab’s guide Prayers of the Old Testament to nurture my own soul. I also modified three or four studies and used them with the small group to give us better insight into how we can pray for our own and others’ needs. A friend of mine led a prayer retreat for denominational leaders and passed out copies of the LifeGuide on The Lord’s Prayer at the end. He wanted the study guide to prompt the participants in the retreat to a continuing commitment to prayer.

Occasionally I get a letter or e-mail requesting a copy of one of the LifeGuides I have written. Most often the request comes from a man or woman in prison. There is usually an explanation attached about how the Lord found them in the darkest of life’s circumstances. Now they are filled with a new desire to know Christ in his fullness. Those requests led me to begin to use LifeGuides more consistently in my counseling and in my discipling of young believers. I have a supply of guides in my office and often put one into the hands of a new convert or a struggling believer, and encourage them to get into the Word on their own as they grow in their spiritual walk.

My point is that LifeGuides can be great tools in any pastor’s ministry and can be used in a wide range of situations and applications. They work wonderfully in traditional adult education and small group settings, but they can also help you minister more effectively to specific needs in your congregation.

LifeGuides will also enrich your own spiritual development and stir new insights to help you prepare that next sermon series. If you are considering a series on David, work through Jack Kuhatschek’s excellent guide on your own or with your staff or your worship team. You will find yourself thinking more clearly about how the series can be applied more personally and powerfully to your congregation. Prepare a series on the Ten Commandments by carving out time for a personal retreat. Take your Bible, Rob Suggs’s LifeGuide The Ten Commandments and a notebook. Leave the commentaries behind for a while and just let God’s Word and the Holy Spirit speak into your life. The message series will come alive in you before the congregation ever hears a word from the pulpit.

I enjoy the discipline of writing LifeGuides, but their influence on my life and ministry is far greater than the few guides I’ve been privileged to write. They work in so many situations simply because they lead people into the riches of God’s truth and that truth changes lives—even a pastor’s life.

Douglas Connelly is the senior pastor of Parkside Community Church in Sterling Heights, Michigan. He is the author of several LifeGuide study guides for InterVarsity Press and has also written The Bible for Blockheads series for Zondervan.

Scripture and the Reformers: Retrieved for the Sake of Renewal

by Mike Gibson, series editor for the Reformation Commentary on Scripture

Martin Luther once remarked that the Reformation took place while he and Philipp Melancthon “drank Wittenberg beer. The Word did it all.” What Luther was suggesting, in his characteristically wry sense of humor, was that the incredible revolutionary movement of the Reformation was not the product of a human being, a personality, charisma, or the result of strategic planning, calculations or effort.

Rather, the Reformation unfolded through the cities, villages and hamlets of early modern Europe as an act of the Spirit—an act centered concretely in Scripture. Luther was not alone in this evaluation. The course of the Reformation occurred as men and women read, contemplated, proclaimed and acted upon Scripture. Above all else, the Reformers and their parishioners were immersed in Scripture. The Reformation was an event grounded in reading and exegesis of the Bible, in preaching the word of Scripture and living out its message in the world.

The Reformation Commentary on Scripture (RCS), a new series from InterVarsity Press, attempts to capture this dynamic. A twenty-eight-volume series, edited by leading Reformation historians Timothy George (Beeson Divinity School) and Scott Manetsch (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School), the RCS places in the hands of readers the writings of a wide array of Reformers on Scripture, collecting their comments across the whole canon of the Bible. Many of the quotations contained in the RCS are here made available in English for the first time. With these volumes readers enter the world of the Reformers gathered together around the Scripture, such that contemporary audiences are invited to read, think, discuss, debate and interpret Scripture in concert with the host of men and women who changed the course of history.

The unique nature of this series is not merely the historical interest of Reformation-era commentary, though readers will be introduced to a constellation of figures virtually unknown to most in the English speaking world, and they will also see the diversity of thought represented within the Reformation traditions (even disagreements over the proper rendering of passages!). Rather, above all else, the RCS is about renewal—renewal constituted by contemplation of Scripture within the folds of tradition. Pastors, preachers and teachers will find in these volumes resources drawn from the deep wells of the Reformation that can produce living springs within the church today.

The voices of the Reformation call to us to look at Scripture anew with different eyes, providing fresh insight and tools for hearing Scripture in bold and startling ways. As the Reformers themselves sought to renew the church through the reading and preaching of Scripture—which they did in conscious alliance with the ancient traditions of the church—so the RCS provides an opportunity to read and preach the Scripture with the Reformers, retrieved here for the renewal of the church and the world.