Excerpt taken courtesy of the book: David Helm, Bible Reading One by One (in the future by Faithful Editor).
Many people have found the following two methods or structures to read the Bible very useful, especially to start reading. When they start reading the Bible in pairs, using one of these methods often helps you enter the text and begin to extract its wealth.
- It is a very simple structure.
- With small steps.
- For people who do not feel confident in their ability to start reading the Bible in pairs.
- You can start with this approach (perhaps for a while) and then switch to the COMA method (see below).
- Which is more substantial when you have a little more confidence.
This simple way of reading the Bible was apparently popularized by Ada Lum, an employee of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, who named it a method in reference to the Swedish student group where she saw it being used for the first time. It works like this:
1) Read the passage aloud
2) Then everyone reads the passage for themselves and look for three things:
A lamp: everything that shines in the hallway and catches the eye; it can be something important or something that particularly impresses the reader.
A question mark: anything that is difficult to understand; something the reader would like to be able to ask the author.
An arrow: everything that applies personally to the reader’s life
3) Each person must write at least one item and no more than three in each category. If you are preparing in advance for your double meeting, it is preparation. Each person must arrive at the meeting with at least one lamp, question mark and arrow removed from the passage.
If you don’t prepare beforehand, you will have to give everyone some time to reread the passage and write their lamp, question mark and arrow, you will need to allow between 5 and 10 minutes for this, depending on the duration. of the passage.
4) Everyone shares their lamp(s) and argues
5) Everyone shares their question mark(s) and does their best to extract the answers from the passage (even if it doesn’t matter if you can’t find an answer).
6) Everyone shares their arrows and argues.
7) Pray together for what you have learned
As you gain confidence and become more familiar with the Bible, you can expand the range of things to look for or consider as you read the passage; for example, you can look for the central idea of the passage (using a heart symbol). ; or you can write down the names of people who might benefit if you shared what you learned (using a bubble symbol), so you can talk to these people before the next meeting. It is up to you to decide the variation and expand the basic method.
The great strength of the Swedish method is its simplicity; it’s a very effective way to start reading the Bible together, especially with people who are new to the Bible or who don’t trust their ability to read the Bible themselves.
By gaining more experience reading the Bible, or if you know someone who is already a reasonably steadfast Christian, you will undoubtedly find that you want to move a little further in understanding the passage. Is the COMA method an excellent tool for reading the Bible?, both for its flexibility and because it helps people integrate their personal reading of the Bible into an overview of the Bible, the history of the saving government of Jesus Christ. As a result, this method helps people avoid common mistakes in understanding the Bible. And although it is much more substantial than the Swedish method, the COMA method can still be easily used by people who are not used to reading a biblical text in depth.
The context
Note
message
Implementation
It’s, in fact, a summary of how we read anything. Even when we take a newspaper article, we notice what kind of things we read and how it fits with other things around it (context); we read words, phrases and paragraphs, taking note of key events, people and content (observation); we integrate what we observe in our head and draw a conclusion about what the author is trying to say (message); and reflect on the relevance of the author’s message in our lives (application).
It can be very useful to consciously follow the COMA process when reading the Bible, as it encourages us to ask good questions about the text and to understand it clearly and deeply. When reading together, it is also very useful for directing the conversation. they can do the four steps together and come to conclusions, rather than being surrounded by many different thoughts or random observations.
A double Bible reading meeting using the COMA method would look like this:
1) Read the passage aloud
2) Ask some questions about the context of the text:
3) Ask some questions to observe the text:
4) Ask some questions about SMS
5) Ask some questions about how to apply the text:
6) Pray together for what you have learned.
If you are preparing for meetings in two, these four question groups set the framework for their preparation. Each person prepares to arrive at the meeting with something annotated in each category: context, observation, message and application.
One of the real strengths of the COMA approach to reading the Bible is that it can be easily applied to the many types of literature we find in the Bible: gospels, letters, stories, poetry, prophecy, proverbs, etc. COMA questions to each of the major literary genres found in the Bible, see chapter 10: “Help to read the different genres of the Bible”.