Plenty of churchgoers wonder this quietly: if the pastor studies all week and preaches on Sunday, isn’t knowing the Bible mostly the pastor’s job? A good pastor carries real responsibility for how a church handles Scripture, and Dr. Cynthia James puts much of that weight on preachers. But knowing the Bible is your own work. It is a letter addressed to you, and a letter someone else reads for you is a letter you never really got.
Most people who grew up in church are familiar with the Bible. Far fewer know it. The answer to the question lives in that gap.
Isn’t teaching the Bible what the pulpit is for?
Partly. Asked how the church can raise biblical literacy, Dr. James, one of several associate pastors at the Potter’s House, starts with people like herself: “where I like to lay much of the responsibility is at the doorstep of those of us who have the privilege to be in pulpits and on platforms.” Her worry is that preachers who expect an audience hungry for entertainment let the packaging crowd out the substance. A verse gets read, the sermon wanders somewhere interesting, and Scripture becomes a seal of approval. As she puts it, “it legitimizes what we’re doing, but it may not be the core of what we’re doing.”
So what a pastor owes a congregation is a church where the Word sits at the center, where people keep meeting it. Dr. James wants the songs, prayers, drama and dance in a service to build toward the text being preached. “It’s not window dressing. It’s what draws us together. This is our meal and not just a Sunday meal.”
A Sunday meal is good, but nobody lives on one plate a week. A pastor who serves Scripture well is training people to feed themselves.
Lisa Fields names the other half of the problem. Many believers get Scripture from a phone app, one verse a day, which she compares to reading one sentence of a book and guessing what the whole book is about. Dr. James agrees the pulpit can’t fix that alone: “we do need to read more, pick it up more.”
What does it mean to actually know the Bible?
Familiarity breaks down under a few plain questions. Dr. James asks them of any single verse: “If I only know one little bit, I’m just acquainted with one tiny little passage, do I really know that passage?” What was it meant to say? Who was it written to? Does it apply to my situation? The verse alone can’t answer those. You need the surrounding story, and the story needs some sense of where and when it happened.
That takes effort. “It’s not just as though there are pearls that have dropped down from heaven.” Some things lie right on the surface. Most of what Dr. James values came from adding historical background and geography, and once a passage sits in its context, it stops reading like a dead document and starts reading like a living one.
She describes this as what she finds in her own life, admits she has pulled verses out of context herself, and calls herself a lover of the Word rather than a biblical scholar. That detail matters. If someone with a doctorate and decades in the pulpit doesn’t claim scholar status, then the line between people who know the Bible and people who don’t was never ordination. It is staying with the text long enough for it to make sense.
Why would ordinary believers check their teachers?
A scene in Acts speaks to this. Paul preaches in Berea, and Luke writes that the listeners there “were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11, KJV).
This is narrative, so it describes what a group of people did rather than issuing a rule. But Luke praises it. And the teacher the Bereans checked was an apostle. They welcomed Paul eagerly and still opened the Scriptures themselves to see whether he was right. Eager reception and personal searching went together.
Even trained teachers drift from the text. Lisa Fields remembers a seminary professor who warned students that “you could get so lost in studying about the Bible that you neglect the actual Bible,” and she admits to “neglecting the very book that I was studying.” Dr. James adds that commentaries carry the same pull for anyone who preaches. Handing all your Bible reading to someone else is that same drift, one step further removed.
Why start with the text before anyone explains it?
Dr. James keeps a clear order. She reads the passage first, in several translations, and prays through it before she opens a commentary. “I think commentaries are the last resort because I think once we read a commentary, it’s very hard to be imaginative in scripture.” Read someone else’s conclusion first, and it becomes the only thing you can see.
Her example is Rahab, preached for decades as a harlot. Dr. James points to translation notes that flag debate over the word, with innkeeper as a possible reading. Harlot or prostitute remains the majority rendering, and the New Testament itself calls Rahab a harlot (Hebrews 11:31; James 2:25). So the footnote doesn’t overturn the usual reading. What it shows is that a question exists, one many sermons never mention. That is why Dr. James is firm about one tool: “Do not have a Bible without footnotes, please.” The editors put extra information on the page, and skipping it, she says, is “self sabotage.”
She still uses commentaries, sometimes eight, nine or ten at once, and prizes the small insight that suddenly opens a passage. Working through the account in Kings of a prophet’s widow with creditors at her door, she came to sense that this woman stood on equal footing with her husband. Later she heard a scholar describe language in the passage pointing the same way. She offers that as a reading, not a settled fact. The order is what counts: she read, prayed and formed a view, and the experts then confirmed it or, as she says they sometimes do, told her she had wandered too far.
Ruth shows what close reading catches. Naomi tells Ruth that Boaz will tell her what to do (Ruth 3:4). Instead, Ruth wakes him and speaks first: “I am Ruth” (Ruth 3:9), then makes her own request. Dr. James hears a woman stepping off the script to declare who she is. You only notice that if you read the instructions and the scene together, which a single memorized verse never asks you to do.
A sermon works like a very good commentary delivered out loud. It can confirm, correct and enrich what you have read. It does that best when you have already read it.
What if I open it and can’t make sense of it?
This is the strongest reason people hand the job to someone else. They tried, the names were strange, the customs were confusing, and they decided the Bible is for experts. Dr. James knows the feeling. As a girl she read Psalms and Proverbs by flashlight under the blanket, because they were short, and understood little of them.
Her answer uses an escape room, where the clues seem designed to keep you from winning. “Sometimes the Bible’s not written as a tease document to keep us locked out.” When a passage makes no sense to her, “I try to look at it as if God wants to communicate to me.” She prays that her own mishearing and misreading will give way.
That posture changes what confusion means. If the author is hiding things, confusion means you’re shut out. If the author wants to be understood, confusion means you aren’t finished. In her words, “the Bible is meant to be complex. Not hard, but complex.” Something complex can be entered a little at a time. Dr. James admits there are portions she reads but doesn’t yet feel equipped to teach. Owning your Bible reading includes owning the parts still unclear to you.
What changes when you read it as a love letter?
Dr. James tells of a priest guiding her and her husband through the Vatican who, asked why he became a priest, said he had discovered the love letter. She has used the idea ever since. “But this is God’s love letter to us.”
The image explains why the work can’t be outsourced. You might ask a friend to help with a hard sentence in a letter you received. You wouldn’t let that friend read it in your place and send a summary.
It also explains how people keep reading. “Unless you fall in love with something, we’re not gonna stick with it,” she says. So she doesn’t insist on one method. She reads the New Testament straight through, lingers in Samuel and Kings for the stories, enjoys the law and poetry for the sound of the words, and sometimes reads by topic. “It’s like a house with multiple entryways, and everyone doesn’t have to come through the front door, but whatever gets us inside so we can get to the table and eat.” She urges frequency, some system and sensible portions, because “if you consume too much and get inundated too soon, one might just give up.” For people short on time, she suggests the stories of the older books, the four Gospels and Paul’s letters.
The obvious objection is that “love letter” sounds sentimental, as if the Bible only comforts. Dr. James shuts that down herself. She says it isn’t a magic book, and she describes seasons when life knocked her off balance and she met another side of God: the one who wrestled with Jacob, the God whose discipline she felt in her own life. A letter from someone who loves you can still correct you. The hard parts come from the same love.
She also points to Nazareth, where Jesus reads from Isaiah and says, “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears” (Luke 4:21, KJV). In context, Jesus is announcing that Isaiah’s words find their fulfillment in him. Dr. James draws an application: she wants Scripture to come alive as she reads it. That goes beyond what the verse says, and she offers it as application. The distinction behind it holds anyway. Hearing about the Bible secondhand differs from having it speak in your own hearing.
Here is the practical consequence. If you read the passage before Sunday, the sermon changes. You arrive with questions the text raised for you, you notice what the preacher emphasizes and what he skips, and you can do what the Bereans did. Your pastor’s study then adds to yours. “We don’t have to master it. It’s not mastered,” Dr. James says. It comes, as she puts it, “it comes in pieces,” and the pieces you gather yourself are the ones you keep.
Quick answers
Do I need to know Greek or Hebrew?
It helps, but it isn’t a requirement. Dr. James never studied either language, and she notes that accurate translations and study aids are widely available. Not knowing the languages is no reason to stop reading.
Should I read on paper or on an app?
Dr. James uses both. She remembers where a verse sits on the printed page, which helps her memory, and she also recommends Bible software, with one caution: pick a level that won’t bury you in more information than you can use.
Does knowing the Bible help me defend my faith?
Dr. James argues the two need each other. Arguments without deep reading give you “something rigid, something defensible. But it may not be livable.” Deep reading without clear convictions about the core of the faith leaves you without firm walls.