Next year marks four hundred years since the Authorised Version (King James Version for my North American friends) was published. In the UK, churches are planning to celebrate 2011 as The Year Of The Bible. A major project to support this is called Biblefresh, which seeks to help the church regain confidence in reading the Bible.
That’s a great idea. However, I’ve run into a problem. Last Monday evening, I was at a meeting of representatives from the four churches in this village (not counting the fifth church that thinks it contains the only true Christians), where we discussed how we were going to mark next year’s big anniversary. Some of them had met a few months ago to start thinking and planning. And our difficulty is this: it seems only natural to us to take our celebrations public. However, the Biblefresh focus on renewing the church’s confidence in Bible reading, important as it is, means that an outreach focus isn’t within its purview. You won’t really find much mention of anything like that on their website, except for the odd comment from Elaine Lindridge, a Methodist Evangelism Enabler in the Newcastle District.
So … I’m posting here, there and everywhere in the social media parts of the Internet to see whether other people have ideas. (These include the Facebook pages for BigBible and Biblefresh.) We’d love to be stimulated by creative sparks elsewhere that might inspire our thinking and praying. If you have any ideas, I’d love you to shre them here.
Big Circumstance 
Hi Dave
I’m sorry you feel that Biblefresh has made its vision solely to renew the church’s confidence in Bible reading, but the ‘Experience’ element of the Biblefresh pledge is the one which can be specifically outreach orientated. There are many many ways that churches can host or run ‘experiences’ of the Bible which would interest people and encourage them to look at the Bible for themselves and investigate the claims of Christianity further. In addition as we let the Bible change us, we can in turn impact our world. There are many examples of possible Bible experiences in the Biblefresh Leaders Guide, the Biblefresh Book and a growing number will be added to the website in the coming months.
Best wishes
Biblefresh
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Thanks, that’s really helpful. I have to admit I hadn’t found the http://www.biblefresh.com/resources/experiences/ section of your site. At a quick look, there are one or two possibilities here. I don’t have the Leaders’ Guide or the Book, but this is a start. Thanks again, and sorry if I was unduly negative.
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