The discipline of personal biblical reflection has made me a better evangelist and a better teacher of God’s word. This is a key thing I’ve learnt in my second year as a Howie ministry trainee, and I commend its practice to you also! Reflection is a dirty word on university campuses. I’m told personal reflection is ‘good pedagogy’, which is why most university courses include structured reflection tasks that count towards students’ final grade. Even the secondary education students who told me all about this pedagogy business are not above lamenting the “2000 word reflection paper due Monday” or “a semester’s worth of weekly diary entries” that they’ll be staying up all night to fabricate.

Maybe it’s because I’m a Generation Z staff worker, but I really get it.

Reflecting is hard. It takes time and discipline, and (when done genuinely) requires introspection that can uncover uncomfortable realisations about ourselves. And that’s why the practice of personally reflecting on the Bible is so good.

The goodness of personal biblical reflection really sunk in for me while teaching the “Jesus Centred Conversations” (JCC) evangelism training course to students in my faculty. A typical session in the course will start by looking theologically at an aspect of the gospel and then move to practicing how we could ask questions and share this knowledge in conversations with our non-Christians friends. But before moving to the practice component, the course prompts us to first reflect personally, e.g., “What is the significance of Jesus’ life for us?”

As a tool to help with this, we’ve used the structure: “Because… I know/feel/do…” and then practice following it up with a question. An example of this is, “Because Jesus is the perfect image of God, I know with certainty what God is like and I’m not left guessing how I ought to live. What about you, do you have an idea of what God is like?”

By engaging deeply in application of the gospel to ourselves prior to evangelistic conversations (that is, doing the hard work of personal biblical reflection), we’re prepared to wrap gospel truths in a testimony of how it has impacted our lives. I’ve found this to be a powerful way to have evangelistic conversations with others.

Personal biblical reflection has also proved helpful for teaching God’s word. A couple of weeks ago, some secondary education students were organising a gospel opportunity for our faculty’s ‘E-Weeks’ – a two week period of heightened evangelism. They were bringing some non-Christian friends out to lunch and they asked me whether I could come along and talk for 10–15 minutes on “what the resurrection means to me”. Of course, what a great opportunity!

But when I sat down to prepare, I realised the difficulty created by the personalised aspect of the question. In essence, they had forced me to move beyond preparing a biblical explanation to engage in deeper personal biblical reflection. How is it that my life is different because of Jesus’ resurrection (or how should it be)? How does the significance of the resurrection tangibly change how I think, how I feel, and how I act?

Spending time wrestling with these questions in reflection allowed old biblical truths to transform me again, and, I think, bring about a more authentic talk. I was able to share at that lunch that when I’m weighed down by the guilt and shame of my sin, I’m able to look to the resurrection to remind myself of the proof that Jesus has defeated death—and I’m united to Him. Or when I’m tempted to doubt the legitimacy of Jesus’ teachings by an alternative idea or worldview, I can remind myself of Jesus’ historical resurrection that proves He is Lord and validates His teaching as trustworthy and good. Or when I fear my physical death or am dissatisfied with my earthly body, I turn to the sure hope that one day I too will rise glorious and imperishable.

Spending time to slow down and, with paper and pen, reflect on how biblical truths impact my life has been a key learning for me as a Howie, and another reason why I’m thankful to God for the EU’s commitment to holistic ministry training.

– Howie for Secondary Education students –