The Bible in the Life of the Church is an Anglican project with global participation. Around the world groups are exploring how Anglicans actually do read the Bible in practice, to see if there are significant characteristics that demonstrate shared habits, common commitments or family-likenesses among the many different ways in which Anglicans approach the Scriptures.
The project originates in these observations from the Windsor Report of 2004:
The current crisis thus constitutes a call to the whole Anglican Communion to re-evaluate the ways in which we have read, heard, studied and digested scripture. We can no longer be content to drop random texts into arguments, imagining that the point is thereby proved, or indeed to sweep away sections of the New Testament as irrelevant to today's world, imagining that problems are thereby solved. We need mature study, wise and prayerful discussion, and a joint commitment to hearing and obeying God as he speaks in scripture, to discovering more of the Jesus Christ to whom all authority is committed, and to being open to the fresh wind of the Spirit who inspired scripture in the first place. If our present difficulties force us to read and learn together from scripture in new ways, they will not have been without profit.The Bible in the Life of the Church project was born out of these tensions and its purpose is very much in line with the call of the Windsor Report to “re-evaluate the ways in which we have read, heard, studied and digested scripture”; but it seeks to go further. It will not only look back in terms of ‘re-evaluation’ but will also look at how we actually use the Bible now by exploring scripture together and reflecting on the experience.
A mention of scripture today can sometimes seem actually divisive, so aware are we of the bewildering range of available interpretative strategies and results. This is tragic, since, as with the Spirit who inspired scripture, we should expect that the Bible would be a means of unity, not division. In fact, our shared reading of scripture across boundaries of culture, region and tradition ought to be the central feature of our common life, guiding us together into an appropriately rich and diverse unity by leading us forward from entrenched positions into fresh appreciation of the riches of the gospel as articulated in the scriptures
The project begins with some of the texts that bear on what is both a central biblical theme that provides one of the Anglican marks of mission, and a matter of contemporary political ethical controversy: the integrity of creation. This has its own dedicated page: Task 1.
