There was a time when I would read a passage, then read it again, and still not be able to tell you what I had just read. Not because I didn’t care. I did. It just didn’t stay with me.
So I tried to be more disciplined. I read more, slowed down, listened to teaching. And some of that helped. But a lot of it still felt like I was trying to hold onto something that kept slipping through.
I don’t think I realized it at the time, but I was reading it without really seeing it. Not because something was wrong with me. I just didn’t understand the world it was happening in.
The Bible isn’t abstract. It’s not just a collection of ideas. It happened somewhere. People walked places. Distances mattered. Names meant something. There was a setting to everything I was reading, and I wasn’t really aware of it.
I’m not someone who thinks you need to know Hebrew or live in Israel to understand the Bible. But I do know this: once you start to see it in its place, something changes.
You read a passage you’ve read before, and it’s not new, but it’s also not the same. It holds together.
I’ve watched that happen with students over and over again. They come in reading the Bible, but not always understanding it. And then something shifts. Not because they got smarter. Not because someone explained everything. They just started to see it.
Not all at once. But enough that it began to make sense.
CCBC Jerusalem is built around that. Not as a requirement, and not as a shortcut. Just as a place where the Bible is read in the same world it was lived in.
And even when it does start to make sense, it doesn’t always stay that way.
There are seasons where your faith feels clear, and others where it feels distant.
Matthew Finch
Director, CCBC Jerusalem