When God’s word is faithfully taught, God’s voice is truly heard.
Any Christian with the Bible in their hand is thoroughly equipped to be a servant of Jesus Christ. Not only do they have in the Bible the divine Word to speak out to others, they also have God’s means to train them to do this prayerfully and faithfully.
At Cornhill we want to help you not just read carefully as we engage with the Bible, but to speak out to others what God says, faithfully and clearly. And we seek to achieve this by training people in a ministry of expository Bible teaching and preaching. We use the word ‘expository’ to emphasise that our instinct when we speak out what God says is to focus on a particular passage of the Bible. We then want to present what God says through the passage in the order the original human author says it, the way he says it, and according to his purpose in saying it. You might do this speaking out in all kinds of ways: a Sunday sermon, or at a small-group Bible study, or in a talk to the youth group, or when reading the Bible with someone in a coffee shop. All of which means the output we’re interested in at Cornhill is students speaking out to others what they have learned and heard from the Bible.
Every student is assigned to a small ‘Teaching Practice’ group, where they take it in turns to give short Bible talks to one another and then receive feedback, both from their peers and from the staff member who facilitates the group. Everyone gives a talk like this about once every half term. You will work progressively from first steps and short presentations, right through to producing ‘ministry-ready’ full-length talks. This is the best way we’ve discovered to measure how students are growing in their ability to speak out the words of the Bible accurately and persuasively to others.
