The Bible: Our Library, Our Sanctuary (Sept and Oct)

James Cathcart September 06, 2026 0

 

6 September - 31 October

 

Open the Resource Pack PDF for all the information on the weekly subthemes and the daily prompts and Bible readings which shape our Daily Worship and live streams. 

 

It's not a thing we read, it's a place we go.

 

The Bible is not a book. It's not a thing we read, it's a place we go.. It's a library, and a sanctuary.  It's somewhere we can meet, cry, celebrate, rest, hope, discover, rage and learn to forgive. It's a place to meet our ancestors and our contemporaries, our friends and our enemies, ourselves and our God. This life-giving library is not a static rulebook, but a multi-room archive of human experience. But this archive is a living archive, shaped to help us face real time issues, enabling us to have face to face conversations with God and the community around about us. The Bible is a sanctuary where we can be ourselves, and become evermore ourselves. And it is a sanctuary open to all.

500 years ago in 1526 Tyndale threw open the doors to this sanctuary translating the New Testament from Greek into the everyday English of the hearth, heart and home. In the deeply suspicious and controlling environment of England in the 16th century scipture was tightly mediated and largely in Latin. Tyndale's radical act to bring the Bible into the intimate place of our everyday lives cost him his life as he was martyred for it by an authoritarian government worried about how the establishment would be undermined if people could read the radical words of Jesus in their own language. But before he was captured he released revised editions of the New Testament in exile and translated much of the Old Testament from Hebrew (a language he fell in love with) to English too, which were smuggled back into England. Tyndale, along with many other translators across the world and throughout history bravely worked to make the Bible phenomenally accessible.

Suddenly Christ speaks to you in your mother tongue - not mediated through a priest, through an ancient language, through mysterious art. The Bible becomes not a book, but a place, a place you can get to! Suddenly it is on the map. All at once signposts are up and justice, hope and transformation are in the language of the people. The humble, dedicated and steely Tyndale paid the price of his life for this text but it would not go away even with his death. Less than 100 years later many of these words would form somewhere in the region of 80-90% of the King James Bible. What happened next was a spiritual, political and creative explosion of innovation, one we still feel now 500 years later. The English language would not be the English without William Tyndale. And the world would not be the world without his groundbreaking translation. 

In the 21st century our phones once more throw the doors of the sanctuary open, taking the Bible across borders, into countless languages and finding homes in hearts worldwide. The Bible can be at our fingertips constantly. It's a library open 24/7 and is only ever a few taps away. It is our duty to the world to remind one another that this library is open! That the Bible remains what it has always been... a place for people to come, to find shelter, to meet others, and to encounter God. Let's rediscover what the Bible is and how it changes lives. How do we celebrate individual access to the Bible while going past a solely private experience to uncover the communal culture of sharing it aloud? In a turbulent, uncertain, often stressed and fearful world how can we rediscover the Bible as a sanctuary - a place for us to cry and celebrate, rest and hope, discover and rage and... over time.. learn to forgive and thereby change our lives and the world…

Weekly overview:

  1. A Place to Meet

  2. A Place to Cry 

  3. A Place to Celebrate 

  4. A Place to Rest

  5. A Place to Hope 

  6. A Place to Discover 

  7. A Place to Rage  

  8. A Place to Forgive

Each week of this theme runs Sunday-Saturday and has its own subtheme, which contains daily Bible readings and prompts for thought (see the Resource Pack PDF for more information).