A Student Bible Study Group

Abstract

IN THE LAST few years there has certainly been a marked increase in the study of the Bible among groups of students everywhere throughout the world that the influence of the World Student Christian Federation can be said to have reached. Many campuses here in America are seeking to give a more prominent place to the study of the Bible in their religious activities. As a student who spent her junior year of college abroad and her senior year on the campus of Smith College, I am able to tell you a little about the study of the Bible among students that I knew abroad and about one repercussion of this world movement in an American student group. If I should take you with me to four places in which I had an opportunity of studying the Bible with students in foreign countries I think you would understand quite clearly the origins and purposes of our little group at Smith. I shall begin therefore by taking you to Goldern, Switzerland, where the World's Student Christian Federation Conference of 1938 is in session. Resting on chairs and on the grass, in an informal circle, we are studying the Bible in one of the most beautiful environments that I have ever known, the side of a hill overlooking a deep Alpine Valley and facing the snowy peaks above the Rosenlaui glacier. Our leader is a French theologian who has since felt it his duty to take up arms for his country. He is carefully going over each verse of the passage in John which we are studying, helping us to understand a little of the background known generally only to the true scholar and at the same time drawing us into a discussion of the deeper meanings of the lines. There are fifteen or twenty members of this group, among them a New Zealander studying at the Sorbonne, a young teacher at a mission school in Transjordan, a French boy and girl from Strassburg, an English pastor, an Australian student and a Latvian. We are all studying in French and, despite occasional passionate outbursts into English when the difficulties of the French tongue cramp too much the expression of our convictions (if we are not French), we manage pretty well to make ourselves understood. To many of us who have not been to a World Student Christian Federation Conference before, never has the Bible seemed so worth careful study and so provocative of thought. We are discovering the common bond of Christian truth and fellowship. Our scene changes to Paris where we are joining a group of French students. They are assembled for their weekly meeting in a second floor apartment of the little Rue Jean de Beauvas just behind the Sorbonne. A raucously gay crowd they are, indeed, all milling about in the small hallway so that they can shout Bonjours to late arrivals and compare news of the week's events, while their President and Presidente, shouting loudest of all, try to corral them into little groups of ten to fifteen for study. Withdrawing into separate rooms, each group after a brief prayer plunges into an hour and a half's study of this week's passage in Acts. Most everyone has brought with him a printed list of questions prepared ahead of time by the leaders. He has studied the passage and can enter readily into the discussion. Over the pages of our common source-book the numerous foreign students grow to understand and to feel themselves a part of the French group. After the meeting is over all the students come together to sing without aid of a piano hymns from the Cantate Domine of the Federation, to reread the passagestudied, and for prayer. The meaning for us of this group you would