Why We Still Read the Bible
Holding onto Scripture without believing it has to be perfect
My husband and I do not belong to the same faith communities.
He attends a local church that brands itself as non-denominational and evangelical, though it is aligned with the Southern Baptist Convention. I belong to a progressive and reconciling congregation within the United Methodist Church.
It hasn’t always been this way.
I was raised United Methodist, but like many, I was drawn into evangelical spaces during my college years. After college, I became involved in a non-denominational evangelical church, where I remained for about 25 years. We were there through a large portion of my children’s formative years.
Over time, something shifted.
As the stronghold that community once had on me began to loosen, I found myself doing something I hadn’t allowed before. I started thinking for myself. I began acknowledging my doubts instead of pushing them aside. What followed was not a sudden change, but a long, slow process of reading, questioning, researching, and reflecting.
Nearly twenty years later, I find myself in a very different place.
Today, I no longer believe the Bible is without error. I don’t believe it is meant to be taken literally. I believe much of it was written for people in very different times and contexts, not directly for us. I believe its contents were shaped and determined by human beings, and that mistranslation further complicates matters.
I also do not hold the same beliefs about who belongs. Unlike the community I was part of for a quarter century, I believe women have equal standing in the church. And I do not believe the Bible provides credible justification for the exclusion of the LGBTQ+ community.
To be fair, much of what I believe now is what I have believed all along, but it was buried so deeply that I could not acknowledge it. Community and belonging can shape us in ways we don’t always recognize, and sometimes more than we care to admit.
I know not everyone will agree with where I’ve landed, and I respect that. But this is the perspective I’ve come to through years of honest questioning.
Yesterday, my husband asked me a question:
“If the Bible has contradictions, is written to other people and not to us, and was written by people who were not eyewitnesses to Jesus many years after he died, why do we even use it in church?”
It’s a fair question. And a good one.
At the time, I did not have a very satisfying answer. I am someone who communicates more clearly when I can write things out, and in the moment, the best I could offer was the story of Jonah and the whale. It is not a story I take literally, but it still holds meaningful lessons.
I think we can learn a lot from the Book of Jonah. It reminds us that we cannot outrun what we need to face, and that growth often comes when we stop resisting, accept responsibility, and learn compassion for others.
So how do I answer my husband’s question after having time to think it through?
We do not use the Bible because we think it is perfect.
We use it because it is a collection of people wrestling with God. It gives us language, stories, and wisdom shaped across generations, cultures, and circumstances very different from our own. Some of it is profound. Some of it reflects the limitations of its time. All of it invites engagement.
For many of us in progressive faith communities, Scripture is not the final word. It is part of an ongoing conversation. Each week, we return to these ancient texts not to suspend our thinking, but to deepen it. We listen, question, interpret, and discern together what still rings true, what needs reexamining, and how it speaks into the world we are living in now.
We do not read the Bible to find certainty in every verse. We read it to stay rooted in a story that is bigger than ourselves, a story of people seeking meaning, justice, mercy, and connection with the divine.
And in that process, we continue the work they began.
So why do we still use the Bible in church?
Because for many of us, faith is not built on certainty or perfection. It is built on engagement.
We do not need the Bible to be flawless in order for it to matter. Its value is not in being beyond question, but in its ability to provoke reflection, challenge assumptions, and shape how we live in the world. It continues to speak, not because every word is universally binding, but because it contains the voices of people who were deeply engaged in the same questions we still wrestle with today.
For me, stepping away from the belief that the Bible must be defended as perfect did not diminish its importance. It changed my relationship to it. It allowed me to approach it with honesty rather than obligation, with curiosity instead of fear.
The Bible still has a place in church, not as the final authority on every question, but as a meaningful part of an ongoing conversation about God, humanity, and how we live together.
For me, that is enough.