Can Your Research Really Be for Your Faith Community?

Who your audience is will necessarily drive what it means to create publishable research for them.¹ What you’re producing must change according to who you’re producing it for.²

As an emerging biblical scholar, you’re familiar with standard forums and mechanisms for academic publishing. Depending on who you’re trying to reach, those can be perfectly valid whats to work toward with your research.

Some biblical scholars have contested whether scholarly research as such can happen in the context of faith communities.³ But faith communities aren’t, in principle, any less feasible or worthwhile whos for the what of your research than is the academy (and, indeed, vice versa).

Two reasons for this emerge from the principle of “first who, then what.” These are that

• the who shapes the what but doesn’t alter its essential identity as research, and
• teaching involves its own kind of scholarship, or expertise.

Research Remains Research

A faith community may or may not be your particular who for a particular research project. But a faith community, the academy, or any number of other possible whos can be perfectly valid audiences for your research.

Any given who should shape the what of your research. That’s true whether the who is the academy or a faith community.

But even when your who is a faith community, the what of your research is still research.⁴ Precisely as an emerging biblical scholar, you can publish your research to faith communities. And your doing so doesn’t somehow necessarily mean that your research isn’t well done or your scholarship isn’t scholarly.

It’s an oversimplified example, but the measure of a good mathematician isn’t how studiously he or she avoids presupposing the traditional answer to the question of the sum of 2 + 2. Much less is it how ready the mathematician is to come to a different answer about that sum. Rather, it’s a matter of how well the mathematician follows the process for determining and demonstrating the amount of that sum.

Similarly, research that’s scholarly is research that’s well done. It’s not necessarily research that comes to—or avoids coming to—particular conclusions. A faith community should naturally shape how research gets crafted for its consumption. A different audience would shape that research in a different way. But in principle, there’s no reason why the who for your research couldn’t be your faith community as one of any number of possible audiences you might choose to address.

Teaching Requires Scholarship

That said, it is true that, if your who is a faith community, your audience may have fewer biblical scholars (emerging or otherwise) than if your who is the academy. Instead, you’re likely to have a greater proportion of specialists in other crafts besides biblical studies. Those crafts might be plumbing, air conditioner repair, dentistry, automotive assembly, English, mathematics, or whatever.

That kind of audience creates unique demands on you in publishing your research to them. A specialist academic audience would create its own unique demands also—they’d just be different demands.

In each case, meeting your audience’s expectations is part of the “scholarship of teaching” that you need for that audience, to borrow Ernest Boyer’s phrase. Anybody with a fairly basic grasp of a complex subject can successfully make that topic obtuse. But describing a complex subject properly and making it clear and straightforward to a non-specialist—that’s a high-skill activity.

Conclusion

So, an audience of non-specialists doesn’t make your research not research. Nor does it necessarily reflect anything about its quality. But that who of your audience does drive what it means for your research to be “publishable.”

A lot more could be said about the relationship between biblical scholars and faith communities. But for the present, suffice it to say that recognizing who your research is for is incredibly important. Whether your who falls in any particular group or has any particular characteristics is much less so.

1. Header image provided by Glen Carrie. ↩︎
2. Here, I’m particularly playing off of and adapting the discussion of Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t (affiliate disclosure; New York: HarperBusiness, 2001), 41–64. ↩︎
3. E.g., see Philip R. Davies, Whose Bible Is It Anyway?, 2nd ed. (affiliate disclosure; Sheffield: Sheffield, 2004); Michael V. Fox, “Bible Scholarship and Faith-Based Study: My View,” Society of Biblical Literature Forum, February 2006. ↩︎
4. Image provided by Hannah Busing. ↩︎