"Quiet time"?

From several years ago, excerpts from "Is It Time to Quit ‘Quiet Time’?" (likely behind a paywall). The problem isn't actually quiet, solitary Bible study and meditation on the Scriptures, but how it is approached.

Every semester, devout Christian students would report to me that they read their Bibles every day. They could even recite key verses from memory. They were fluent in Christian theological clichés. Yet despite their constant engagement with the Bible, they were shocked by what we found in Genesis....

I began to realize that their poor grasp of Scripture wasn’t necessarily due to a lack of reading, although that’s also a large problem in the US. ....

But for my students, many of whom read the Bible daily and have chosen to attend a Christian college, their poor grasp on and application of Scripture seems to be due to the way they engage with it. It is a way many American Christians have been reading the Bible for decades: through “daily devotions” or “quiet time.” ....

“As a whole,” Ed Stetzer wrote in 2017, “Americans, including many Christians, hold unbiblical views on hell, sin, salvation, Jesus, humanity, and the Bible itself.” Like many American Christians, my students didn’t seem to understand details required to grasp the whole sweep of Scripture. ....

...[M]y students who do not practice more robust forms of traditional Bible engagement—such as inductive Bible study, yearly Bible reading plans, the lectionary, or lectio divina—have few tools to help situate a daily meditation on a verse such as “What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Rom. 8:31). Such microdosing of Scripture without a grasp of the whole can easily distort our interpretations. Time-tested traditions of long-form Scripture engagement expose us to and familiarize us with the contents of Scripture. .... When my freshmen described their daily quiet times, I began to understand some of the disconnect. They lacked extended communal readings of Scripture where it was safe to interrogate the text and puzzle over its meaning.

For them, Scripture reading was an individual’s responsibility with a necessary outcome: God showing the reader something from the passage that is immediately relevant to his or her life. Many were playing Bible roulette every morning, letting the Scriptures open to any page and asking God to show them what they should learn from the verses. Some of them would read just one verse a day. Others read a passage, or maybe a chapter. ....

Daily devotions have been characteristically solitary and have not usually involved rigorous study of Scripture. Instead, readers often focus on one chapter or even a few verses per session, from which they may expect to receive God’s guidance for their personal life in that moment. Daily devotions typically include a period of prayerful “listening” for God’s voice, which is believed to manifest either in the verses read that session or via direct communication to the mind of the listener.

Though this listening may be expectant, it is essentially passive. It’s often guided by a tacit belief that God’s Word speaks and transforms through sudden insights directed at individual readers, rather than through sustained study and active questioning in community. ....

If Bible literacy is declining, even for those who read devotionally every day, then what is the way forward? Most of the parachurch ministries we talked to reported that they have been considering methods that provide a wider perspective of Scripture. These include ancient Scripture reading rituals that many evangelical churches have rarely practiced (such as lectio divina, the Daily Office from The Book of Common Prayer, and so on). But the practice most mentioned by ministry leaders was the public, or communal, reading of Scripture. .... (more, but likely behind a paywall)

My most recent practice most mornings is reading The Daily Liturgy newsletter provided by Mere Orthodoxy. It includes readings from the Psalms, Old Testament, and New Testament, as well as prayers and meditations on the Scriptures, and it is orthodox in doctrine (i.e., "adhering to the traditional and established Christian faith").

Dru Johnson & Celina Durgin, "Is It Time to Quit ‘Quiet Time’?," Christianity Today, April 2023.