A characteristic of scholarship is that it is mostly irrelevant to ordinary life. A journal like this one is just a small endeavour in the run of things. It really just speaks to the intellectual dimension of the Christian life. Of course, ethics may be treated in these pages, which may have more practical effect, but generally, the EJournal is all about belief and knowledge and interpretation. The goal is to go deeper into matters because the deeper the roots go, the more likely it is that any storm can be weathered. Or, to change the metaphor, the better you prepare the ground, the more likely it is that the seed will take root. With society ever more confident in its secular atheism/agnosticism, an intellectual confidence in the Word is important.
Social observation is often just anecdotal rather than scientific, but the neglect of the intellectual dimension of believing in Christ is one of the reasons for the decline in numbers coming into the faith in the UK as regards Christadelphians (we cannot comment on other Abrahamic Biblical Unitarian communities or Christadelphians in the rest of the world). But, this is only one reason. Someone might argue that more important factors are off-putting bad behaviour in the ecclesia or a puritan style of worship. Such points often go hand in hand with the judgment that things are better in this or that church down the road. And so it is that individuals remain uncommitted or choose a Trinitarian church.
The first thing though is whether there is a real conviction of sin in the individual and a recognition of the need for a personal saviour. This ought to lead to repentance and baptism in short order, but knowledge and belief interpose themselves in this sequence because there are many competing churches that offer salvation from sin and death. It is here that the intellect plays its part and why the neglect of the intellectual dimension of faith on the part of Christadelphians has resulted in the loss of souls amongst teenagers and young adults. The problem stems from the materialism of life in the West; it makes older people lazy when it comes to diligently searching out and developing the things of the Word. It is easier to just present ready-made material and/or devotional and exhortational material. The solution does not lie in one conversation or one editorial; human nature being what it is, there is only a struggle. But it really is just a matter of diligent shepherding others in the knowledge of Jesus Christ. The structure that best facilitates this process is not the lecture or the bible class but the small home group where brethren and sisters cooperatively search the Scriptures with their concordances in hand.
No doubt there is bad behaviour in the ecclesial world; no doubt there is Christ-like behaviour in all communities that profess the name of Christ, and it has to be said that there are different styles of worship and association everywhere you look among UK Christadelphians, but the Abrahamic and Biblical Unitarian communities are where the truth as it is in Jesus lies, rather than the Trinitarian churches, and we know this for intellectual reasons.
What is a Bible Student?