Ask who decides what Scripture means here
Reach for it when you are choosing a church, or when a church's reading and yours have parted.
What it asks one question that works with every church: "who decides what Scripture means here, and who can correct that decision?" The appendix adds four habits for any reader. Read the passage around the verse and then its book. Ask who wrote it, to whom and why. Set it beside other passages on the same subject. Ask how the church has read it across the centuries, and treat a reading that stands entirely alone as a warning.
What it prevents two errors at once. One is lifting a verse out and building on it alone. The other is trusting a church because it is firm: "Strong governance does not make a meaning right either, because a strict church can hold a wrong meaning firmly." When your reading and the church's part ways, the page's counsel is that "the answer is neither to drop your reading quietly nor to hold it alone. Take it back to the text, to prayer, and to someone in the church who knows the text well."
It cannot tell you whether the reading is right. "It does not tell you the reading is right."
Where it lives in the Preamble's section on reading Scripture well, and in Findings 13 and 15.
Compare two churches
Reach for it when you are weighing the church you attend against one you are considering, or a family is choosing between the churches the husband and the wife each grew up in.
What it asks that you load one church's answers into the questionnaire as if they were yours and then compare them with a second church. The side-by-side view marks every question as a match, an open point or a difference, with how firmly each church holds it.
What it prevents relying on one church's description of another: "you do not have to rely on how one church describes the other."
It cannot tell you how either congregation lives. "The view compares documents, not congregations."
Where it lives in the questionnaire's bar, "Start from a church's answers," and in the results.
Visit before you decide
Reach for it when the profiles have narrowed your search to a church or two.
What it asks that you take the unscored questions to the congregation itself. "What is the pastor bound to teach, and by what document?" "If the pastor taught something that went against the denomination's teaching, who could correct that, and has anyone ever done so?" "How does the church treat someone who admits a serious failure?" "Does the church teach and practice a close relationship with God, however it describes this?"
What it prevents grading a congregation by its denomination's paper. The documents tell you what a church teaches, and "the pastor you meet may teach something else."
It cannot tell you anything the map has recorded about the congregation. The visiting questions "are for the reader's own use and are not coded for any church." The answer comes from your own visit.
Where it lives in the section "Questions to ask when you visit a church."
One finding in the appendix is worth carrying out of the page. The map sorts 24 of its 26 churches into seven families, and then asks whether churches in the same family hold their people to about the same degree. They do not. "Judgment: knowing a church's family tells you a lot about what it teaches. It tells you much less about how tightly the church holds you to it." Learning what a church teaches and learning what it requires are two readings, and the map keeps them apart.
