Let God Speak for Himself - Leadership journal - ChristianityTodayLibrary.com

The series of books called The Divine Hours introduced many people, unfamiliar with the Anglican prayer "offices" and the Benedictine routine, to the concept of fixed-hour prayer. Author Phyllis Tickle collected prayers from several Christian traditions and paired them with Scriptures in a series of daily readings designed to give free-form pray-ers more structure and an appreciation for older spiritual practices. For decades, Tickle served as religion editor for Publisher's Weekly, keeping track of every book and trend in Christendom. Today she is finding a welcome audience among younger Christians and church leaders who find her witty, wise, and wise-cracking. When our Eric Reed caught up with her, Tickle had just returned to her Tennessee farm, fresh from the stage of a national youth pastors conference. Her newest book is This Is What I Pray Today: Divine Hours Prayers for Children (Dutton, 2007).

Two things happen. First, we become habituated in a good way. That is, we begin to hear those words and take them in, which does something very close to what Eugene Peterson meant by the title of his book, Eat This Book. I'm part of a tradition that reads a lot of Scripture in worship and encourages it in the daily offices. Cumulatively, hearing all this Scripture lays track, just as it did all those years in Sunday school. It's repetitive, but we learn by repetition. As adults we know "The Lord is my Shepherd" because we heard it so often as children, and for that reason, it becomes the first file that downloads when we have distress. (That's why I have become passionate about reading to children over and over.)

Now, a second thing also happens, which is more serious. When you read the Word, it becomes a thing on the page. When you hear it, it can't be a thing because it's not physically present in the same way. It's not visible. Instead it becomes an auditory space and you move into it. It occupies a different psychological space when it's heard.

Yes. It infiltrates. The Word works on us and changes us. You don't see words in your head on some kind of video screen, but almost all of us hear voices, though we don't admit it—.

Reading Scripture the Way Jesus Did—Aloud!

Actors Needed – To serve as Scripture readers for our morning worship services. Audition required. Please send acting resume to persons-name@redeemer.com.

When this ad ran in the bulletin at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, New York, more than one worshiper wondered why the church wanted entertainers to read God's Word. Or why people had to audition.

Six years later, the jury's verdict is long in, and the comments are heavily affirming.

"When we read the Scripture well, people say, 'I look forward to hearing the teaching,'" reports Max McLean, who started the Scripture readers group in 2002 after composing the ad above.

Serious preparation

"Selection is 90 percent of the process," says Max, who does voice work for recordings and for radio. He took the auditions seriously, seeking people who demonstrated both strong skills and a healthy attitude. "I look for giftedness, character, and commitment. It's important that the reader has made a commitment to the church and is prepared to serve the congregation in this way."

He listened for good command of the meaning of the text as well as an emotional connection without being too dramatic. "When we do our work properly, we are pre-preaching," he says, "because we're setting up the emotional or intellectual connection to the text that helps the congregation look forward to how the teaching pastor will address it. That's our service to Redeemer."

The responsibilities for the readers include reading every 6 or 7 weeks for a one-year period, downloading an early draft of the bulletin (typically the text is received by Wednesday), spending at least 30 minutes rehearsing the text, and arriving early to the service. "I ask everyone to read it aloud at least eight times. If they do that, they will know the text well enough that it almost seems memorized," Max says.

More than inflection

When Max reads, he looks for phrasing to determine inflection. "That's the key to meaning," he says. "It helps me find the emotional undertow within the text. That insight connects the passage more viscerally to the congregation. You definitely want people to connect with each thought block in the text, but you also want them to receive a little bit more – an understanding of the author's motivation and intent at that moment."

He also studies the verbs. "People connect with action. Verbs move the story forward," he says. "When the reader explores the verbs within a passage, it is often the key to unlock how to read it."

Scripture presentation as ministry

For reader Catrina Ganey, "It's been a humbling experience. In the beginning, all I thought about was me; I was terrified that I would stumble or mispronounce a word. Then I realized it is about Jesus. My goal became, 'I want them to see Jesus when I read the Word. Were they ushered into his presence?' As the Bible says, 'He must increase and I must decrease.'"

What keeps the weekly reading time from lapsing into a performance? "A good reading invites listeners into the text," says Tom Jennings, director of worship and arts. "A performance draws attention merely to the skill of the artist but not the content of their art. A thoughtful, clear reading brings to life material that has, after all, been passed down in oral form for most of the church's history."

As Catrina says, "We serve a vibrant and exciting God! Why should reading Scripture be any less than vibrant, exciting, and with a powerful sense of truth and understanding?"

—Warren Bird, director of research and intellectual capital for Leadership Network.

—yeah, I hear voices. All of us hear sounds in our heads. And so to hear the Word is to let it infiltrate and occupy that kind of place in our interior.

Oh, she's absolutely right. You need the other voice bringing it in like a gift. Otherwise it loses some of its impact. It becomes familiar in the way your own voice is familiar. Though, interestingly enough, I don't think an audio book of it does the same thing, or the few I have tried don't do it. It's not incarnational enough. What she's saying is that there needs to be a human voice and energy physically present, so that comes in with the words, too. There's something about the canned words, the recorded word, that doesn't do quite the same thing.

It sure does. Heart has to come in as well as mind. There is somewhere in us—it may not be in the cardiac muscle exactly, but somewhere—another way of knowing besides pure intellectuality. It's the difference between knowing Scripture with your mind and knowing it with your heart. There is something about the presence of another human voice in a visible body that speaks to the heart. I'm sick unto death of the Protestant emphasis on intellectuality. Our failure is losing the heart somewhere along the way.

Judaism can teach us so many things, not the least of which is how you engage that Book as a living and holy thing. The Jews start by kissing the Torah as they lift it out of its box. Right from the beginning, they sense that it is a living thing. They sense the vitality in those words. They don't go hacking it to pieces as if they were going to make beef stew out of it. It's a continuous flow and a continuous story.

Yes, because we know how to do exegesis. If we had Midrash, think what we would get. Midrash is investigating a mystery, but exegesis is intellectualizing a bunch of definitions. There's such a vast difference. In Protestant culture, we have made the Bible a commodity that has to be broken down into pieces and packaged—

That's right. Now, before I get too jocular here, I do think that each of us as a hearer is supposed to hear something different. I think each heart has an obligation to be informed as the ears listen and take in what's being read. I don't think uniformity of understanding is in any way desirable. I think that part of the ethos we've built as Protestants is that we have to have only one understanding. We try to understand what it says to us, and then force it to convey that message to everybody who's listening. But it won't, and it shouldn't. To me, trying to force uniformity of understanding of Scripture is something close to heresy itself.

I'm blessed if I know, unless the pressure of the emerging church forces us to begin to have conversations like this one and to find a different way of approaching Scripture. We're all trained in doing it this exegetical way, and our teachers are trained in teaching us to do it this way. So it's not going to be easy and it's not going to be immediate, but we can at least begin to talk to each other about it, inform ourselves of it, and be aware of it as a potential danger in our own individual formation and in the formation of our kids.

The loss of the home altar and of the Bible story time with children truly, truly is something we need to address as Protestants. This loss happened for understandable reasons: you have two working parents and three kids that have been in daycare all day long. Everybody's exhausted. You've shared in supper from the pizza parlor. Even in homes where that pattern has been changed a little bit, there's still not that sitting down and reading the Scripture without commentary. The loss of that has done a lot to stiltify and stultify Scripture for younger folk.

One of the things that younger Christians and emergent leaders are going back to is family altars, reading Scripture aloud, together, as a family.