Did you know that you can read the entire Bible outloud in approximately 75 hours? It's true— in 1985 Lauralee Maudlin
conceived of a program called
Bible Alive Aloud in which members of the congregation signed up to read half-hour portions of
specific verses at a specific time. They started at noon on Palm Sunday, 1986, and read until 6:00 p.m. that day; they continued Monday
through Saturday of Holy Week, starting at 6:30 a.m. and ending each evening at 6:00 p.m. They read 150 half-hour segments, Genesis 1:1
through Revelation 22:21, not including the
Apocrypha.
Lauralee's church did this every three years through 2001. Folks would come early and read before work, some came during their
lunch hours. The church was open to the community for anyone who wanted to listen and there were occasionally as
many as ten people simply listening. Lauralee made a point of being present for the entire reading; this way
she could step in if someone was delayed or didn't show (a rarity!) and everyone had an "audience" appreciating
their labor of love.
This project was always a blessing to the church. It does require that someone will act as the coordinator (ideally a lay-member of of the congregation,
since clergy is usually overloaded with responsibilities) and facilitate the presentation: promoting the project, soliciting readers, keeping track,
and providing oversight. Holy Week (Palm Sunday through Holy Saturday) is a good time to do it but a church could organize it around different dates
and seasons to suit their own needs and schedule.
The breakdown of readings is
here - it can be downloaded and printed, for use in signing people
up for their 30-minute reading. In the years since, Lauralee has been reading the Bible outloud in fifteen-minute segments, keeping notes on
the various versions (the Amplified Bible, since it adds many words, is obviously the major exception to the rule). We invite you to let us know
if and when you present
Bible Alive Aloud in your church or community; you can contact us
here.
When you look at it this way, it's surprising that so many people are so daunted by the thought of reading the
whole Bible in the course of a year. It's a great discipline and feeds our souls.
Blue Letter
Bible has an assortment of
reading plans, in addition being an excellent
free online resource (although they will gladly take donations to offset costs), with many translations, interlinear
concordances, commentaries, and teaching aids, etc.
Observations from Lynn Maudlin:
One of the oddities of the Bible is that you shouldn't try to read it cover-to-cover like any other book, at least
not the first time you read it (my suggestion: start with the gospel of Luke). But, ironically, it's a great way
for serious Christians and Jews: start at Genesis 1 and read it straight through, read it quickly, at least
half an hour or more at a sitting, like you would read a novel. And while reading the law (much of Exodus, most of
Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) it helps to ponder the world in which the Hebrews found themselves and how
God set them apart and made them distinct from the surrounding peoples, by use of the law.
In the last decade or so I've been enjoying
listening to the Bible via the
Word of
Promise Complete Audio Bible which employs a wonderful cast of actors and takes about 98 hours in its entirety (there are some
sound effects and music added, which extends the length). Because of its size it used to download in 17 "parts" but now is
apparently downloaded as a single enormous file, so it's hard to find specific locations within the Bible
unless you have the breakdown by chapters or "parts" This
breakdown by chapters also works for the excellent in-an-entirely-different way
Complete Audio Bible recorded by David Suchet
(yes, the actor who played Hercule Poirot for many years); he does a spectacular job reading the NIV (New International Version); this one runs
about 83 hours.
A great related tool is Dr. Chuck Missler's
Learn the Bible
in 24 Hours, a tongue-in-cheek title to his excellent overview of the Bible; the 66/40 radio program occasionally podcasts
parts of it. And my favorite website:
Blue Letter Bible, with wonderful search
tools and online concordance so you can follow a Hebrew word (or Greek, for the New Testament) through every occurrence in
scripture.
One of my personal favorite ways to soak in God's word is to read the books of
Proverbs
and
Psalms in full each month. This
is easily done; Proverbs has 31 chapters so you read the chapter which corresponds to the day of the month and chapter
31 simply isn't read every month. The book of Psalms has 150 chapters (the Coptic church includes
Psalm
151, as do most Catholic Bibles) so my preferred method is to read the psalm which corresponds to the day of
the month, plus 30, 60, 90, and 120. So on the first, I read Psalm 1, Psalm 31, Psalm 61, Psalm 91, and Psalm 121.
I save Psalm 119 (all 176 verses!) for the 31st of the month.
Why do I care? I grew up with computers as dinner table conversation but the Bible and church were the central core of our home
life but the Bible got cut off at the knees in my early childhood; I'm not sure that all our ministers
actually
believed in Jesus as
Savior: God-incarnate, sacrificed in our place to pay for our sins and make a way for humanity to be
reconciled to a holy, righteous, perfect God. It wasn't until life started to smack me around the head that I realized I didn't have a
saving faith; God graciously showed me the deeper way - and
that opened the Bible to me. Suddenly, reading the Bible wasn't like
eating sawdust, it was
alive and vital. If you don't experience the Bible as alive and vital, I encourage you to pick it up
(I recommend the New American Standard Bible as perhaps the most accurate modern translation
but the best Bible translation is
the one you actually read!) and ask God to open His word to you and open you to His word. That's a prayer He loves to answer!
House of Bread is a musical based on the Bible's book of
Ruth written by Lynn Maudlin over the course of four years.
House of Bread
Blue Letter Bible
Contents Copyright © 2005 - Lynn Maudlin,
all rights reserved.