I knew my father, Hugh, was a minister from the beginning of my life. We tried to have family worship on a daily basis and usually succeeded. My father taught us to memorize psalms through our family worship. We had a Sunday School Superintendent who sent each child home with a verse to memorize for the next Sunday and my father realized that the children were easily memorizing psalms; this inspired my Dad to add another verse each evening and in this gradual, cumulative manner we'd memorized over 20 Psalms by the time I left home at seventeen, after graduating from high school. The way my father read the Bible (3 chapters a day and 5 on Sunday) was the way I carried on, after moving in with with my grandparents. I came across various formats for reading through the Bible in a year: for example, portions from the Old Testament, the Psalms, and the New Testament and I tried a number of those different formulas, over the years.

I was interested in different translations. I particularly enjoyed the J.B. Phillips translation of Psalms and eagerly looked forward to his translation of the New Testament. Lloyd and I were also very interested in the Lamsa version of the New Testament, examining the scriptures from the perspective of the Aramaic language.
(Note: Aramaic was the language the Jews spoke when they returned from the seventy year captivity in Babylon. At the time Jesus walked the earth the people of Judea spoke Aramaic and many also spoke Koine Greek, the language imposed upon the conquered world by Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C.; those educated in the Torah also read & wrote Hebrew but it was no longer the common tongue.

I learned from my father that three chapters a day (and five on Sunday) would get me through the whole Bible in a year.

Henrietta Mears observed in her book, What The Bible is All About, that a person can read the whole Bible out loud at pulpit speed in about 70-80 hours and that was a startling concept and I resolved right then to start reading the Bible outloud, reading in half hour segments and noting scripture addresses where I started and ended for the day - this was in the fall of 1985 ...I read more than one single half-hour portion per day, so I'd completed it that fall. My vision was that our church (Rolando UMC, in San Diego near SDSU) would read it outloud as a gift to the community and we did, starting the next Holy Week. We continued to do that every 3 years through 2001.

The Bible was always precious to me because it was my father's textbook - I knew it was the most important book in the world. There is no other book that compares.

I realized I still remembered the Psalms I'd memorized in childhood (1, 8, 11, 16, 23, 24, 27, 51, 100, 121, 139) - and then I'd recognize Psalms I'd memorized as a child but didn't remember that I knew them. Many years later I realized I needed to recite them from time to time, to keep them alive in my memory, so my daughter Lynn asked about how many Psalms I'd memorized - it was about 30. She recommended I recite them on a monthly basis. I did this with additional verses and passages I'd memorized in order to keep those fresh and alive in my memory, too (I will look for Mom's list of what scriptures she recited on which days and share it here, when I find it —Lynn).





Lauralee's church did this Bible Alive Aloud program 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. The first year Lauralee also fasted that week.
(Note: fasting was another area of interest and study for Mom; she knew quite a bit about it and was careful. She did many week-long fasts, sometimes 10-day fasts, and at least one forty-day fast, although that made her husband Lloyd nervous.)

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 of who has signed up for which reading, and providing general oversight. Holy Week (Palm Sunday through Holy Saturday) is a good time to do it but a church could organize it around different dates or seasons to suit their own needs and schedule.

The breakdown of readings is here - it's 13 pages long and can be downloaded and printed to 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 Lynn.





Videos:

September 28 Memorial Service in Poway
          The service runs about an hour and is followed by the slide show, on repeat.

To A Wild Rose December 13, 2016
Silent Night December 12, 2017
Teaching the Weaver's Knot June 4, 2019
O Sacred Head, Now Wounded April 3, 2022


House of Bread is a musical based on the Bible's book of Ruth written by Lynn Maudlin over the course of four years.



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