Blog
“Long Readings in the Assembly”
Categories: M. W. Bassford, Meditations
In many churches, it’s been the custom since time out of mind to have one of the young men read a two- or three-verse passage that introduces the sermon topic. Less commonly, the preacher will get up, read a long context (the Sermon on the Mount) or even a whole book of the Bible (Ephesians), offer an invitation, and sit back down.
Recently, there’s been some discussion online about the practice. Is a prolonged Scripture reading beneficial to the church when any of us could pull up the same book of the Bible on our phones and listen to it by ourselves? I think the answer is yes.
Reading long contexts or even books is particularly important because it gets us out of our verse-by-verse mentality. As I am fond of observing, the Bible was not originally formatted with chapter and verse notation. The former was added during the medieval era by an archbishop of Canterbury named Stephen Langton; the latter is the contribution of Renaissance printer Robert Estienne. Certainly, Paul’s letter to the Ephesians did not arrive in Ephesus subdivided into six chapters and 155 verses!
Though an innovation, the formatting of our Bibles has a powerful grip on our understanding. We read the Bible differently than any other written work. We don’t go through books or online articles parsing the meaning of each phrase and sentence. Instead, we figure out the overall point and move on. The Bible, by contrast, nearly always gets put under the microscope.
This is not to say that verse-by-verse analysis of the Bible is problematic, but it is not the only, or even the most obvious, way to understand the text. Indeed, it is not the way the text was originally received. When a church received a letter from Paul, it read the whole letter out loud, beginning to end, in an assembly. No, the church wasn’t going to get every nuance in the text from that one reading (though there may have been a certain amount of, “Hey, Herodion, go back and read that part again!”), but it was going to get the point that Paul and the Holy Spirit intended it to get.
I suspect that when Christians are resistant to long readings, it’s because they’re trying to import their individual-tree perspective to a whole-forest exercise. The first time I ever tried listening to the Bible on CD (I know; I’m old), I felt like I was trying to drink out of a fire hose. I was trying to place more importance on each detail than the mode of transmission allowed.
The solution to the problem, though, isn’t always to slow down and take in all the details. Sometimes, it’s to speed up so that we can’t. I think a daily Bible reading is a great way to speed things up (my usual plan takes me through 3-4 chapters a day), but so is public, out-loud reading.
I doubt that more than a tiny percentage of Christians habitually listens to audio recordings of the Bible. Those that do probably have developed the knack of zooming out, but that’s a knack that the rest of us need to learn. When we listen to public reading, we’re learning not only the message of the gospel or epistle, but a different way of understanding that message. We’re coming at truth from a different direction, and that’s an exercise that always will be valuable.
