On Sunday morning in an impoverished Chicago neighborhood, a young woman walks to the front of a small congregation, her heels clicking on the shiny wooden floor. It's not uncommon for new church plants to meet in public high schools, but this one is on a block that has seen 41 homicides since 2006. She plants her feet and looks into the faces before her: businessmen, Nigerian immigrants in flowing cotton dresses, mothers holding infants, college students in expensive cardigans sitting next to homeless walk-ins. They have rested their bulletins and are gazing back at her, expectant. She fills her lungs with air and announces: “A reading from the prophet Amos …”
Only it’s not a “reading” at all. Her hands hang empty at her side; there is no podium, no projection, no in-ear prompts. She opens her mouth and recites a lengthy passage from Amos, a monologue memorized word-for-word from the English Standard translation. While sirens scream past outside, she proclaims the text as a messenger, channeling words from God without need of parchment or scroll or iPad app. The people drink in the recitation, wondering what strange and startling sentence will come next, likely much like the original hearers of the hard words of Amos as he raved barefoot in the streets of Bethel three thousand years ago.
While sirens scream past outside, she proclaims the text as a messenger, channeling words from God without need of parchment or scroll or iPad app.
A practice ancient and new
Every Sunday since its inception in 2013, Immanuel Anglican Church has featured a member of the church speaking a memorized text from Scripture during the portion of the liturgy set aside for readings as dictated by the Lectionary. The recitation is a fixture of the service as routine as the singing, homily, confession, or Eucharist. Father Aaron Damiani says the practice has given the community greater continuity with Historic Christianity: “The recitations have re-tethered us to an ancient form of worship: memorizing and speaking Holy Writ in the assembly of the local congregation.”
It has become one way to rediscover the all-but-lost art of oral tradition. On some Sundays it feels as though Chicago's Uptown neighborhood is a mountain wilderness and we are storytellers around a campfire exchanging wild yarns about giants, locusts, and floods; as though Wilson Avenue is the ancient Roman Via Appia and we the bards in a village square, re-telling the tales of old.
There is, of course, a body of devotional literature surrounding the discipline of Scripture memorization as an act of personal piety. But what about memorization for the express purpose of delivery in a worship setting? Why is the practice of performing our childhood "memory verses" abandoned after graduating from Sunday school?
The Jewish heritage is replete with memorization. There are injunctions in Deuteronomy to transmit the Torah orally: “Recite these instructions when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up” (Deut. 6:7). During the Babylonian Exile, physical copies of the Scriptures had been destroyed in the first temple. This meant the only way Jewish scribes could produce new copies of the Word was strictly from memory. During the Second Temple Period (3rd century B.C.E.) the Talmud records a story in which King Ptolemy arrested 72 Jewish elders, placed them in 72 separate cells, and commanded them “Write out for me the Torah of your teacher Moses.” Each of them wrote down the Pentateuch in isolation from one another and, as tradition goes, remarkably, the texts matched.
The early church Father Pachomius the Great required of his monastic communities complete memorization of the Psalms at a minimum, and preferably the entire New Testament for recitation in the monastery and to the public. During the Medieval period, most of the Christian laity was illiterate and relied exclusively upon hearing the Word read or recited aloud for their spiritual nourishment.
Old words new
So why memorize and recite Scripture today? The majority of Christianity’s adherents in the West are literate. There’s a copy of the Bible in every hotel room. Why memorize and recite Scripture in the 21st century when you can simply read it on your smartphone?
First, because reading aloud a passage from your iPhone in a church service makes you about as interesting and credible as the next guy. Which is to say, not at all. A memorized reading conveys enormous commitment on the part of the speaker.
The act of memorization itself has become a novelty: “Our society's reliance on the Internet and instantly-searchable sums of knowledge has eviscerated—literally taken the guts out—of our capacity to remember.” says Elliot Gaiser, a law student at the University of Chicago and a skilled member of the recitation team at Immanuel. A well-presented off-book reading snatches the congregation out of the everyday drone of humdrum digital connectivity and heightens the stakes to something surprising and unusual. Gaiser also points out that the congregation tends to engage with a recitation largely because of the very practical and human thought, “Is he going to make it? Can she remember all of these words correctly?” The possibility that something could go wrong creates an irresistible sense of tension.
But do we want people to feel tense when Scripture is presented? Isn’t that manipulative and dangerous?” Let us take moment to remember: the Bible is raw. It's peppered with genocide, rape, circumcision, bears eating children, throat slitting, sex, and slavery, just like all the other old stories, and the new ones, too (seen any movies lately?). Perhaps a healthy dose of dread and wonder at the sound of Scripture could do us all some good. A sterile, clinical reading fails to support the church’s assertion that God is a consuming fire, that though the stories are old, they have immediacy and bite. It confirms every skeptic’s worst suspicion about Scripture: that the text is wooden and hollow, musty and obsolete. Why should we be surprised that people fall asleep in church when we read aloud from the Bible as though it were as exciting as a phone book?
Aaron Sangha, a lay deacon at Immanuel, has noticed that the memorized performances “invoke a different kind of energy than readings from a page.” As lectors, when we merely read ink on paper, it distances us from events that actually happened, planting us firmly in the safety of reporting from the other side of a canyon, separated by miles of cultural, lingual, and historical disparities. By contrast, memorizing the narrative—action by action—forces us to take an emotional and visual walk through the sequence of events, relying upon sense memory to color our delivery: smelling the blood on the battlefield, feeling the five smooth stones in the brook at the Valley of Elah, seeing the daughters of Israel dancing in the vineyards of Shiloh at the end of Judges.
The Lectionary prescribes passages from genres as broad as the canon itself, providing opportunities to engage participants of every age, gender, and stage of life, often in striking combinations. One Sunday, when the Lectionary called for a clamorous reading from Job 38 ("The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind…"), we staged five men standing on chairs in V-formation like a flock of wild geese, reciting The Almighty's litany of rhetorical questions in thunderous unison.
“This practice resonates with the artistic sensibilities of our city, where actors recite provocative texts on an unadorned stage,” says Fr. Damiani, referencing Chicago’s robust storefront theatre culture. The Windy City is known for mounting Greek tragedies and the works of Shakespeare in grungy, repurposed retail spaces, relying upon the performer’s talent for heightened language rather than fancy sets or lavish production values. A layperson reciting the ancient words of the Bible in a temporarily repurposed public high school is right at home in the city’s theatrical tradition.
Giving it a try
Whether your church is located in an urban center known for performing arts or nestled in the rural plains known for great potlucks, we believe all churches would benefit from the memorization and public recitation of God’s Word. But where can you begin?
1. Start Small. Take a look at the readings for a particular Sunday, and choose the shortest one. Sometimes the Lectionary will prescribe a mere six verses. Identify a reader on your team and ask her to consider memorizing six verses, which is a very manageable task. If you can memorize your address, your phone number, your social security number, the chorus of “Don’t Stop Believing” and more than one stanza of “Amazing Grace,” you can handle six verses, trust me. When the time comes for the off-book reading in the service, have someone close by to offer a quick prompt if the reciter gets stuck. It’s no big deal: this is church, not Broadway. There’s plenty of grace for brain freezes. As Max McLean says, “Sometimes when you hide God’s Word in your heart, you can’t find it!” Nothing makes a temporarily derailed reciter feel more safe and supported than a light prompt and a sea of warm smiles urging him to keep going. Cheer each other on!
2. Divide and Conquer. For longer readings with multiple voices, we’ve found it helpful to divide up roles and have different people speak the parts of various characters in the story. For example, if the text is the feeding of the five thousand, you might have one person say the words of Jesus, another person say all the phrases spoken by the disciples, and a third person provide all of the narrative bits. Sharing the load provides confidence and helps flesh out the story for the congregation better than a single voice trying to represent multiple characters.
3. Get Help. Tap the resources available in your community both inside and outside the church. Hire a professional actor or theatre director in your area to come and teach a Saturday workshop on delivering heightened language off-book. Even a speech teacher from the local high school will do. At Immanuel we’ve occasionally brought in secular actors from renowned theaters o coach our team and help us hone our craft. The Bible is as eloquent and theatrical as any other piece of ancient literature, and there are plenty of people in the world who’ve made a life out of studying and perfecting the stylized recitation of verse and prose. Learn from them!
4. Enlist Tribes. Charge one of your small groups with presenting a reading together. If there are nine people in the group, find a reading with nine verses and assign one verse to each person, to be recited in a daisy chain. Anyone can handle one verse! Often the process of dividing up the text, assigning roles and rehearsing together becomes a fun project that draws people closer together.
We also try to involve the children as much as possible (kids memorize with great ease). One of our favorite reading teams at Immanuel is a pair of 20-something brothers who tag team the prophetic books. Once we had several women of all ages recite verses from Proverbs 31 in sequence. Another Sunday 23 men recited Psalm 136 standing at attention in a long line like some kind of military Greek Chorus. During Advent all of our deacons performed different parts of the “In the beginning was the Word” passage from John 1 while passing an oil lantern between them.
Identify subgroups or tribes in your church and let them take on the challenge together in a way that fits their personality or subculture. Readings performed by families can be especially meaningful.
5. Engage the Space. The liturgical environment is full of physical elements that can aid memory (mnemonic objects, if you will) and help the reading to feel less like a stiff oration and more like a natural incarnation of story completely at home in its surroundings.
Readers should feel free to move between the altar and the cross, to reach out toward one of the burning candles when speaking of fire or light, to kneel down or touch another person. “I’ve been astounded at how profoundly a simple gesture or glance–toward another speaker, the congregation, the altar, the cross—can illuminate levels of meanings I had not realized were there” says Susan Raedeke, also a lay deacon at Immanuel. If you have stairs or levels in your setting, it can be very effective place readers on a higher plane when they are reciting the voice of God, an earthly king, or a messenger angel. Sometimes we’ll have people stand and recite their text from where they are in the congregation, particularly if it’s a passage of protest, an imprecatory Psalm, or the voice of the people.
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Fluorescent bulbs buzz overhead as the Amos recitation at Emmanuel Anglican Church draws to a close. I stare across the room that serves as our worship space: an assembly hall in an underfunded public high school that educates some of the poorest (including homeless) teenagers in all of Chicago. The walls are plastered with motivational urges for the kids to get their diplomas, posters pleading for an end to gun violence, a sprawling student-generated art installation inspired by #blacklivesmatter.
The words of Amos reverberate off the cinder block walls in the utilitarian hall, and I find myself wondering whether all these prophetic verses about plumb lines, prostitutes, exile, judgment, and the oppression of the poor in an unclean land aren’t somehow meant for us right here, right now, in this place. And of course they are. The reciter says the last verse and concludes with the traditional punctuation: “The Word of the Lord.” The congregation thunders back “Thanks be to God.”
Tyler Thompson is a writer and performer living in Chicago, Illinois. He co-wrote the short film Once We Were Slaves, which was awarded Best Original Screenplay at the Madrid International Film Festival. He is also the leader of the Readers Team at Immanuel Anglican Church in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood.
This article was adapted from a post that originally appeared on Mercuryblog.org. Used by permission.
Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
