Unleashing the Word

Max McLean, Warren Bird

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780310323464
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

Modern society is awash in words. An auditory tidal wave cascades from our televisions, radios, media players, and the Internet. Today's distracted worshippers often feel spiritually shortchanged when the Scriptures are spoken without passion and power. This lively and encouraging resource is the collaboration of a gifted Bible narrator and a mentor to church leaders. In it they show how churches can train their own teams of Scripture readers. These laypeople can—with enthusiasm, conviction, and passion—"unleash the Word of God, " and prepare hearts to receive the message. Spoken well, the Word of God opens and penetrates the listener's heart. Simple, straightforward, and culturally relevant, this unique book provides the necessary tools to teach you how to read the Bible aloud, in a way that communicates its life-changing power!

PART ONE

MY
STORY

CHAPTER ONE

HOW I GOT
STARTED READING
SCRIPTURE ALOUD

DURING MY CHILDHOOD, I was quite interested in the idea of God—and a little frightened as well. I grew up in a nominal churchgoing home, but when I was about fourteen, I made a clean break from anything to do with Christianity. During my college years, I even dabbled a bit in Eastern mysticism.

After college, I was attracted to a Christian woman named Sharon, and we began dating. I didn’t really understand her faith, but since I was interested in spending time with her, I would accompany her to church from time to time. She introduced me to some of her friends who were studying the Bible together.

Though I wouldn’t normally have any interest in studying the Bible, for some reason, I felt compelled to attend one of their sessions. They had a guest teacher that evening, and I distinctly remember that the teaching failed to engage me. But I found that I was drawn to the Bible passage being read. It was from Galatians 1. The word Galatians meant nothing to me at the time, but I remember the words of those verses hitting me in a passionate and forceful way. Prior to that night, I had never been confronted by the power and insight of the Bible. Something was changing.

From that moment, I began to see God working in my life, bringing what I would later come to understand as a conviction of my sins. At first I just wanted to run away, but where can you run to get away from God? I began reading the Bible for myself, something my nominal faith tradition had never emphasized, and I ended up reading John’s gospel in one sitting.

As I read the gospel, it was almost as if I could see, feel, and experience it in my mind’s eye. I felt like an eyewitness as Jesus was stepping out of the pages of my Bible. By the time I got to the passion narratives and the crucifixion, I was in tears. When I read about the resurrection, I felt an inexplicable joy overwhelming my entire body.

At that moment, I knew two things. The story of Jesus was true, and my life would never be the same again.

Today, I recognize that time as a work of God’s Holy Spirit, illuminating the words of the Bible, making them come alive, and changing me from the inside out. Since that time, I’ve seen it happen time after time in the lives of countless people. The words of Scripture are powerful and life-changing, breaking through to the hearts of those who are ready to receive it.

DRAWN TO THEATER

Shortly before meeting Sharon, I had developed a desire to act. I had always had a social phobia when it came to being in front of people, a carryover from my childhood. So during college, I had started acting as a way of overcoming that fear, and it had grown into a love for the stage.

I was born in Panama City, Panama, and I first came to America at the age of four, arriving at the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor. My dad served in the military, so we moved quite a bit growing up, living in places all across the continental United States, the Far East, and Europe.

I think I was attracted to the theater because I had a strong desire to express myself, and acting was able to draw that out of me. I enjoyed connecting to my inner emotions and then expressing those emotions in a controlled way in front of others. As an actor, I knew I was still pretty raw and that I would need a lot of work in the various acting disciplines. That included vocal training. My voice was stuck in a limited range, and it was affecting my ability to accurately express my thoughts and feelings. I planned to do some postgraduate work after college at a drama school in London to develop those skills.

My spiritual birth the year after I graduated from college did not derail those plans at all. In fact, after that experience, I was even more energized than before. I was certain that God would use my training in the dramatic arts, even though I wasn’t at all sure how. In 1978, I completed my postgraduate degree in theater and then did some work on the stage in Great Britain, in New York City, and in regional theater.

During this time, Sharon and I got married and started our family (we now have two lovely daughters). Before long, I began to realize that my life as an actor was little more than serving as a hired hand. My job was basically to communicate, as brilliantly as possible, the ideas of other people, regardless of their message. I found it both demanding and unfulfilling.

While I was struggling through this dissatisfaction with my work, God was calling me to experience more of him. He was teaching me that “no one can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24). Eventually, I felt compelled to leave the theater and abandon acting altogether. (This was my personal pathway, but this book will not argue that people need to leave their primary work or be trained in theater in order to read the Bible effectively.)

FIRST READING IN CHURCH

Looking back, I know that my departure from the theater at that time was from the Lord, but it still left a huge void in my life. I didn’t know what I would do. To fill that void, I became much more active in my local church in Chatham, New Jersey, which was part of the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination. My pastor, Paul Bubna, preached the Bible with great conviction. He also invited outstanding guest speakers to preach on a regular basis. Over time, I was exposed to great preaching and Bible teaching. I began to enjoy listening to audio tapes of other preachers on my commute to work. I found myself being moved by the insight from their sermons and the conviction in their voices. The way they connected with the Bible and were able to inspire and exhort others intrigued me. Their personal devotion to the Word of God enabled them to communicate with such power that I found it riveting.

I remember my first one-on-one meeting with Pastor Bubna. It was in the spring of 1980. I was still a fairly new Christian. We had breakfast together, and he asked if I would read the Scripture for the following Sunday during the service. It was 2 Peter 3:10–15.

I wanted to do it well, so I rehearsed it carefully. The process of meditating on the Scripture as I prepared to present it really opened me up to receive what God was saying. The text began to warm my heart. That morning, I was asked to sit at the front of the church with the pastor. What an honor that was! I was nervous but also very excited. As I did the reading, I noticed that the congregation listened with unusual attention.

The feedback after the service was immediate and widespread. Their eyes and the gratitude they expressed were a great encouragement to me. So many people I had never met thanked me profusely for allowing them to receive the Scripture in a new light. It was a life-changing day. Little did I know at the time that the Lord had taken away my theater career so that he could use me in an entirely new way.

In part, the response from the congregation came because my reading was such a stark contrast to what they were used to hearing. Most weeks, the pastor would have the elders pray with him before the service, and then he would ask one of them to read the passage that morning. None of them really had time to reflect on the passage, much less to practice it. These were mature Christians, but few of them had any gift for reading the Scripture aloud to the congregation.

During this time, the Lord gave me another experience that had a profound effect on my life. The church had invited an evangelist to speak at a men’s missionary breakfast at 7:30 on Saturday morning. When my alarm clock went off at 6:30 that morning, I almost turned it off, thinking “I’m not going.” But for some reason, the Spirit just wouldn’t let me off the hook. So I went, dutifully, but without much expectation.

I was in for a big surprise. The speaker was a young evangelist whom I had not heard of. When he started to speak, all my senses lit up. Never before had I heard such dynamic passion and sheer logic combined into a single address. The man’s name was Ravi Zacharias (who wrote the foreword to this book). His talk was the most intense, fast-paced, alarming, and at times humorously engaging speech I’d ever heard. I know I didn’t fully understand what he was saying, but I did sense that I was in the presence of someone who spoke for God at a deep, profound level. Ravi’s confidence, expansiveness, body language, emotion, and voice worked together in a way that communicated something much bigger than any of those parts alone could have done.

Ravi’s example gave me a vision for how a person’s voice and speech could be united behind an idea in a way that I had rarely seen in the theater. What I saw in Ravi was more than a man who spent a lot of time getting his content right. Granted, it takes an amazing amount of work to do that preparation, and it is essential to good communication, but from watching Ravi on that day (and on subsequent occasions), I discovered that good preparation is only the minimum requirement and basic necessity for allowing the Holy Spirit to begin his work. A sermon, talk, or performance reaches a point where it is no longer a speech. It becomes far more dynamic. The audience listens and communes with the speaker as one collective mind, and there is a holy moment of inspiration and conviction that goes beyond logic or emotional impression. Moments like these are divine.

Ravi’s model was of someone not satisfied with simply having good content. He wanted to make sure that the ideas were expressed vigorously so that the audience would feel the full weight of his message. He demonstrated that the voice was the channel or instrument for this to happen. It isn’t enough to simply get the words right. If Ravi’s vocal instrument was not up to the challenge of physically delivering the full expression and weight of the message God had given him, then it would not be complete. It may be communicating truth but not the fullest range of spirit. Jesus tells us that God wants worshipers “in spirit and truth” (John 4:23). That is the goal. And our vocal instrument is one important part of God’s magnificent body that helps us get there.

AN UNEXPECTED BREAK

These experiences encouraged me to begin studying the Bible more closely and eventually led me to enroll in seminary. I chose Alliance Theological Seminary, just north of New York City, where Ravi Zacharias was a professor. I went to seminary with a desire to serve God, but I wasn’t exactly sure how I would do it!

While I was attending seminary, Ravi discovered that I had a theatrical background and he encouraged me to use my drama skills as a ministry. At that time, drama in churches was just starting to get some attention, but it was mostly as a way of illustrating sermons with sketches and short skits. I wasn’t motivated to go in that direction.

Rather, the Lord inspired me to do something different. I began asking, “Why not use the skills and techniques developed from acting and the theater, integrate it into what I have learned from preachers and teachers, and apply all of that into word-for-word dramatic presentations of the Bible?”

I had gone to seminary to serve the Lord, uncertain with whether I was being called to serve in a pastoral ministry. Like most people in seminary, I had a passion to know God and to share God with others. Now I was finding that the act of reading the text was itself a homily to the congregation. Maybe that was my calling?

Shortly after Ravi’s encouragement to use drama in ministry, someone invited me to lead one of our seminary chapels. I gave a little talk and then presented the first two chapters of Mark’s gospel from memory. It was a seventy-three-verse monolog that I prepared, using my skills as an actor, and I wanted people to experience Jesus in a fresh way.

Similar to my first Scripture reading experience at church, the response of the students and faculty was strong. The seminary in those days had a bit of a conformist culture. A few students thought what I was doing in worship was peculiar, but lots of people gave me feedback and it was all compelling. I was encouraged to continue pursuing this unique ministry. I began to memorize the entire book of Mark—almost 15,000 words. It took months of preparation and rehearsal, but I was finally ready.

I reserved a big lecture hall at adjoining Nyack College for four consecutive weekends. I billed it as a dramatic performance of the Bible—“The Gospel according to Mark, as told by Max McLean.” The date was September 1983.

Among the people in the audience on one of those nights were Warren and Michelle Bird. Warren was a new seminary student with something of a journalistic bent. We struck up a friendship that has lasted through the years, eventually leading to articles that he has written about me in Christian magazines (and now to this book that you are reading).

Another member in the audience was Rev. Dahl Seckinger, the Christian and Missionary Alliance district superintendent for the New York metro area. He told me that he and his wife, Joyce, were just stunned by the experience. Dahl proceeded to write every pastor in the district, urging them to invite me to their church. Soon after that performance, I was traveling around to churches, presenting Mark’s gospel dramatically, word for word, with no prop other than a stool.

The first church to put me on an airplane (April 1984) was Ward Presbyterian in Livonia, Michigan. They brought me out to do Mark’s Gospel, which typically ran just under two hours (with an intermission after Mark 9:1), and I found that the readings were consistently well received.

The modest honorariums that came from my performances covered only a small portion of our family expenses, not to mention my seminary tuition. My day job was with the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB), headquartered near our home. I sold advertising for the trade magazine sponsored by the NRB.

My job required me to attend the annual NRB conventions. In 1984, I was invited to give my first Scripture reading at NRB, and I was asked to return for another reading in 1987. That was the year I began seriously going on the road with my presentations.

But things really took off in 1994, when several people, including Norman Plunkett of Peachtree Media, encouraged me to get involved in radio. “If you could do a one-, two- or three-minute Scripture reading, radio stations will pick it up,” Norm advised.

Norm opened the door for me, but I still had to fund it! Two years earlier, I had founded Fellowship for the Performing Arts (FPA), an organization to support the work of expressing faith through the dramatic arts. At the time I was on the road around 150 to 200 nights a year, and it was a tough way to live. But I was motivated to continue fulfilling the vision God had called me to. By starting FPA I could now raise support, put myself on salary, and be more strategic in fulfilling my vision.

One of the first things we did through FPA was to produce the NIV New Testament. That effort has since grown into the Listeners Bible line of products in the English Standard Version (ESV), King James Version (KJV), and New International Version (NIV) translations. My daily radio program, Listen to the Bible, has since grown to almost seven hundred affiliates worldwide. The other thing FPA allowed me to do was to produce Mark’s gospel, and subsequently to expand my performances to the Acts of the Apostles, Genesis, and Philippians in fully produced theatrical settings. I have collaborated with other artists to present John and Revelation as well.

My love for great Christian literature led me to record and release Classics of the Christian Faith—a series of audio recordings that includes The Conversion of Saint Augustine (from Book 8 of his Confessions), Martin Luther’s Here I Stand, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Jonathan Edward’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, George Whitfield’s The Method of Grace, and William Wilberforce’s Real Christianity. The idea of this series is to introduce these extraordinary works to a contemporary audience.

Most recently, I produced a stage adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters that opened Off Broadway in New York City in 2007, and has since moved to Washington, D.C., and Chicago, with other cities yet to come. In 2009 Christianity Today did a feature article about it.¹

Most important, I continu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contents of DVD
• Foreword
• Introduction: Why We Wrote This Book
• PART 1: MY STORY
• PART 2: BUTTERFLIES AND BREATHING
• PART 3: HOW TO TEACH OTHERS
• PART 4: NEXT STEPS
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Annotated Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• About the Publisher