FROM GENESIS TO REVELATION
Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church celebrates Easter week with marathon reading of Bible
THE sun was more than an hour away from peeking over the horizon as congregants trickled into the chapel of Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church on Monday.
Inside, senior pastor Alf Halvorson waited at the pulpit, the lights dimmed around him, and a camera set up to capture his every word.
“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth,” Halvorson read to the few people who had braved the crisp morning. “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
With that, the church launched its sixth annual The Spoken Word event: a reading of the Bible from Genesis to Revelations, culminating on the afternoon of Maundy Thursday to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter.
“In Lent, people are invited to fast from something or take something on,” Halvorson said. “We do that to create room in our minds and our hearts for the great event of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross on Good Friday.”
The four-day immersion functions as a leveler, Halvorson said. Congregants, clergy and members of the community gather to read Scripture and worship together during the holiest week of the year.
Though thousands of years old, the stories told in the Bible often reflect the human condition as we live it today, Halvorson said. Reading and becoming familiar with all the parables, psalms and gospels — often jubilant, terrifying and triumphant — brings one’s feelings and worldviews into the Scripture.
“How can our story — with all its brokenness, wounds, hurts, sins and joys — how can it be taken into that redemptive larger story, unless we read the story?” Halvorson said.
The Spoken Word is not the first reading of its kind, said co-founder and church elder David Thomas, but it’s the first large-scale one in Houston and the first held during Holy Week with the purpose of reflecting on the most important week of the Christian faith. And it all started with a doughnut.
“I was having breakfast at Shipley’s and had a holy nudge,” Thomas said. “What if our congregation could read the Bible continuously,
from cover to cover?”
He and co-creator Terri Higgins brought the idea to then-senior pastor Dave Peterson, who helped him develop a plan for the timing, outreach and duration of The Spoken Word.
With the help of social media and Sunday service announcements, The Spoken Word draws participants across all demographic, age and language barriers, said church elder Ted Meyer, this year’s organizer.
The church’s Spanish-language ministry, Fuente, and the newly affiliated Brazilian congregation often reserve a block or several chunks of time for its members to read in their native language.
“Reading the Bible is a way of getting close to what the message is for us,” Fuente’s associate pastor Mauricio Chacon said. “To hear the reading in our own language is important for us.”
Having the opportunity to have participants read aloud — and listen to — the stories of their faith provides not only an opportunity for them to grow closer to God, Chacon said, but as a way to grow together with
Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church.
“Houston is one of the most diverse cities in the whole country,” Chacon said. “MDPC can’t be white only, and it’s important to have this opportunity to build a more diverse congregation.”
The church’s teacher-in-residence Martha Moore leads a group of high school-age girls from nearby Stratford and Memorial high schools to read for a few hours at a time every year. The students are at an age where going to church tends to fall low on the list of social activities, Moore said. She and co-youth leader Charlotte Crawford built the group three years ago to inspire the young women to encourage each other’s faith.
“It makes it real,” Moore said. “Easter is not just chocolate eggs and fancy dresses, it’s so much more. He has a plan for our lives, and we’re focusing on that on Easter and the culmination of Jesus’s ministry on Earth. He came for the forgiveness of our sins.”
The event has only grown in popularity in the years since its inception. In all, 324 15-minute spots are available to book for the more than 80 hours that it takes to read the entire holy book.
“Word has gotten out in community,” Meyer said. “We get people that are non-members and find us and sign up. Our goal is for other churches to do it. If it took hold it, could be a neat global tradition.”
Despite the negativity in the world, especially cynical news exacerbated by constant exposure to the 24-hour news cycle, Halvorson said, it’s often hard to find a time to center oneself and truly reflect on faith and Jesus’s sacrifice.
Hopefully, he said, spending even 15 minutes reading the Word of God aloud in the days before Easter will help to understand them in a new way.
“No matter what’s going on in our lives, it doesn’t get the last word,” Halvorson said. “There can be hope, and there can be new life.”