(Roman Catholic) but O.D. (other denominations – Methodist to Salvationist, Buddhist to atheist). I was responsible for a string of stations from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf. In most there was not even a congregation to call a ‘church’, never mind a building.
In civilian life I had been a Methodist minister working anywhere from the Shetland Islands to the Thames Valley. In that denomination it was only necessary to prepare a few sermons each quarter, which were hawked around a ‘circuit’ of chapels. Mine had mostly been of the ‘text’ type (talking about a single verse) or the ‘topic’ type (talking about a single subject with many verses from all over the Bible). In both I was as guilty as any of taking texts out of context before I realized that chapter and verse numbers were neither inspired nor intended by God and had done immense damage to Scripture, not least by changing the meaning of ‘text’ from a whole book to a single sentence. The Bible had become a compendium of ‘proof-texts’, picked out at will and used to support almost anything a preacher wanted to say.
With a pocketful of sermons based on this questionable technique, I found myself in uniform, facing very different congregations – all male instead of the lifeboat-style gatherings I had been used to: women and children first. My meagre stock of messages soon ran out. Some of them had gone down like a lead balloon, especially in compulsory parade services in England before I was posted overseas.
So here I was in Aden, virtually starting a church from scratch, from the Permanent Staff and temporary National Servicemen of Her Majesty’s youngest armed service. How could I get these men interested in the Christian faith and then committed to it?
Something (I would now say: Someone) prompted me to announce that I would give a series of talks over a few months, which would take us right through the Bible (‘from Generation to Revolution’!).
It was to prove a voyage of discovery for all of us. The Bible became a new book when seen as a whole. To use a well-worn cliché, we had failed to see the wood for the trees. Now God’s plan and purpose were unfolding in a fresh way. The men were getting something big enough to sink their teeth into. The thought of being part of a cosmic rescue was a powerful motivation. The Bible story was seen as both real and relevant.
Of course, my ‘overview’ was at that time quite simple, even naive. I felt like that American tourist who ‘did’ the British Museum in 20 minutes – and could have done it in 10 if he’d had his running shoes! We raced through the centuries, giving some books of the Bible little more than a passing glance.
But the results surpassed my expectations and set the course for the rest of my life and ministry. I had become a ‘Bible teacher’, albeit in embryo. My ambition to share the excitement of knowing the whole Bible became a passion.
When I returned to ‘normal’ church life, I resolved to take my congregation through the whole Bible in a decade (if they put up with me that long). This involved tackling about one ‘chapter’ at every service. This took a lot of time, both in preparation (an hour in the study for every 10 minutes in the pulpit) and delivery (45–50 minutes). The ratio was similar to that of cooking and eating a meal.
The effect of this systematic ‘exposition’ of Scripture confirmed its rightness. A real hunger for God’s Word was revealed. People began to come from far and wide, ‘to recharge their batteries’ as some explained. Soon this traffic was reversed. Tape recordings, first prepared for the sick and housebound, now began to go far and wide, ultimately in hundreds of thousands to 120 countries. No one was more surprised than I.
Leaving Gold Hill in Buckinghamshire for Guildford in Surrey, I found myself sharing in the design and building of the Millmead Centre, which contained an ideal auditorium for continuing this teaching ministry. When it was opened, we decided to associate it with the whole Bible by reading it aloud right through without stopping. It took us 84 hours, from Sunday evening until Thursday morning, each person reading for 15 minutes before passing the Bible on to someone else. We used the ‘Living’ version, the easiest both to read and to listen to, with the heart as well as the mind.
We did not know what to expect, but the event seemed to capture the public imagination. Even the mayor wanted to take part and by sheer coincidence (or providence) found himself reading about a husband who was ‘well known, for he sits in the council chamber with the other civic leaders’. He insisted on taking a copy home for his wife. Another lady dropped in on her way to see her solicitor about the legal termination of her marriage and found herself reading, ‘I hate divorce, says the Lord’. She never went to the lawyer.
An aggregate of 2,000 people attended and bought half a ton of Bibles. Some came for half an hour and were still there hours later, muttering to themselves, ‘Well, maybe just one more book and then I really must go.’
It was the first time many, including our most regular attenders, had ever heard a book of the Bible read straight through. In most churches only a few sentences are read each week and then not always consecutively. What other book would get anyone interested, much less excited, if treated in this way?
So on Sundays we worked through the whole Bible book by book. For the Bible is not one book, but many – in fact, it is a whole library (the word biblia in Latin and Greek is plural: ‘books’). And not just many books, but many kinds of books – history, law, letters, songs, etc. It became necessary, when we had finished studying one book, and were starting on another, to begin with a special introduction covering very basic questions: What kind of book is this? When was it written? Who wrote it? Who was it written for? Above all, why was it written? The answer to that one provided the ‘key’ to unlock its message. Nothing in that book could be fully understood unless seen as part of the whole. The context of every ‘text’ was not just the paragraph or the section but fundamentally the whole book itself.
By now, I was becoming more widely known as a Bible teacher and was invited to colleges, conferences and conventions – at first in this country, but increasingly overseas, where tapes had opened doors and prepared the way. I enjoy meeting new people and seeing new places, but the novelty of sitting in a jumbo jet wears off in 10 minutes!
Everywhere I went I found the same eager desire to know God’s Word. I praised God for the invention of recording cassettes which, unlike video systems, are standardized the world over. They were helping to plug a real hole in so many places. There is so much successful evangelism but so little teaching ministry to stabilize, develop and mature converts.
I might have continued along these lines until the end of my active ministry, but the Lord had another surprise for me, which was the last link in the chain that led to the publication of these volumes.
In the early 1990s, Bernard Thompson, a friend pastoring a church in Wallingford, near Oxford, asked me to speak at a short series of united meetings with the aim of increasing interest in and knowledge of the Bible – an objective guaranteed to hook me!
I said I would come once a month and speak for three hours about one book in the Bible (with a coffee break in the middle!). In return, I asked those attending to read that book right through before and after my visit. During the following weeks preachers were to base their sermons and house groups their discussions on the same book. All this would hopefully mean familiarity at least with that one book.
My purpose was two-fold. On the one hand, to get people so interested in that book that they could hardly wait to read it. On the other hand, to give them enough insight and information so that when they did read it they would be excited by their ability to understand it. To help with both, I used pictures, charts, maps and models.
This approach really caught on. After just four months I was pressed to book dates for the next five years, to cover all 66 books! I laughingly declined, saying I might be in heaven long before then (in fact, I have rarely booked
