During the last two weeks in November this year leading up to Advent we had a plan to have a public reading of the whole Bible.

What? The whole thing? … Yes the whole of it; all 66 books of the new and old testament.

We will be aimed to have the church at St. Felix open for a long period most days of the two week event, everyone made welcome to come and listen, pray and meditate on The Word. We are called apon volunteers to work short shifts to read from the New International Version of The Bible – each person reading for approximately 15 minutes, until a natural, logical break occured in the text.

It ran from the 15th to the 29th of November from morning till late into the evening (click here to download a timetable), flowing round other church events until we finished with the last chapter of Revelation on the first Sunday of Advent:

29th November is the first Sunday of Advent, that time of preparation for Christmas, a time of waiting and longing. We will begin that time reading the last verses of the Bible: “… Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!”

Janice

Why read The Bible from beginning to end anyway? What do we hope to gain from it? So much of the Bible is interlinked through prophetically, historically and quoted by the authors and people within it. The old testament is so relevant because it shows us the big picture behind the gospels and rest of the new testament.

I was listening to a podcast the other day from Holy Trinity Brompton when Bishop Tom Wright came to do a talk (10th June 2009); he was talking at one point about the Gospels and why it was important to read things in their entirety:

… otherwise we cut up the Bible up into little bite-sized chunks …...... and then what happens is that we never actually get the full impact of the message of The Kingdom.

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If you went to a concert at the Barbican, you wouldn't expect that one week you get the first twenty bars of Beethoven's Fifth symphony, and then you come back the next week for the next twenty bars, then go back ... you know – come on!; this is a symphony, yes you may not be able to remember it all when you get to the end but the whole thing is the whole thing.

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[the Gospels] hook back into the story of ancient Israel. Matthew does it with the genealogy up front. Mark does it with reference to prophesies. Luke does it with reference to all sorts of things and echoes and illusions of scripture, and John does it matchlessly with an evocation of Genesis 1: in the beginning was the Word. They do it very differently but they all do it, they all say the story you are about to read is the climax of a much longer story, this is where it was all going …

We believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God – through it God shows us the love he has for His creation and wants to have a personal relationship with each and every one of us through His only son; Jesus Christ who paid the price for our sins so that we need not be separated from God when we die if we turn from our sin and believe in Him. Sounds incredible? Yes it is, absolutely amazing — and true.

Questions! During a recent test run we found to our amazement things that we had never noticed before; dozens of questions and new observations from just a short half hour reading; we really became exited about The Bible; and that is part of our desire — to get others enthusiastic about reading their Bibles, finding time to explore what an awesome God we have and to glorify his name by proclaiming His Word out loud.