Bible Memory as Sermon Series Companion
Pastors spend a significant part of their work hours preparing sermons to feed the congregation a good meal but how can they make sure the congregation is eating spiritually the rest of the week? Consider using the ideas in Be A Tree to get your congregation eating and digesting God's word throughout the week. Have the congregation pick their own verse or pick one out for them and consider having small groups talk about the sermon and Scripture with the added dimension of having memorized and meditated in community. As we have all experienced sharing Scripture together makes things pop off the page...this happens on steroids when a community has meditated ahead of time. This shared meditative exploration should naturally shift from the very Western temptation to speculate on and abstract God's word and bring it back to the very world of our lives. Instead of speculative abstraction we want to share witness and testimony of our real lives having actually fed and even obsessivly delighted in God's Word.
The possible approaches and variations are endless but consider these directions to get started...
The church should pick a book of the Bible that is planning to preach through and the lead preaching pastor in the weeks before should start to express from the pulpit and various announcement videos that there is an expectation that people will not only listen to the sermons but start working on Be A Tree for the book. It would be best if the church made a couple of verses with different voices in church leadership demonstrating them doing the following:
Take a paper Bible and a yellow highlighter and read chapter one looking thoughtfully for a verse (or maybe a cluster of 2 verses) that are vivid and moving and hopefully give a sense of the main theme of the chapter. There isn’t necessarily a right or wrong answer here on which verse to pick and it will be good for different people to pick different verses. For those with years of familiarity with the Bible they may want to skip a passage that they already know too well especially if they already knew what chapter of the Bible the verse was in without having to use an electronic search tool. You can go ahead keep doing this for the rest of the chapters or some more of the following chapters in the book or you can move on to step 2 and come back to step 1 later.
Download The Bible Memory App and put the verse(s) into the app using the NIV. Feel free to trim off a conjunction that seems clunky when memorizing a verse on its own. We want the language to be as natural in English as possible.
Commit to touching the app at least twice a day and ideally four or more times a day. Put the app in a prominent part of your phone. Use the desktop version and the watch tool. Meditating on Scripture should naturally change your appetite and where you go instinctively for dopamine but you can aid this process by choosing to either cut certain apps, websites, or other forms of media out of your life for a time period or even just making a customized commitment like opening the app before opening Instagram or Youtube.
A Slack, Whatsapp, or Signal group should be opened either for the whole church or better at small group levels (with maybe a drip pan group for people who don’t have a small group) where people will start discussing the verses they memorize.
The leader of the Be A Tree discussion groups will feed instructions to their group every day or two to keep discussion going.
Have the group watch the Bible Project Video for the Genre (gospel, narrative, poetry, epistle, apocalyptic) and discuss including insights it gives into their verse/chapter.
Follow this link to see an example of an exercise to tie the verses to their context and the chapters to each other with the result of a grip on the thematic flow of the book: Chapter Context and Connection Exercise
Have the group do the same for the Bible Project Video for the specific book being studied (also possible other themes like sacrifice that are relevant.
Instruct disciples to sit down with a paper Bible and a different colored (not yellow) highlighter and a pen and mark up two to three passages in the first chapter that shed light on their meditation verse (or vise versa). Discuss. (note: this is
Ask dopamine/delight questions not just speculative questions meant to get Americans what they love doing…abstracting and pontificating. Did anybody have an experience of taking their passage to bed with them or on a walk and meditating? What did the passage do in you? Did this generate any changed behavior in you (obedience)? Did it lead to any opportunities for witness?
Occasionally a small group time could be committed to looking thematically through the book to get a broader sense of the connections and working towards a Biblical theology.
Opportunities for moving into public spaces or intersections with the lost or needy could be arranged where service and witness are anticipated.
Guided practices of moving from dopamine to oxytocin…from delight to connection both with people and with God can be encouraged and then celebrated.
If you congregation doesn't normally bring a Bible with them to church this is a good time to encourage bringing that habit back. They will then be able to flip around the book and take notes on connections that are coming to light.
