UNLEASHING THE WORD
Rediscovering the public reading of Scripture
By Max McLean and Warren Bird. Zondervan. 173 pages
ISBN 978-0-310-29270-8
There is an illustration about a talented professional musician who played the piano in church so nobody noticed him but everyone was able to sing really well. Max Mclean’s book aims for something similar: to equip public readers of Scripture to read the Bible so they do not draw attention to themselves but highlight God’s word. It is a call to unleash the power of the text so that listeners fully engage with God’s word before it is preached.
For those of us who ever have the responsibility to read the Bible aloud to others, this book is a healthy challenge to work out ways we can read the Bible better. I am sure many of us can relate to McLean’s experience of Bible reading being a low point in the service in which he would think, ‘Well, that’s done. Now we get to the good part’. He loved to hear the word preached far more than hearing it read.
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