West Baptist Church

What’s your favourite food?

Imagine biting into it, chewing it luxuriously, savouring the taste… mmm…

That’s what we did with Acts 3:1-10 on Sunday morning, in a version of the ancient Christian practice of lectio divina, ‘holy reading’, and it’s something you can do on your own, any day of the week.  Start by imagining broccoli or ice cream (two genuine answers we got to the opening question from kids at West on Sunday), then open a Bible.

We started on Sunday morning, the first day of our annual focus on Prayer and Self-Denial for tranzsend, by asking the Holy Spirit to speak to us through our group feast.  Then we bit off a mouthful of Scripture, reading and hearing the text in a couple of different translations and exploring the groovy Picture Bible comic version of the story of Peter and John meeting a disabled beggar.

We then chewed our mouthful, asking questions about what we read, and what we didn’t read, in the text, and looking at the story from different points of view.

Next we savoured the taste, asking ourselves and each other what God might be saying to us in this story, and then we let the text send us into worship through music, as we responded to what we had read.

If you’re interested in exploring this kind of Bible reading, the practice of lectio divina, you might like to follow these links to some resources:

• a cute, 5-minute video introduction to lectio divina by a hip priest in New York
• Wikipedia’s short intro to lectio divina
• a short intro from a kiwi site with lots of other spirituality resources
• extra for experts from a Benedictine site
• a review of Eugene Peterson’s Eat This Book whose title I stole for the title of this post – he’s the guy who did The Message translation.  I haven’t read the book, actually, but it’s on my reading list and has a chapter on lectio divina.
• the Amazon page for Eat This Book; click on ‘look inside’ to, well, look inside the book
• and the Amazon page for The Picture Bible (click the link above in the fourth paragraph to see the whole thing online at google books).

This coming Sunday we’ll be looking at Acts 8:26-39.  We won’t be eating that text together like we did last week, so feel free to do some chewing of it yourself before you come.  It’ll be a great one to do with kids again, if you have any handy!

Tags:   7 day faith · a tale of two texts · Bible · Books · Holy Spirit · Kids · lectio divina · listening · Sermons · SpiritualityNo Comments