Worship Weblog
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Keeping and Talking the Word 7
This morning Tim read an article he wrote entitled “The Power of Words” from the latest issue of Reformed Worship. In it, he shared a scripture-reader’s to-do list. They are worthy principles that we all can apply to public reading of scripture, so I thought they were worth another look.
1. Warm up before you go up.
2. Look into people’s eyes and not over their heads.
3. Slow down. Reading is more like a walk in the park than like the Indy 500.
4. Slow down. Make every body movement a servant of the text.
5. Remember that punctuation marks were made for the reader, not the reader for the punctuation mark.
6. Feel what you are reading as deeply as you can. What the reader does not feel deeply, the hearer will not feel at all.
7. Treat every word like an only child. Enunciate.
8. Treat every sentence like the last bite of a favorite dessert. Be sure to finish!
9. Remember that microphones are “equal opportunity” amplifiers; they magnify the good and the bad.
10. Don’t forget to breath. Words should rise up out of your belly, not be strained through your throat.