But is it practical? (Part 3)

"Come on, now," I recently heard someone protest when they heard about The Books of The Bible, "if we get rid of chapters and verses, don't tell me the pastor's going to stand up and say, 'Everybody open to the place in John where Jesus changes the water into wine.' "

Well, I'm a pastor. And I'd love to have a congregation that was biblically literate enough to be able to do that. (I think many of our people actually could already.) I'd love for them all to be able to say to themselves, "Now John begins with the 'book of signs,' and changing the water into wine was the first sign, so it must be right . . . here." Hey, I'd even settle for them knowing this is recorded somewhere near the beginning of John. What is the goal of our preaching and teaching, if not to train our people in the word of God? How can we be content with such a low level of biblical literacy that we don't expect our people to be able to find things without following the numbers by rote?

But I'll bet things really aren't that bad. Let's do a little experiment. Everybody open to the place in Genesis where Joseph gets sold into slavery by his brothers. I'm not going to give you a chapter and verse reference. Just find the place, based on what you know about the book.

No, really, everybody open to the place in Genesis where Joseph gets sold into slavery by his brothers.

That wasn't so bad, was it? I'll bet it went something like this: "Abraham, too early . . . Jacob, too early . . . hey, here it is." You know your way around the Bible better than a lot of people are giving you credit for. We don't really need to keep using chapters and verses the way we have been in a lot of cases.

But beyond this, how often would it really be so hard to give notice of the sermon passage before the pastor stood up to preach? You pastors do prepare your sermons in advance, don't you? (Please tell me that you do.) Then aren't there a lot of ways besides chapters and verses to let people know what you're going to be preaching about, enough in advance that they can even prepare their own hearts and minds by reading and reflecting on the passage?

In my own church, I send an e-mail newsletter out to the congregation every Thursday. In it I always tell them what passage I'll be preaching from. Often I will provide the text of the whole passage in this e-mail. This newsletter also gets posted on our web site.

And in our bulletin, now that most of the people have their own copies of The Books of The Bible, we list the scripture lesson this way:

John 2:1-12

The Books of The Bible, p. 1743 ("On the third day a wedding took place . . .")

Yes, we still give the reference in "feet and inches," for those who haven't gone metric yet. But I have to tell you, people seem to be finding the lesson a lot faster with the page number and callout phrase than they used to by book, chapter and verse. It all feels pretty practical to me.

Chris Smith

Chris Smith is the pastor of University Baptist Church in East Lansing, MI and author of "The Beauty Behind the Mask: Rediscovering the Books of the Bible" from Clements Publishing.