Lifeway Leadership Podcast Network.

Good day.I’m Pete Hughes.Welcome to The One Thing, a podcast designed to give you one solid, practical tip for gospel.Centred ministry every week.The one thing’s brought to you by.Reach Australia we would.Love to see thousands of healthy, evangelistic and multiplying.Churches all over our country.Deep in the word is one.

Of the great mantras of reach Australia, we.We need to be reading the word to go deep into the word.I reckon.One of the big mistakes is that we have is that God, we, we, we think in our churches God doesn’t start speaking in the.Church till the preacher stands up and preaches.

Now that’s actually a terrible heresy, which we.Won’t go into the details of but God speaks through his word, the Bible, and when he when the Bible is.Read.That is when God speaks.Now today, we’ve got Simon.Camilleri, who’s passionate about.Helping.People read the Bible.

Well, in church.Welcome, Simon.Hi, great to be here.Mate, let let me just ask you, you obviously read the Bible, not just publicly, but.Privately as well.What’s what’s delighted you in?Reading the Bible lately.Recently it’s I wouldn’t say delighted, I’d say more crushed.

It’s been I read the and studied in my Bible study the story of the the woman at the well in John’s Gospel and, and just seeing her just her passion for sharing the gospel, passion for talking about Jesus.

That was just organic and she just ran off and told everyone just made me reflect on why I’m not like that myself, why I’m not just running down the street telling people.And so it’s that’s been weighing on me and just delighting me and inspiring me to to be more bold and to love, you know, her, her evangelism wasn’t born out of any technique or anything like that.

It was born out of her love and her experience and her excitement for meeting the Messiah.And so yeah, that’s been, that’s been delighting me at the moment.I I love that moment when she goes back to the village.She goes.I found a man who’s told me everything I’ve ever done.

And you can imagine the women the other women don’t.Yeah, we know.Yeah.That’s right.And she goes, I don’t care.I met Jesus.This is so cool.I’m just, I just want you to meet Jesus.It’s it’s I love that story.It’s a great, great story.So, yeah.But you’re right.It is a challenge.For the rest of.Us and yeah, thank you for challenging me.

So yeah, anyway, we will.We’re going to talk more about public Bible reading, but for now, you’ve pressed play on another episode of the.One thing what makes.A good Bible reading.Today’s podcast is brought to you by EMU Music’s Hymn Book app.

Leading your congregation to sing well helps build healthy Sunday gatherings.Equip your musicians to lead well with the Hymn book training resource new from EMU Music Head to Hymn Book dot app and now back to the podcast.Now, Simon, why?

Why is?Public Bible reading so.Important to you personally?I think I’ve got a natural I I love theatre and I love the spoken word and so I’ve got those natural sort of bent to enjoying things being read well, especially publicly.

Because you’re background, you’re an active, I am.I studied theatre at university and, and have run a, a theatre company called the Backyard Bard for 20 years or so.And so I’ve done a lot of theatre.

But I, I hope that my passion for public Barber reading is actually born out of the fact that it’s actually important to God and, and it’s one of those areas of the body of Christ that I feel is under undervalued maybe or under resourced.

And I’m passionate about getting, you know, getting the church resourced and excited about it.I think God’s been banging on about public Bible reading throughout the whole Bible.As I researched this topic and and looked at the sort of the story of public Bible reading, you get that right from the beginning, right back in Deuteronomy, Moses reads out the law and I love in Deuteronomy 31 it talks about how Moses commands that.

You shall read the law.This is from verse 11.You shall read this law before them in their hearing.Assemble the people, men, women, children, and foreigners residing in your home so that they can listen and learn to fear the Lord your God and follow carefully all the words of His law.

Their children who do not know this law must hear it and learn to fear the Lord your God.And, and you see in Old Testament history how when the ministry of public Bible reading is neglected, that’s when the people of God go off the track.

There’s a devastating story in Two Kings 22 where King Josiah discovers the Scriptures sort of in a, a dusty, you know, in his attic sort of thing.And he brings it out and it’s read to him and he tears his clothes and realises how much the, the land has fallen into idolatry and how far he’s gone from God’s ways.

And and so he assembles everyone and reads the law to them and reads the covenants to them and and ultimately the the big sort of go to verse is it for for us in the New as New Testament Christians is one Timothy in chapter 4 at the beginning of one chapter, the verse first verse, it says the spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandoned the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons.

So the the temptation or the danger of falling away and falling under false teaching is always present for the church and the solution he Paul instructs Timothy in verse 13.

He says, until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of scripture, to preaching and to teaching.And I think most churches are devoted to preaching and to teaching and they value it.

And they many, you know, most churches do have the public reading of Scripture in some form, but I don’t know if they would say that they are devoted to it in and value it as as much of A ministry as much as preaching and teaching.

And so, yeah.So my my passion is to elevate it in the in the church.So what?What do you think?Churches are doing wrong.Is it just that they’re?Now I’m I’m asking.You for your opinion at this.Point in time, so.Just to be clear on that, but what do you?

Reckon is it?Is it they’re just not doing it enough?There’s.Just not a priority.It’s just sort of a thing that’s tacked on.What?What?What are they?Doing wrong I As I go around and I talk to different churches, I hear lots of different things.So I, I ran a four hour workshop for a church on public Bible reading not too long ago and they were passionate about learning and everything like that.

And it was fantastic.And I said, oh, are people on your Bible reading roster here at the workshop?And they go, oh, we don’t have a Barber reading roster.We don’t do public Barber reading during the church service.I was like staggered and you know, they sort of maybe do the Bible, a bit of a Bible reading during the sermon or here and there.

And and then you’ve got other churches where it’s very much it’s staple.It’s part of the tradition of what we do in a church service.But then it just becomes part of the tradition and it just becomes this thing that we tick the box and we and we do and it sort of just flows over people and it gets forgotten.

And I also have experience in my own sort of circles in evangelical circles, the, that we so value preaching and teaching that we, we sometimes go, well, we want to make sure the preaching and teaching is biblical.