The Rev Roddy Hamilton considers how the Word of God can be brought to life.

SCREENS in church. I am generally terrified of them.

They are ugly beasts if they just hang there with nothing on them often sitting so incongruously. So we fill them with words to sing, and key phrases in sermons, perhaps a video, or an image to help a congregation remember the point of being there, and, my biggest fear, and why I’d never read in a church that enables this: we project the bible passage and read along with the reader, awkwardly and unconsciously, checking they read the passage correctly. Why?

Why keep the Word of God as words? When did the Word become a stumbling block rather than a holy moment to listen, inviting ourselves to reimagine and bring to life the story that is being told?

Turn the screens off. Even turn the lights down. Close your eyes. And listen!

It takes a good reader to engage us, someone rehearsed, offering the retelling of the story as if to a group of school children. It isn’t a legal document or a shopping list. It is a story in which we find ourselves.

It is not everyone who wishes to ‘stand up front’ and read from the lectern, so let’s not. Perhaps a more comfortable stool or chair, of which we can sit on the edge, or even told from among the pews might be a better place for the story to be told.

“ It takes a good reader to engage us, someone rehearsed, offering the retelling of “ the story as if to a group of school children.

It is something for us to think about, given we are story-tellers: how do we tell the stories of our faith, moving them from the formality of the lectern to a more engaging place for listening.

It is perhaps the story that brings us closer to the grace of God than any sermon or prayer. The lesson is not the warm-up but God in the raw. Everything else comes from the Word, and how we present and prepare and invite people to be engrossed by it might be the more important question to ask in preparing our worship.

Imagine the story of David and Goliath, Abraham’s promise, Creation. No, really imagine them. They are all vivid stories that are there to capture us and engage our senses. The formality of reading from a lectern, often in a monotone, does no justice to the invitation the word offers to challenge, grip, renew, and question us.

And for those who can, might they be invited to reimagine the story and retell the scripture in their own words? Is the word of God too holy to be envisioned in a new way? Using screens with images does exactly that. Might we more readily do that with our words too and invite people to hear ancient stories with new ears?

There are certainly a number of good resources that offer retellings of bible passages, but we are also called to be creative people, asked to inspire folk with the word of God. Given all we have is the story, might we invest more of our time learning to retell these stories, rewrite them for our own communities in our own language, reimagine them for the people who have come, not to follow every word on a screen, but to fall into the story again, hear it afresh and be brought to life once more in the telling of it.

The Rev Roddy Hamilton is minister at Bearsden: New Kilpatrick.