The majority of our Bible workers have the readers either read the text aloud from their own Bibles, or read silently while it is read aloud by the worker. This is the plan recommended in our standard instruction, and it has much to recommend it.
However, as the outgrowth of my own experience, I have adopted another plan which I have followed for five years. I have the reader give me his entire attention, while I read the text slowly and carefully, making sure that he gets every word. In this way I can submit a proposition, and prove it from the text, without any break in the thought of the reader. As the study proceeds, each text is entered in an inexpensive notebook; and when the reading is finished, all the texts used in the study are set down in order. This notebook I leave with the reader, urging him to go over and study carefully, looking up each text in his own Bible, and checking off each as he reads it.
Nor do I leave the matter there, but am persistent in my "follow-up" of the plan. Persistence is a proper part of the Bible worker's equipment, if it is not allowed to become obnoxious.
Obviously, if a reader is not familiar with his Bible, his attention is distracted by trying to find the text, and he loses the thought. Invariably he will ask you to repeat the chapter, book, and verse; then by the time the text is found, you have to repeat the point you wish him to see in the text. Often, too, he will read farther than you wish, and so get his mind on some other expression than the one you are trying to make plain. All this takes a great deal of time.
To illustrate: Suppose you are giving a study on the second coming of Christ, and the reader turns to the text in Acts 1: 9-11. There are a number of good thoughts in that text,—about angels, about Jesus' talking to His disciples, and so forth. If the reader is asked to read this scripture aloud during the study, he will probably fail to emphasize the thing you wish emphasized, and nine times out of ten you will have to reread the text to bring out the point you are trying to make. I prefer to emphasize the point of the text, and to see that my reader sees it. Then when he reads the text later for himself, he understands it clearly.
I use an inexpensive notebook for each reader, entering the subject and the texts as I proceed. I have tried using a. loose-leaf notebook, writing in the texts before giving the study, noting the main thought in each text, then inserting the page in the reader's notebook, but I find the other plan more effective. Usually I write the texts in during the study, so the reader can, see that I am not omitting any. If there is a diagram with the subject, I draw it on the back of the page, very simply. If there are several texts on one point, I group them with brackets. Once in a while I jot down what the texts are to prove. My readers value these little notebooks. They often read the texts over two or three times before I come to give the next study.
While I do not urge the general adoption of the plan outlined above, I do feel that in my own work I can accomplish the end desired much more quickly and easily by following it.
Washington, D. C.