Article January 26, 2004 Issue

Speaking the Word with transforming power

By Amanda Tucker

Church attendance , it's fair to say, is related to whether people get what they need from services. If they don't they will either leave, or (possibly worse) attend only out of a sense of duty. Signs of this failure to nature are too familiar: a handful of folks dotting the sanctuary, rustling bulletins, agitated shuffling, and even snores. Eugene Peterson, who developed The Message Bible, got the impetus for his first translation of Galatians during an adult Sunday School class that just wasn't getting it. The Word wasn't speaking to them.

"They'd fill up their coffee cups and stir in sugar and cream and look at their cups" as he addressed them, Peterson recounts. But when he started to bring in pieces of Galatians that he had translated into "their idiom," by the end of class the coffee cups "were full of cold coffee and they had forgotten to stir in the sugar and cream."

To many, holy Scripture is the transformative Word of God, given to feed the spiritually hungry, to invigorate a relationship with the Divine, and to promote a greater understanding of existence. How, then, could it ever be dull?

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