Reading “these words of mine”

Reading “these words of mine”

This interview is part of a series. We took our theme, “House on the Rock”, and spoke to three different people about listening and hearing the Word, for it is with hearing that Jesus starts this parable: “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice…” (Matthew 7:24a)

 

Michael McDonald is the Chief Global Focus & Strategic Relationships Officer at the Bible Project, a nonprofit animation studio, whose mission is to help people experience the Bible as a unified story that leads to Jesus.

 

On your Website, there is a sentence that caught my attention: “Ultimately, we want to change how people read and use the Bible.”- This is quite a strong statement – how do you see this necessary change?

 

When you tell most people, hey, do you understand when you read the Bible, do you have any questions? I’ve never met anybody who says, “Oh yeah, I got that all covered, everything makes sense.” Especially when the Bible is not just one book, it is a collection of books from different authors, written at different times, for different people; there is so much context in every single one in these pages. For me, a white male in Portland, Oregon, who is opening up this book that was written to, most likely a Middle-Eastern culture, and you have Hebraic narrative, and all the stuff that I don’t understand and know. Am picking up this English translation and just hoping to read it like a newspaper and understand it? That is just not the way that it is written, and unfortunately for the first 10 years of my walk with Jesus, that is the way I read it.

 

What we are trying to do at the Bible Project is just to help you understand how to actually read the Bible in the way that it was intended to be read, and that means that you have to understand narrative, you have to understand poetry, story-telling. You’ve got the Psalms, Proverbs, Gospel, Prophecy, Revelation… And you can’t approach all of those the same way, because they are written with a different intent.

 

I feel your approach seems this double move towards trying to read the Bible as it was meant to be listened to/read initially, and yet also to contextualise in the fact we are modern people today, who use technology, visuals, etc.

 

You know, we are the Bible Project, not the Theology Project or the Culture Project, or any of those things. So we definitely do believe that the second part is really the work of the Church, work of communities, work of families. Because my culture here in Portland is very different to your culture in Germany…And it is very different from my friends in Tunisia and South Africa. So how this weighs out in each of our spaces and cultures and contexts, that is actually quite a bit different. So for us, we want to help people read the Bible and understand how to read it from the context that everything was written. And then I think that is really the effort of the community and the church to go: OK, what does this look like in my day-to-day life. What does it look like for me to love my neighbour better, for me to honour my teacher or my parents; whatever those things look like in your culture, you are going to have to work that through from the Scriptures.

 

You mentioned inter-cultural exchange. Do you try and incorporate this when you are trying to build content? Because we always build content from a context.

 

Yes, we do. Our team is diverse, so that brings in some diversity. We also do our videos in 56 other languages, and all of those have local teams. I have a team in Germany, and the German Bible Project videos are made by Germans, inside Germany, reanimating, rewriting the scripts to contextually make sense for that specific people, and they have language advisers. We are not making videos for our Swahili speaking friends here in Portland. That is happening in South Africa.

 

Even our scholar team comes from all different backgrounds, we have Catholic scholars that are on our language adviser team, Protestant scholars, we have lots of different folks that are speaking in to create a rounded – at least culturally – approach.

 

The West is a busy society, it is noisy, we don’t read as much. The Bible Project unpacks a whole 40-chapter book into a 5 min video. How do you balance making visual and short-ish content with preserving meaning and depth? Do you struggle with this, do you think about this?

 

Yes, we do. I’ll tell you how it works personally for me. When I watch one of those 5 or 8 min overview videos, it isn’t a substitute for reading. It actually does the opposite: it makes me want to read. Because I’m going like, “wait a minute, it says that in there? I don’t remember that,” and then I want to open it up and read. And it is the same thing with the theme videos, when we are linking these hyperlinks from Genesis all the way to Revelation, and I am just like, “man, I had never unlocked that when I read through the Bible before.” And it causes me to want to dive deeper back into reading.

 

I think we are pretty sensitive that we are not trying to replace Scripture, but we are really trying to help people understand it so they get excited about reading it. Because one of the barriers to reading it is, it’s hard to understand. It just is. Somethings seem black and white and easy, and somethings are really difficult, and weird and strange.

 

Do you get any sort of feedback from your followers and viewers about how what you are doing has helped them to read the Bible more, or understand more?

 

Yeah, we get hundreds of emails a day. It is incredible the reach of folks from all over the world. Everything from 10-year-olds writing and going like, “Oh my gosh, I am so excited about reading the Bible after watching your videos”, to 85-year-olds who say, “I’ve read through the Bible, every year since I was 20, and I had never understood some of these things.”

 

Even from non-Jesus people that are like, “I had questions about God, I went onto YouTube, one of your videos popped up. I’ve heard about Christianity or I’ve heard about Jesus in my context,” a Muslim or even Hindu context, and then they start consuming our videos because they are answering questions for them, and then they start reading the Bible because they are like, “does it really say that, I’ve got to check it.” And they send us emails about how they are reading the Bible every single day and learning about who Jesus is, which is our hope – that people understand that it is a unified story that leads to Jesus, and we try and do that with every single one of our content pieces that we put out there.

 

How about you personally, how has this journey with the Bible Project impacted you?

 

I have been on Staff for 5 years. I’ve been around it since the beginning, Jon and Tim were friends of mine since back in the day. And I was traveling around doing global work, but also bringing material into these countries that I was going to, Iraq, Afghanistan or Uganda, because when I was talking with folks on the ground they would say, we just don’t have good biblical teaching or content, or we don’t have books, or Internet is really slow. So I would bring these SD cards and give them material and watch them say, this is going to revolutionize our entire church!

 

So when Jon and Tim approached me about coming and working here, 5 years ago, that was an easy yes, just because I had seen the impact in my friend’s lives. And in my own life, I definitely felt I was almost in a post-Bible Christianity. I was a pastor, I taught the Bible, I would read it when I needed to teach, but I wasn’t really engaging it outside of that. That is the honest truth… And the Bible Project really helped ignite a new passion for the Scriptures and for reading and for stuff that I didn’t really learn going to seminary classes and everything else, you know? It’s been profound in my own life for sure.

 

If I have a question, I go to Tim and ask, Tim, talk to me about this thing in Daniel…and his response is, “let’s learn this together”. Which is so different to, I’ve got all the answers and I’m going to dump it on you. It’s more like, yes, let’s open this up and learn this together, because I’m going to learn something. He’s learning every time, he’s like, Mike, I’ve just scratched the surface, I’m at 1%, I feel this is just going to be a life-long journey.

 

Coming back to the House on the Rock Parable, what is your personal take on this parable, where is the punch for you?

 

For me it is the foundation that I am going to be building my life and my community on. It’s the teachings of Jesus, the narrative of God rescuing humanity, this whole thing. For my wife and I, as we are talking about what we are doing with our finances, it is coming down to the foundation – what are we building this on? If it’s around what friends are we going to engage with, how are we going to serve, the needs of our neighbours. All of that, we filter through the foundation of what are we building it on. For me that is the parable, if you are going to build it on something, build it on the truth that you know is me. I think that is what Jesus is saying, I am the truth, I am the way. For me, I look at that and it is the Word, the Scriptures, but more than just words on a page, it is the narrative, it is the story.

 

Check out Bible Project resources on their website.

 

Follow these links for the other interviews from this series, with Usha Reifsnider (Lausanne Movement) and with Manuel Rainho (GBU, the Portuguese IFES movement).

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