Being theatrical and stifling the word of God are the main two pitfalls one may drop into when speaking in chuch.

Alain COMBES will help you to avoid such unpleasant accidents.

Alain COMBES's knowledge about how to say and read things - and particularly in church- is most precious. .

Alain is both learned and practical. He trained actors for years. His experience as a stage director - he still is, and his commitment to the Lord are quite an asset.

If you happen to express yourself orally in church, his book :" l'expression orale en église" will prove helpful.

In case your French were slightly rusty, here is a sample of the very beginning of the book:

They will see that everything runs properly, lead worship, read, deliver a message -either a sermon, or homily or preaching.

There are two kinds of spoken words in church:

- the improvised ones, uttered without written support;

- the ones that are written and will be read or said.

Reading can be performed in different ways.

Due to the denominations, traditions and personal habits and tastes, spoken words will differ from one assembly to another.

In church, "reading well" or " speaking well" should first mean that one understands what is said as well as if one read it oneself - or perhaps even better. Such obviousness goes along with another clear fact. One must attract the assembly's attention and keep them listening carefully and pleasurably. It is important to bring the listeners to feel like hearing more of it, to encourage or help them to meditate on it, and occasionally to give them an opportunity to examine themselves.

Once you are aware of the power and weath of the biblical texts, of the importance of its message and the strength in its call, no need for you to try and bring the word of God to life. The word of God IS already alive. Your only care should then be to make yourselves ready to receive it. Then you are given life. Once alive yourselves, do keep being open, for the word of life to ring through your words.

One has to become a better bearer of the message. Nothing must be removed or weakened because of our expression, should we be reading - a message bearer-, or improvising - when presiding over a meeting, or preaching.

It therefore seems of paramount importance that one ought to practise oral expression very much like practising a musical instrument which is meant to serve a music work.

Few people seriously consider such training.

Some others cannot see what they need to do.

Let's take a reader who tumbled or stuttered on a word. He or she brought a hasty correction and will be more or less embarrassed, or annoyed perhaps. But in most cases such reader will have missed the essential and that should be far more distressing:

a lack of power,

a faulty articulation

too fast a delivery

no pauses, or wrongly-set ones

sentences split into two or, conversely, linking two sentences that have no relationship

no meaning-conveying intonations

a singsong that removes all landmarks and kills the listeners' attention.

an artificial tone (i.e. solemn, or full of affectation, or bombastic...)

A preacher may have such difficulties as well. Reading and improvising eventually meet on the same field,- oral expression.

A good reader will generally be a good improviser too, as far as orality is concerned. A good improviser may be a bad reader, yet.

Be heard and understood by the assembly.

I mean that a reading that is not normally audible and easily understood is not only useless but harmful. Indeed, bad reading maintains the listeners in their prejudice -"scriptures are obscure, and remote from our everyday life and worries"

The least you can try and do is not to suggest through your phrasing the very opposite of what the text is about.

Were you ready to move still further, your work is to enable the listeners or the assembly to hear the feelings, the emotion, and the purport the text conveys.

There are two snags, at this stage:

a_playing or displaying emotions.

Instead of playing such emotions, we shall see that it is far more efficient to "bear" those feelings, to "present" them in order to be felt by those who listen.

b- erasing all expressions for modesty and soberness sake which could very well be stage-fright or a personal difficulty to communicate.

The latter is the most frequent tendency. Let's go deeper into it:

A certain amount of soberness is required, but soberness and scarcity should not be confused.The inner attitude must be clear and sound. "I come to serve others and not myself; the joy of serving will arise from that."

On the other hand, some minimalists spotting the tiniest spark of natural tone or liveliness in someone's reading will tag it pretentiousness. Even asking for reading is suspicious in those people's eye.

You can see the result - fewer people will volunteer and take part, the readers will feel funny, everyone will sail out to extreme mechanical coldness to avoid making oneself conspicuous...

A flexible reading, quite similar to an everyday tone, may not be a kind of raving expressivity through which the reader cries out his text while getting excited. The person who is reading the word of God to an assembly has obviously not to play the text. But his duty does not consist in merely uttering a series of words, either. The text that is read is meaningful. The meaning is borne by means of words, indeed. But not only. Meaning seeps through basic reflection (questions, exclamations, affirmative statements, enumerations, opening of a series of arguments, end of an idea or a sequence), pauses, keeping silence for a short while, rhythm, articulation, breathing as well...

The expressive strength of reading varies from simplicity to exaggeration. But on the other hand a "cold" reading, both unexpressive and declamatory, may be out of place.

Reading the bible is no theatrical exercise. It can nevertheless be a performing of the text. The etymology of the French word "représentation", which is translated here by "performing", means " to render present". It perfectly shows that for making a text "present", its contents has to be presented in such a way that every significant part of it becomes clear.

If a reader goes along with the contents of his text, that is if he fully lives the remoteness and the proximity suggested by it,

if a reader does so in a sober way, taking into account where and when that reading is being made,

then that reader does NOT stand in front of the Word, overshadowing it. He DOES give way to the Word.

Anyway, when you wish to be crystal clear, its best stick to the nuances of the text and merge into them, rather than stand like a weighty monolithic boulder that thus becomes too sightly."

We do hope Alain COMBES caught your attention through this excerpt.

Now, if you want to know more about it 

combes@aventures.org