My friend, Dr. Matt Coombe, is memorizing entire books of the Bible. He’s not doing it verbatim, but by using a system of memory that includes acrostics, mnemonics, and a structure of thinking unfamiliar to many of us. I’ve been talking to him about this for weeks, watching him internalize the Gospel of John, and I have become increasingly curious to try the techniques myself. The only problem was, I didn’t know what I wanted to memorize.
Today at my church, Refuge Church in Bremerton, we had a potluck and a meeting. During the gathering, they announced the need for a new elder and outlined the process for bringing someone on. As the meeting went on, I became more and more convinced that this was the subject I needed to tackle first. Providentially, Matt is a pastor at a different church and had just concluded a study on a book about this exact topic: Biblical Eldership: An Urgent Call to Restore Biblical Church Leadership by Alexander Strauch. I decided right then to memorize it.
Before I get into how I am going to tackle this book—and what I actually mean by “memorize”—I want to explain the why.
For years, I’ve been curious about eldership. While I’ve read on the subject quite a bit and am familiar with the relevant biblical passages, I cannot just rattle off every facet of the role. Personally, whenever a church looks for a qualified candidate, I automatically feel unqualified. It’s not necessarily because I couldn’t do the job, but how can someone honestly look in the mirror and say they are ready for a role if they can’t even clearly define what it is? If I can’t articulate, on the fly, what an elder is and does, then I have no business pursuing the position.
I would like to explore becoming an elder in the future, if God wills it and I am recognized as having the gifting for it. Putting this specific information deep into my head will give me a concrete roadmap for my own growth toward that goal.
This series is going to show you how I memorize this book and deeply engrain all the wisdom it has to offer. I’m going to show you how to read differently, how to utilize AI to synthesize and memorize information, how to recall concepts you’ve encoded as mnemonics, and how you can do all of this on your own. I also hope to share a few theological and practical lessons from the book along the way.
This will be a long-term project, and I hope you enjoy the journey. Next, I’d like to begin by teaching you how to think entirely differently about your own memory.