Member spotlight: Jim Woychuk of Scripture Memory Fellowship

If that old-time Bible memorization was good enough for Charles Spurgeon, William Wilberforce and Todd Beamer, it should be good enough for us.

And Scripture Memory Fellowship, directed by Samaritan member Jim Woychuk, is there to help our families, from toddlers to seniors, with a vital spiritual discipline often left neglected in today’s Church.

The great preacher Spurgeon, for example, was paid by his grandmother to memorize the Bible verses that would become the lifeblood of his long and fruitful Gospel ministry in London. British abolitionist Wilberforce would recite Psalm 119 from memory for comfort while walking home from frustrating days at Parliament as he battled the slave trade in the British Empire for 30 years. And a stack of memory verse cards were found on the dashboard of the car that Beamer drove to the airport on September 11, 2001, before taking the flight in which he and other passengers overpowered terrorists. The top verse on the stack belonging to the former Wheaton College third baseman was Romans 11:33: “Oh the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God; how unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out.”

“Memorization is Bible study on steroids,” Jim says.

Except you don’t need to take injections or break the law. Instead, you can turn to a ministry like the Hannibal, Missouri-based SMF, which provides memorization plans, memory books, rewards, and Scripture set to music.

SMF Bible memory books are organized under Biblical topics with age-appropriate art and number of verses per week. Infants to 2-year-olds are read Bible Forget-Me-Nots with strong verbs and vivid illustrations. Preschoolers go on to learn a key verse for each letter of the alphabet, all of which can be sung along with the CDs SMF provides. For elementary students there are books such as God Gives Eternal Life and God Loves Us. High school students can learn 100 verses from John in Foundation for the Christian Life and 144 key verses on discipleship from Stepping Stones in the Christian Life. Adults can memorize from books on such topics as peace, prayer and praise or memorize 105 verses on salvation in Let There Be Light.

Plus, Jim points out, memorizing the Word helps older believers stay mentally alert. His father and the founder of SMF, Dr. N.A. Woychuk, was a vibrant 93 when he died on November 7, 2009. Dr. Woychuk’s surviving sister is another example of that at 99 years old.

Raised in Canada in a Ukrainian immigrant farming family, the elder Woychuk attended a summer camp as a 15-year-old unbeliever in 1930 after having memorized 500 verses from the Gospel of John in order to impress a teacher. The Lord had other ideas, though. A missionary from South Africa led N.A. Woychuk to Christ at that camp at Lake Winnipeg, the Holy Spirit using the seed of the words from John’s Gospel.

After eventually becoming a pastor in Shreveport, Louisiana, the elder Woychuk started Bible Memory Association in 1944. He took out an ad offering a free Bible and free week of summer camp to children if they memorized 250 verses. SMF still offers free camp to children who recite an entire memory book—anywhere from a couple dozen to more than 100, depending on their age.

In 1976, N.A. Woychuk left Bible Memory Association and started Scripture Memory Fellowship.

“The ministry has continued with this very, very simple idea that memorizing Scripture is a vital discipline we should pursue systematically and in an ongoing manner, not just in childhood,” Jim says.

These “key things” are what the ministry aims to provide.

• An accountability structure, “in which you receive a structured course of verses to complete and recite weekly.” Memorizers are encouraged to line up another person to recite to.
• Rewards, especially valued by young people. These can be books or games. While some object to this aspect of the program, saying memorizing Scripture is its own reward, Jim says that it’s helpful “to have something to look forward to.” Just ask Charles Spurgeon.
• A plan. “Our system is largely topically based, since this is how we usually use Scripture.” That’s how Jesus used it, quoting select verses from Deuteronomy to counter the devil’s temptations (Matthew 4:1-11), and how Paul used it, on 10 different passages from the law, prophets, and writings in Romans 3 to make his case for total human sinfulness.
• Learning aids, such as CDs that set verses to music or Bible knowledge games like Tic Tac Know, in which students must fill in the blank or quote the verse to put down their X’s and O’s.

But in SMF’s view, it’s not how much you know, but “a question of ‘What are you meditating on today?’” Jim says.

“It’s better to know 10 verses and obey them than to have 1,000 salted away.”

Yet, it does help to have a number “salted away” as long as you move them from head to heart, says Jim, the 43-year-old husband and father of three.

“Memorizing Scripture is storing up fuel and raw material and resources,” he says. “Then the Holy Spirit works through the people of God in the ministries and life of local churches to take that raw material and craft it into character and Christlikeness.”

Memorizing isn’t as hard as some people think it may be, Jim says. SMF’s books are easier for young people and require more verses to be memorized per week as a person gets older. But all it takes is 10 minutes a day to learn something new and 10 minutes a day to review for an adult to make “dramatic progress.”

“Memory is like a muscle,” Jim says. “The more you use it, the stronger it gets.”

“Some adults sweat to do one verse a week at first, but by the end of that book they do four to seven verses a week.”

Children, meanwhile, “have prodigious memory capacity stemming from the way our brains are hard-wired to acquire language in our younger years,” says Jim. He should know how they think: He and his wife, Susan, have two children and are expecting another in January. “I think every child is a prodigy.”

For all ages, memorization is also a path into quality Bible study, the pastor says.

“When you take the time to memorize, you catch small details that otherwise would escape you. You take note that a certain word is plural, of whether it’s a question or a statement, who is speaking and who is being addressed. You are forced to slow down.”

Scripture Memory Fellowship doesn’t look like it’ll be slowing down anytime soon, especially with what Jim, who is also pastor of Hannibal Evangelical Free Church, says is a need for greater commitment to memory work among young people and adults.

“If the Bible-loving, Gospel-preaching church in America perishes, it would not be for a lack of books and stores and programs and websites,” Jim says. “It would be because the days and minutes of our mental lives are full and preoccupied with all kinds of important-seeming, nice things, even good things, but not the best things. Martha-like, we serve the Lord with all kinds of activity but have forgotten the discipline of remembering to hear His Word, hour by hour. We say all kinds of nice, reverent things about the Bible, but we fail to take the time and mental effort to treasure up God’s Words and meditate on them day and night.

“’What verse are you meditating on this day? This hour? This week?’ Most adult Christian believers have no answer to that question. I feel like it’s a very dangerous warning light on the dashboard that memory work among American adults is plummeting. What are they doing? They’re absolutely frenetically busy but they’re frenetically busy with things that don’t matter as much. This is a great alarm to us, but also a great challenge.”

Other challenges for SMF include development of more tools, especially digital ones, to re-engage American adults and young people to memorize Scripture—to “use people’s electronic fixation to get them meditating on God’s Word day and night.”

SMF is also moving into regions with explosive Christian growth, such as Africa and China. The ministry is making partnerships with other ministries to have systematic memory work available in those places.

“Systematic Scripture memorization is not an end in itself. The goal is not to become Bible trivia experts,” Jim says. “Instead it is a discipleship tool we can use to know, love and obey our Father better. It is a means of carrying out the Great Commission and the Great Commandment in that we’re teaching ourselves and the nations ‘to observe all things’ as Jesus taught us, and using those truths to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves” (Matthew 28:19-20, 22:37-40).