ST. CLAIRSVILLE — Belmont County church members are gearing up for a marathon Bible-reading event at the Belmont County Courthouse.

The St. Clairsville Area of Churches Bible reading marathon will begin Thursday at noon until 8 p.m. and end at 6:45 p.m. April 30 at the courthouse plaza, located at 101 W Main St., St. Clairsville. For the days in between, members for several churches will read parts of the bible from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Steve Roten, director of the reading marathon, and others came upon the idea of reading the Bible publicly back in 1990. A man from Washington D.C. came up with the idea and started a Bible marathon there. Roten decided to bring a reading marathon to St. Clairsville. He and others presented the idea to the Council of Churches and decided to go ahead with it.

Members from 15 churches across Belmont County – including the Friends Church, the Experience Church, Harbor of Hope Church, Christ the King Church, Calvary Presbyterian, and St. Mary’s Catholic Church – will read excerpts from the Bible. It will take about 300 people to complete the marathon.

Roten said the purpose of the reading marathon is to prepare for the National Day of Prayer on May 1 and let people know it is happening soon.

He added the Bible reading marathon encourages and reminds people if they call themselves Christian, they should be reading the Bible every day.

“We get people out reading, and many people come out that would never read the Bible in public, but they’ll come out and do it at the courthouse,” Roten said. “So it’s strengthening and encouraging to read the word that we’re commanded to do.”

Roten hopes after the Bible reading marathon, the participating churches will do other events in the community.

“It’s bringing churches together to work together, laying aside our religious differences for a purpose of letting the community see how churches come together and work together to serve a single purpose,” Roten said.

The National Day of Prayer celebration will take place at 11:45 a.m. to 1 p.m. May 1 on the courthouse plaza.

The National Day of Prayer brings together communities each year to pray for their churches, the military, the United States and more.

For the celebration at the courthouse plaza, there will be different prayer groups going on throughout the day, praying for something different, such as law enforcement or teachers. Different pastors from Belmont County will be leading the different sections.

Roten said people sometimes ask him, “How do I learn to pray?” and he tells them to hang out with people who are praying. He added maybe someone won’t pray the first or second time, but eventually they’ll hear the prayers and feel like they’ve had enough experience to pray on their own.

“It’s to bring a public light onto prayer, which is normally in private,” Roten said. “We pray in private. We pray in church, but now so much in these times we don’t pray in public much anymore. So it’s bringing the focus back on what it is to pray and what we should be praying for.”