Bible Literacy Should Be the #1 Priority for Churches in 2025
Biblically Literate Christians are strong in their faith, discerning, selfless and courageous. Here's how churches can promote a culture of bible literacy in their church.
At some point in the past decades, Christian churches adopted an an approach to Bible study that has proved ineffective in teaching their members how to read the Bible. A Google search of “Bible literacy rates in 2024” shows a long list of articles from the likes of outlets such as Outreach Magazine, the Jerusalem Post, Religion Unplugged, Decision Magazine and Christianty Today, all highlighting how Biblical engagement has sharply declined and Bible literacy is the lowest it’s been in generations. In fact, Christianity Today’s headline reads “Bible Literacy is in a Postliterate Age.” However, looking at the metrics for podcasts and YouTube channels that focus on Bible literacy, you’ll find astronomical numbers of listeners. “The Bible in a Year” podcast hosted by Father Mike Schmitz has the “largest exclusive listener audience of any podcast in America,” meaning that the show has the highest percentage of listeners who listen to that podcast exclusively. The show has been downloaded over 700 million times since it came out in 2021. Dr. Jordan Peterson’s Genesis lecture series on YouTube has been watched over 100 million times - and each of the lectures is over 3 hours long. Both Father Schmitz and Dr. Peterson teach the Bible in incredibly intellectual ways; their teaching is high-level thought about the concepts the Bible puts forward. They take the Bible seriously and assume their listeners do too. People want to know what the Bible says, but churches have lost their effectiveness in teaching them how to do it.
From my vantage point, there are 3 major ways the culture of the Church should shift to create a culture of Bible literacy in their church, which should be their top priority for 2025.
#1 Stop stigmatizing the Bible as though it’s hard to understand or takes a long time to read.
We have internalized the idea that the Bible is hard to understand to such a degree, it’s a part of the church culture and we don’t realize it. We use words in everyday conversation, Sunday school lessons and preaching that insinuate the difficulty of understanding the Bible, which members then internalize. The word “struggle” comes to mind - a word we use constantly. As Christians, we seem to “struggle” with everything, especially with reading our Bibles.
This is a mindset, but it’s not reality -perhaps this comes from the idea that a pastor goes to seminary for years to understand the Bible enough to pastor a church. Christians see the Bible as this complex book that they need help to understand; meanwhile, 90 million people have read the entire Game of Thrones book series, which has the most complex storylines I’ve ever attempted to read, then after they read the books, they watch the complex shows afterward.
We should be teaching people how to read the Bible and believe that everyone can do it. God would never have given us an instruction manual that was too complex for us to understand. Teaching how to read the Bible involves giving them foundational tactics for study. The Bible Project does this very well. The Overview Bible has a great Beginnger’s Guide to the Bible and explains foundational information to help a beginning reader with context.
I’d also point out the fallacy we promote in the Church - that it takes a person a whole year to read the Bible through once. This is another layer in which we internalize that the Bible is hard to understand - it must be, if we expect it takes a year to get through! The timeline of a year gives people an end goal, which is good, but that also gives the sublimal message that it is so difficult to read, if it will take a whole year to do it.
Once a Christian shifts their thinking about these things, they’ll discover that they can read the Bible several times in a year, and will often go back to listen/read their favorite book because they want to and they like it.
With this, I’ll say that the way we promote studying the Bible, which is in small snippets, read over a long period of time, does make the Bible harder to understand, which I’ll get into in my next point.
#2 Shift the goal from promoting daily quiet times to Bible literacy, overall.
This will be the most controversial thing I say to most, mainly because of how much we’ve internalized the concept of a daily quiet time in the modern Christian church. In my opinion, the pushing of the “Daily 15 minute quiet time” as the goal every Believer should strive to acheive has counterproductively promoted Bible illiteracy, rather than encouraged Bible literacy.
What pastors and leaders think they are doing by promoting short daily quiet times is a) encouraging daily time with God, b) encouraging people to find time in their day to read the Bible. In the reality of every day life, the short daily quiet time becomes yet another task in a person’s day that they must check off their list and when they miss days, they get discouraged and stop altogether. I’m not proposing we should stop promoting quiet times, rather that the daily quiet time itself shouldn’t be the ultimate goal.
In the mind of most Christians, the preconceived idea of a quiet time involves getting up early, usually with a cup of coffee, with a journal, a pen and a devotional. It involves finding a place in the home that is quiet and cozy, then focusing on one passage of the Bible to study that day. In the 15-20 minutes of preparation it takes to get out of bed, get coffee made, getting out the materials and getting organized, a person could have popped in their bluetooth, opened their Bible app, and listened to their choice of 29 books of the Bible that take 20 minutes or less to listen to in their entirety. Travisagnew.org lays out how long each book of the Bible takes to read and I think people will be surprised.
You can listen to any of these books just like you listen to a podcast through the Bible app for free. If a person only listened to one of those 29, 20-min-or-less books daily, like every morning as they are getting ready for work, driving to or from work, cooking dinner, etc., they’d have 43% of the Bible read in a month.
Depending on the narrator and translation, you could listen to the entire Bible in 75.5 hours or less. The Game of Thrones television series takes 70 hours and 15 minutes to watch and 44 million people have done that, for context.
I believe that when possible, people should read/listen to books of the Bible in their entirety, especially if the goal is reading the Bible all the way through. Reading it in short 15 minute snippits makes it much more difficult to understand. We don’t read any other book like this, yet we promote reading the Bible like this! I believe that the chapter and verse numbers, as well as separation of the chapters from each other and giving those passages a title, has mentally conditioned us to see the Bible books in short passages, as opposed to the scroll or letter form in which they were originally written. Those numbers are meaningless to context, their only usefulness being reference tools when studying in groups.
#3 Stop promoting Christian studies in the church and promote actual Bible studies.
All studies with the Bible at their core have been labeled “Bible studies,” when in reality, many of them are self-help studies designed to help people be better Christians in different areas of their life. Guided studies about parenting, finance, relationships, and betterment of the self proliferate our Christian bookshelves. Keeping in the mind that the majority of our members have never read the Bible all the way through once, these studies feel good to do in a group together, but rarely move the needle on literacy in the Bible.
It appears that the more literate people become, the better all those areas in their life become, because the Bible addresses all those topics within the stories of the people in it. The more literate we become, the more the Holy Spirit alligns our soul with our creator, which transforms our entire life.
Another controversial opinion - most of those Christian studies are pretty shallow because most of them are written with a focus on feelings and emotions, not on Biblical literacy. They come with beautifully designed covers and beautifully edited videos, that make people feel so encouraged and positive. If you compare how many people completed those studies vs. the statistics on Bible literacy, you’ll find that they don’t correlate well. Without being literate, we have no idea if the author of a Christian study is Biblically literate themselves!
The Positive Side Effects of a Biblically Literate Congregation
People will begin to pray all day, rather than just once a day. People will see God in everything and feel his presence all the time, rather than expect to “feel” his presence once a day for 15 minutes.
They’ll become more evangelical without even realizing it’s happening. When people study the Bible and understand it, they’ll want to talk about it all the time with others.
They’ll want to serve more in the church. Righ now, church leaders have to beg members to serve, but if Bible literacy goes up, people will naturally want to spend more time in the church serving others.
They’ll become more discerning, especially regarding who to listen to or be influenced by in an internet that gives them millions of otions.
They’ll become courageous Christians, like the First Century Apostles were in Acts.
Rates of divorce will go down in churches and they’ll become husbands and wives aligned with what God says.
They’ll create more ministries to serve more people. Knowing the Bible means knowing God, and knowing God means knowing ourselves. People who know themselves know what gifts they have to offer others.
They’ll invite people to their church regularly.
It will make the lives of the Pastor and his staff less stressful because of all the reasons mentioned above.