You will not be surprised to hear that I am very pleased to see Faithlife try and revive the Christian magazine business with two offerings– Bible Study Magazine and for the more serious student and teacher of the Bible Didaktos. Interestingly, these are not purely or solely online magazines. They regularly show up in my seminary box as real printed paper copies. These magazines come out of the folks in Bellingham who have brought us LOGOS and other helpful tools for studying God’s Word, and more recently they have ventured even into the fraught and overcrowded field of book publishing. I was very pleased with the production values of my little Lexham Press book, Who God Is which focuses on the nouns predicated of God in the Bible, which have to a real degree been neglected in favor of all those adjectives also predicated of God. For example, God is love is more than to say God is loving or lovely or lovable.
But I digress. The magazines are written by a group of contributors ranging from in house staff like Mark Ward, to pastors and teachers and scholars from across the Evangelical world and involve interviews with all sorts of folks.
Here I want to focus briefly on the most recent issue of Bible Study Magazine (March-April 2022), which has a helpful article on the recent Barna survey (in 2021) on the state of the Bible in America, even during the pandemic. The article is written by Josh Kelly an author and former pastor. Here are a few of the interesting conclusions. The survey is based on interviews with 3,354 adults plus 91 youth ages 15-17 from all 50 states and Washington D.C. Note that it was conducted at the beginning of this year, when COVID was once more raging away after the Christmas season. You can download for free the full detailed report at sotb.research.bible . One quote that stood out to me from early in the report by the editor in chief of it, John Plake, was this “Our research tells us clearly that an individual’s relationship with the Bible is the single greatest influence on her or his spiritual health, period. Nothing else comes close.” In short, not preaching, not small groups, not mission trips, not even worship. As a teacher of the Bible for more than 40 years, this conclusion doesn’t surprise me at all. And for many pastors this conclusion should serve as a wake up call. If you want your people to be more spiritually healthy, they need to be spending more time in the Bible, and what will help this is MORE BIBLICALLY CENTERED TEACHING AND PREACHING (see my recent blog post on my pet peeves about preaching trends). But of course this presupposes a pastor actually knows the Bible well, and has studied it, preferably in its original languages, and with the aid of good commentaries and monographs and Bible dictionaries etc.
Some other statistics— half of all Americans read the Bible with some level of frequency. Interestingly, 37% of those who belong to another religion also read the Bible (what was not clear to me is whether Judaism was classified in this statistic as ‘another religion’ or was it non-Bibliocentric religions that was meant). A quarter of all Americans prefer to read their Bible on a computer or phone or tablet screen, a number that declines rapidly when one is dealing with Baby Boomers and other older persons. What are the most common reasons for reading the Bible? 1) to feel closer to God, 2) to find comfort, 3) for wisdom or guidance, 4) out of obligation. Notice to teachers— they are not primarily reading the Bible out of intellectual curiosity or to do historical research on their faith. For example, the more likely one has been personally impacted by COVID in some ways, the more likely a person was to read the Bible for solace, guidance, comfort, hearing from God etc. During the early panic days of the pandemic, and pre-vaccines Bible reading declined, for whatever reason. Interestingly Gen Z (ages 9-24) is not only lower in every measure of faith and flourishing in the survey (except financially). This does not augur well for the future. Greater Scriptural engagement makes for more volunteerism, more charitable giving, and pro-social behavior in general As Kelly says, this gives the lie to the old adage, too heavenly minded to be any earthly good. In short, Bible reading changes people, and in particular changes the way they approach their neighbors and what they ought to be doing in the world. Of the four major groups, Evangelicals, Black churches, mainline churches and Catholics, when asked questions like how much do we read our Bibles, why do we read it, do we believe it’s God Word, Evangelicals and Black churches out pace the other two groups by a lot in almost all these areas. Who tends to give generously? They tend to be older, married, better educated, lower income (if we are talking giving measured by percentage not gross amount given). Those who volunteer time give eight fold more than those who don’t. Overall, the report concludes that 2021 was the fourth straight year in which Bible reading increased. Another interesting fact, Gen Z saw the greatest decline in church attendance during COVID when a church adopted a strictly online model (15%), followed by millenials (7%). And here is an alarming statistic— of people Americans tend to trust the most, religious leaders fall near the bottom of the list only ranking about governmental leaders but behind delivery vehicle drivers. Those most respected were healthcare workers, and firefighters, but they had some of the lowest authority of those listed, and note that police placed no higher on the scale than deliver vehicle drivers! This last is surely in part because of the too numerous George Floyd instances in recent years (and for the record, defunding the police is not the solution to our social ills, but better training and cultural sensitivity may help).
Think about these things, as we go forward hopefully into a time when COVID is endemic, but no longer a pandemic.
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