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You can find previous episodes of “The Stone Chapel Podcast” at Lanier Theological Library.
“The Stone Chapel Podcast” is part of the ChurchLeaders Podcast Network.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
John Plake
Hi. I’m Dr. John Plake, Chief Innovation Officer at the American Bible Society, and editor in chief of the State of the Bible Project.
David Capes
Dr. John Plake. John, good to see you. Welcome to “The Stone Chapel Podcast.”
John Plake
Thank you, Dave. It’s great to be with you.
David Capes
I heard about you and I’ve heard about this project. We’re going to get a little bit deep into it here in a few minutes. For those who don’t know who John Blake is, who is he?
John Plake
Well, I’m a lot of things. I’m a third generation preacher’s kid. I’ve been a pastor, a missionary, a Christian educator. I like to describe myself as a researcher with a pastor’s heart, because it’s not just about learning the numbers, it’s about what they mean for the way we care for the people around us. I did my Master’s in intercultural studies at Wheaton College. So, I had a wonderful experience at Wheaton, and that kind of reignited my desire to learn. It had been beaten out of me in undergraduate life. But we won’t get into all of that. I was really honored to do a PhD in Missions and Intercultural Studies at the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary at Evangel University.
David Capes
Tell us about your family.
John Plake
Well, my wife, Tabitha, is the smart one in the family, and I just try to keep up. And we have two wonderful daughters, Hannah and Bethany, who are in college and high school, respectively.
David Capes
Oh, terrific. You’re here at Lanier Theological Library as part of a conversation about the state of the church. We’re going to be talking about the state of the Bible in a minute, because that’s been your project. But we’re here with Ed Stetzer, Nicole Martin and David Kinnaman. It’s just a delight to have you here. We’re going to tell people in the show notes how they can listen to the presentations you will have done, and we’ll have those up on our YouTube channel. The podcast is a primer to that. We’re just teasing the subject a bit. We want people to know what’s going on in the state of the Bible. Okay, tell us a little bit about the project. You’re the Chief Innovation Officer, but you’re also working with this project.
John Plake
So, as Chief Innovation Officer, I really lead two parts of our work. First is our insights work. We have an insights team that’s focused on research like the state of the Bible project, and I’ll return to that in a second. And then the innovation side, where we try and go beyond just what the numbers say, and decide, well, what should we do about it? How do we help people in light of the numbers that we’re seeing.
Back in 2011 American Bible Society started the State of the Bible Project. I was not there then so it was not my brain child. I came in much later in 2017 and in fact, David Kinnaman at the Barna Group and his team helped us to launch State of the Bible. But eventually we built an internal team so that every year now we reach out to a representative sample of American adults from every walk of life, every state in the Union and the District of Columbia. We want to talk to them about their relationship, their beliefs, their attitudes and behaviors around the Bible, faith in the church.
It’s been fascinating to do that. This is how we love our neighbor as ourselves, because we seek to talk to them, to understand them on their own terms. But we also believe that the Bible offers something powerful for them no matter where they’re at in their walk with God, if they’re far from him or quite close. And we want to make sure that the American Bible Society and our many partners in the church are helping in that project.
David Capes
So how are you reaching out to these people? First of all, who are they and how are you getting this information?
John Plake
Normally, people do this using online panels. And there are services you can sign up and say, hey, I want to take a survey, and they’ll collect certain kinds of demographic information about you and your family. Where you live, and that kind of thing. And then that is used to help put together a representative panel. But we wanted to be able to appear in peer-reviewed literature, like the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA, psychiatry, public health, those kinds of places.
In order to do that, we reached out to NORC at the University of Chicago. NORC stands for the National Opinion Research Council, and they have a panel called “amerispeak”, which is what’s called a probability-based sample. It means that every household in America has the equal opportunity to be a part of the sample, and they recruit the panel from all over the nation. They handle that work for us, and our job is to be the experts about the questions and to understand the answers that those people are giving us. So, if you ask who they are, they’re your friends and neighbors. They are representative of everybody, everywhere, from every walk of life in America.
David Capes
And this started in 2011 but the American Bible Society has been around for a long time.
John Plake
Yes, we happen to be the second oldest nonprofit organization in the United States. We were founded on the steps of City Hall in New York City in 1816. It’s amazing when you read our history. Some of the founders of our nation like Elias Boudinot was the first general manager of the American Bible Society. He was George Washington’s Quartermaster General during the winter at Valley Forge. He was a member of the Continental Congress. And John Jay you might have heard of him. He was the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. In fact, one of the things I found most interesting is that some of the early presidents of the United States were Presidents and they had a role at the American Bible Society at the same time.
David Capes
That’s interesting. Let’s talk a little bit about what you’re finding in the research these days. What are we seeing? How are people looking at the Bible these days?
John Plake
Well, there’s so much that’s been going on. We have the privilege of looking back over 15 years. This is our 15th year, and I guess if you looked over those 15 years, you’d see a slow decline in people interacting with the Bible. We basically use a measure to decide if they ever reach for the Bible on their own. If they do, they’re a Bible user. If they don’t, they’re not a Bible user. More than half of all Americans are not Bible users. In fact, 59% this year are not.
For many years, it was about half. But COVID and a number of other things seemed to have happened, and that fell away. But between 2024 and 2025 something happened, and we saw the first resurgence in Bible use that we have seen in the entire study. There were 11 million new people who were reaching for the Bible. And it really gets interesting after the headline, because then we start looking at, who are these people, and where are they from, and lots more detail there.
David Capes
And can you get to the question of why they’re reaching for the Bible? Is that a question you can ask?
John Plake
If we were doing qualitative research instead of quantitative research, it would be easier to get at that. And we have done some focus groups that are selected samples of people who are just beginning their journey with the Bible. I don’t know that we can generalize those to this particular trend, but we know that many people who are reaching for the Bible have someone who’s a person of faith that has been in their life; a mom, a grandmother, sometimes a father, a neighbor, a co-worker who’s a Bible person. Or maybe has gone before them and has been a Bible person, and there seems to be a new yearning for many people in America for something more. There’s a wonderful podcaster and interviewer out of the UK. His name’s Justin Brierley.
David Capes
Justin’s been here to lecture at the library. He is a great guy.
John Plake
And the way he puts it is, people are looking for a better story. Post-modernism has left people saying, well, the only story you have is your own story. The new Atheism of the early 2000s left people saying, well, the only story is that it’s just matter. It’s a soulless, heartless, cruel natural selection process. And people have looked at that and they’ve decided something about that just isn’t right.
David Capes
Yes. You help not only to gather this information, but you help in some ways, to form what that story is, I suppose, right?
John Plake
And you know from some of the research that there have been saints in people’s background. Maybe they’re related or friends and they remember something special about them, and that they loved the Bible.
David Capes
That’s a fascinating combination, when you think about it.
