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How the Bible App Serves Church Leaders
ChurchLeaders: Thank you for sharing that. Those stories are really moving. So this is an interview for ChurchLeaders.com and our audience is church leaders. What are ways the Bible app can be uniquely helpful to church leaders?
Bobby Gruenewald: First of all, we’re grateful for church leaders because a big part of our story of reaching a billion downloads is because of church leaders.
Early on, we had pastors and church leaders around the world that began to share this tool as a resource with their congregations.
Initially, there was some hesitation because there was this concern about people using their phones in church.
And more and more pastors, I think, began to recognize—because we’d hear this from them—that if they could get the Bible on [congregants’] mobile devices, that the chance of them engaging with it daily outside of the church service goes way up.
So pastors began to look at the Bible app as a tool that would engage their congregations in Scripture, which was going to be great for [Christians’] spiritual growth and their development.
So pastors and church leaders were probably one of the biggest promotion mechanisms of how people found the Bible app.
They would see other people using it at church, or their pastor or the church leader would tell them about it.
Many [pastors] today, every week, mention “turn in the YouVersion Bible app,” or they will use the app as part of their sermon.
We want it to be a tool that serves the church.
If people don’t know, YouVersion is actually a ministry of Life.Church. It’s not separate from the church; it’s a part of the local church.
Even though it’s not designed to serve our church exclusively or specifically, we, being a church, understand what churches need and [we] really want YouVersion to be a tool that helps serve them effectively as a way to engage their congregations.
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It’s also a way to extend the reach of the church’s influence in the digital space.
We have many churches that create Bible plans that coincide with their teachings or maybe a book, if the pastor is an author and wrote a book.
This just becomes ways to take that content and extend it beyond just their congregation to the rest of the world.
