It’s been an incredible journey that God has had us on with this huge coalition of partners from around the globe—pastors, church leaders, Bible societies, publishers, influencers—just people of all sorts that are passionate about the Bible that have come together to provide content and Bible translations and all the things that are necessary to make it possible for us to do what we do. And that’s the very short version of the journey that we’ve been on for 17 years.
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ChurchLeaders: You were solving a problem, right, of helping people be more engaged with Scripture. How has the Bible app helped you personally in that area?
Bobby Gruenewald: When we first launched the app or put it on the BlackBerry, the Bible [became] proximate to my everyday life. The first change that made it more engaging, more accessible is the fact that I have it with me all the time. It is true that many people, especially in the U.S., have access to the Bible in printed form and have had access for a long time. And I have more than one Bible at my house.
But carrying a Bible with me everywhere, with as mobile and as much movement as my life has, wasn’t actually standard practice. The Bible might come with me to church. It certainly was by my bed. But the fact that I have access to it anywhere is one factor that increased engagement.
The other is, as we began to develop the app, we started to add features that take advantage of the capabilities of a digital platform and a mobile device that are not possible or are much more difficult to do in a printed form. [These are] things like push notifications, where we can set up to subscribe to be reminded to open the app, to do the verse of the day or a Bible plan.
For me, I regularly do Bible plans, and I’m in the middle of one right now and I have it set to remind me. So this sort of proactive prompt encourages me, if I’ve not already completed my Bible plan reading for that day, to do that. I’m a person that is into gamification and things like streaks, and so I have a long streak in the app.
Even though for some people that might seem silly, it’s actually very, very effective at building habits. Part of my routine is that the Bible is actually the first thing that I look at in the morning when I wake up, and it’s become that kind of rhythm and pattern to my day.
Even if I’m in a hotel in some other country on a trip, the Bible is the first thing I look at when I wake up that day. And that’s just something that was a little bit more difficult to do in a printed format. So the kind of structured reading plans, the reminders are all things that I leverage personally and are part of my rhythm.
Actually, we didn’t have this feature until five years ago, but the guided Scripture feature that we have built off of the verse of the day, it’s something that I do every day. It was not normally a part of my rhythm, but when we added that feature—it’s a short devotional that comes from different communicators and different speakers that we source from all over the world.
It basically takes what was just one verse that you might see in the verse of the day and expands it into a five- minute to seven-minute experience. And so that’s another part of my daily rhythm. The first thing in the morning when I wake up is [I] do the verse of the day with the guided Scripture component. Of course, there are many other features that are engaging and that connect people to it.
ChurchLeaders: I like the ability to listen to the Bible while I’m getting ready in the morning.
Bobby Gruenewald: That’s a great, great thought. I’ve had different seasons of how I’ve engaged. There was one [period of] time where all of my drive times were audio Bible.
I would fill the drive time with the audio Bible, or, when I was doing cardio and I’m working out, [I would] listen through the Bible in those environments. And that’s part of, again, things that you can do in this format, this medium that were difficult to do before in other formats for the Bible.
ChurchLeaders: The Bible app launched in 2008, and in 2021, you achieved a half billion downloads. Just four years later, you’re anticipating your next half billion, so it seems the app’s growth has accelerated. What do you attribute that growth to?
Bobby Gruenewald: There’s definitely been an acceleration. It’s a combination of things. I think there are some things that we have done and efforts that we’ve taken in the last four years that have contributed to the acceleration. Some of that is we’ve taken a lot more risk, and we’ve invested a lot more resources into the Bible app in the last four years.
We have a community of people supporting it that’s much, much larger than what we had four years ago, in terms of just financially supporting it—because it’s a free app that’s supported entirely by donations. This has enabled us to proactively use marketing and very trackable digital advertising in certain parts of the world to help accelerate the growth in places that we felt were opportunities.
We launched a “lite” version of the app that’s designed for phones we were not reaching [in] parts of the world that have less connectivity and have less capable smartphones. The Bible app wasn’t functioning well, or [people there] weren’t even downloading it on those devices. So we’re able to reach a new market with that variation of the app called Bible App Lite. That’s another factor.
But overall, what’s happening right now is just something God’s doing, something special globally with the Bible and with the church. And we just see this sort of hunger for Scripture, particularly in the last two years. And there’s a lot of excitement within Gen Z around the Bible.
