It’s not just the Bible app that’s experiencing this. Print Bible sales are up. We see other Bible experiences in terms of apps and websites that have grown in popularity over this time frame. There’s just an overall excitement around the Bible that’s happening globally.
It’s not isolated to one continent, although Africa’s a very fast-growing area for us, as well as Latin America. But it’s not exclusive to those areas. I mean, there’s double-digit growth in Europe. And so we see many parts of the world growing right now.
You know, you have things like “The Chosen,” and you have all these different things that are really getting traction globally. And I think there’s just an excitement or a hunger that’s happening that we are seeing the benefit of or that we’re able to measure, I guess, in part of our metric.
So it’s a combination of, I think, different inputs and different levels of acceleration that we’ve been intentionally trying to do in the last few years, combined with something supernatural that God’s doing that’s a little bit difficult for us to take credit for or explain.
ChurchLeaders: What’s the most surprising or unexpected part about how people are using the app? Is there anything that stands out that we haven’t touched on yet?
Bobby Gruenewald: That’s a good question. You kind of have to go back in time a little bit because we’ve seen a lot of things over 17 years, so there are not as many surprises today. What I would say in general is I probably had the presumption because it’s the Bible, it looks like a Bible, and it’s called the “Bible app” that we would primarily, almost exclusively, be reaching Christians with a way to engage them more in Scripture. In reality, we have a lot of people that download the app that are not Christians.
ChurchLeaders: Really? That’s interesting.
Bobby Gruenewald: [These people] are hurting or searching for some kind of answer or some kind of direction for whatever felt need or life challenge they’re going through. And I guess the surprise is that they actually go to the App Store to look for answers or see if they could find a source for answers to whatever relationship problem they might be having, whatever addiction or challenge or anxiety they might be facing.
And the reason we can tell this is based on what people are searching for on the Bible app, as well as some of the key terms that people are responding to when they’re searching in the App Store, in terms of like an advertisement or how they’re coming into the app.
We obviously have people that are believers that are downloading the app to help them engage more with Scripture…but we definitely have people that download it that don’t know Jesus, and this is their first experience of the Bible.
And that’s part of the reason we’ve worked really hard to try to take away some of the intimidation factor of Scripture. Because if you could imagine [that] you’re not a believer—even if you are a believer and you’re a new believer—opening the Bible and trying to figure out how to navigate it or understand it can be a bit intimidating for people.
So we’ve tried to create a lot of on-ramps for people that are searching for answers, looking for guidance, trying to look for truth in a world that they feel like maybe doesn’t have a lot of truth. To me, that’s an exciting part of it. But it definitely was a surprise. Just logically, you kind of would have assumed that wouldn’t necessarily be the case, but it is.
ChurchLeaders: Do you have specific personal stories that you could share about how the app has impacted people, particularly in ways that wouldn’t have happened if the app didn’t exist?
Bobby Gruenewald: Sure, I’ll share a couple with you. Every week, our team sends out an update to me on Friday with a whole bunch of summaries of different initiatives we’re working on, but they always start every email with a story. We get thousands, actually tens of thousands, of stories of people who have been impacted. One is from a guy [who] wrote in and said that he had no hope and was ready to take his life. He wasn’t a Christian but downloaded the Bible app.
So he saw it in the App Store and downloaded it, and as he read the Bible, it resonated with him. And he started to change his perspective until he decided to put God in the center of his life. He said, ‘I went from googling ways to die to having lasting joy and peace, all because of the Bible,’ and specifically through our app. So that’s an example of God’s Word literally saving someone’s life, like physical life. And we hear stories like that, actually, all the time.
Another one is [about a man] from Iran. He grew up in Iran and was taught to follow Islam. He started reading Scripture to strengthen his Islamic beliefs. But he actually fell in love with the God of the Bible.
