Now, he didn’t start reading Scripture in the Bible app. He had portions of Scripture in different books, never had a full Bible. And he got in trouble in Iran because he was sharing his faith, and they confiscated his Bibles (they were just like portions of Scripture in different books).
But the officials took [those books] and then told him that he would go to prison if he continued evangelizing. That’s when he actually downloaded the Bible app. And then, for the first time ever, he had the full Bible instead of just pieces of Scripture. Now that he had access to the full Bible, he read it from front to back, from Genesis to Revelation, which emboldened him to share his faith even more.
And so the Bible app gave him a way to strengthen his faith and to reach more people. So it’s somebody that basically went from physical to digital in an environment where having the physical Bible was problematic, but the Bible app was a resource and a tool for him to have access to the Bible in Iran.
RELATED: ‘I Saw a Refugee Crisis’–What Iranian Christians Are Facing Once They Leave
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.
RELATED: Craig Groeschel Shares Life.Church Baptized Over 2,000 This Past Weekend
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. So it becomes a platform that is completely free but allows people to understand Scripture in a more interesting way based on the content that that pastor or church leader is producing.
Then, more recently, we started to create a set of features specifically for churches. Churches can have a presence in the app today. Here in the U.S., you go through and register your church and create a kind of a page, which would be like the equivalent of a page on Facebook, and it has your service times [and] your location of your church.
If you are a multi-campus church, you have all the campuses and everything that you have available, and then people within your congregation that use the Bible app can associate or affiliate themselves with your church.
And when they do that, it unlocks a whole set of features for pastors and church leaders. One is pastors and church leaders are able to see the aggregated engagement of their congregation during the week.
They can’t see anything individually for privacy reasons, but they could see the types of Bible plans that their congregations are reading and the types of searches that people are doing inside the app.
