John Plake
It really is. We were talking with a group of people in Chicago in a focus group facility. People referred to the fact that my mother or my grandmother left me a Bible when she died. Now I have this item that I remembered her using. I’ll just tell you one particular story I remember. This lady said I inherited my mother’s Bible when she passed away, and I opened it, and I found that my name was written in the margins of the Bible in various places, along with key dates. And she said, then I realized that when we would go out in the front yard to play, I thought my mother was just sitting taking a nap in that front chair. But she wasn’t taking a nap. She had her Bible open in her lap, and while we played in the front yard, she was in the front room praying for us and reading God’s Word over us.
It made an incredible impact on her, and I think it should. And so now she’s trying to decide, how can I be more like her? Because I haven’t been for a long time, and in many cases, they say, I don’t know how. I don’t understand the Bible. It’s complicated. It’s not like any book they’ve ever read before. The structure is different. The culture is different. And could somebody please help me come to a place where I understand God’s word the way she did.
David Capes
Are these, generally people who are going to church? Are these people who are sitting on their front porch reading the Bible by themselves?
John Plake
Well, it depends. We have a whole category of people that we refer to, sometimes as the “movable middle” because they’re on a journey with the Bible. They’re open to it. They’re curious about it. I would say more than half of them are not regularly attending any particular church. If, depending on the kind of church that your listeners go to, they would be maybe interested to know that between a third and a half of the people who are with them in church on a Sunday are not deeply and transformatively engaging with the scriptures. They find it daunting. They find it overwhelming, and they want to know
more about it.
In fact, another gentleman I was talking to had sent his kids to a parochial school. He lived in a city that had difficult public education issues, and so he sent his kids to a Christian school. They came back with questions about the Bible, and he said I felt dumb because I didn’t know the answers to their questions. I decided I was going to do something about it, and we started studying the Bible together.
David Capes
Now, what do you think churches are doing at this point? Are churches teaching the Bible well enough? Are people getting a good sense when they do go to church from the preachers, the Sunday school teachers? Are they getting a good sense of scripture, or is biblical illiteracy still growing?
John Plake
Well, I think it depends a lot on the church. There’s a lot of variety, just like there’s variety in people, there’s variety in churches. Some churches really have close identification with the community that they serve in, and the people who are in that community. They feel their hurts and their challenges very deeply. Others feel more closely connected to the text than they do to the context. And the challenge is, I think being a Christian and certainly being a ministry leader, means we have to be a bridge across a river. One bank is the text, the other bank is the context. And if we aren’t firmly moored into both sides of that river, we’re not doing our job. We can’t communicate the gospel to real people. We can’t bring
real people to Christ.
One of the challenges is staying connected to both at the same time. And there are some great churches that are doing exactly that. Some are all about the Bible, but they don’t know their neighbors very well. We try to help with that. We don’t want them shouting into the void. We don’t want them answering questions that nobody’s asking, at least not at first. The Bible does have its own narrative, and we could talk about that, but at the same time, we don’t want them just loving their neighbor but not bringing them God’s truth. And so that’s the challenge, I think, to do both at the same time.
David Capes
What are your senses about next year’s survey? Do you have a sense of what you’re going to find already? Because there seem to be some data out there and the Wall Street Journal had an article of late about how Bible sales have increased. I don’t think people go out and buy a Bible if they don’t intend to read it, do they?
John Plake
I don’t believe so. There are people buying their 10th Bible. Maybe they’ve worn out the old or there’s a particular version they want. But I think for a lot of first time Bible purchasers, (and we’re starting to see more and more of that), they really are on a journey with the Bible. They’re looking for a Bible that they can understand, that they can dig into a bit more deeply. And Bible sales rose 22% between the fall of 2023 and the fall of 2024. That was at the same time that book sales in America were down 1% so a 22% increase got some folks attention.
We have this new data on Bible Sales, we have our State of the Bible data showing we’ve got more Bible users, and Bible engagement has ticked up. But if it were just that, I wouldn’t say we’re on to something. But when you look at what’s going on in Europe as well, there was a 500% increase in Gen Z men attending church between 2018 and 2024. 500%. That’s five times, 5x right? It’s a huge change. We’re starting to see people coming to churches, not just in the US, but also in the United Kingdom and other parts of Western Europe.
We’re seeing things we’ve never seen before, and because we’ve never seen them before, it’s hard for researchers to say, I recognize this trend. It’s not like we’re predicting futures in the stock market where we’ve seen that “W” shape before, and so we should expect X, Y or Z. I think we don’t know what to expect, but we are hopeful, and we want to make sure that in a moment when the world is disrupted, when change is happening, that the church recognizes it. Is that change, and we’re ready to meet our friends and neighbors and help them through that change with God’s word.
David Capes
If people want to know more about the state of the Bible and about the American Bible Society and John Plake, how would they go about getting that information?
John Plake
They can just visit us at stateoftheBible.org. When you get there. That’s housed on the American Bible Society website. If you aren’t interested in research and things like that just go to americanbible.org. You can see the work that we’re doing in Bible access, Bible engagement and Bible advocacy in the US and around the world. There are lots of wonderful ways that people can engage with us. They can learn with us. They can become advocates for the Bible along with us, and we’d love to invite them to do that.
David Capes
For those who are thinking about this and might like to donate to your work, can they make donations to the American Bible Society and to the work that you guys are doing?
John Plake
They certainly can at either one of those websites. They’ll find ways to be able to give. They can give to particular projects. If they want to help us with funding the State of the Bible and some of the innovation research work that we’re doing around this, they can find us there at stateofthebible.org, or reach out to me directly, and they can have my email address. It’s jplake@americanbible.org. Shoot me an email. Let’s talk, and we’ll find a way to make sure that you can make an impact for God’s Word in the world.
David Capes
Well, I think that’s part of it. You’re a person who knows, not only the data and the research, but you’ve got to think about, what this means. What does this mean for our culture? What does it mean for our times? What does it mean for the opportunities that are ahead of us? For the gospel, as we read about what’s happening in Europe, as we read about what’s happening with the Bible sales. That’s an interesting time; it seems to me.
John Plake
There’s are two words for “time” in the New Testament in Greek. One of them is chronos. As in: what time is it. The other one is Kairos. And if you’re a Bible nerd, you probably already know this, but it’s from theater, and it is the turning point. It’s a pivot point. When Jesus says in Mark 1:14-15, the time has come, the kingdom of heaven is at hand, he uses that word, kairos. He was probably speaking in Aramaic. But when they wrote it down, they wrote it down in Greek because they wanted to say, this is the hinge point of history. And I think while Christ is the hinge point of history in each of our generations, we have these Kairos moments when God invites us to step into what he’s doing in a big way in our own generation. And like King David, I want to serve God’s purposes in my generation before I hand it off to my children or the Lord returns.
David Capes
We all pass the baton. I grew up during the Jesus Movement in the 1970s and did a lot of music back in those days. That was a real turbulent time, but that seemed to issue in something that was heaven sent. And I’m wondering, given all the turbulence we’ve had with COVID and what’s happening in the world right now, if maybe the next movement of God is going to take us in a new direction, a new pivot point, a new place in our own lifetimes.
John Plake
I hope so. I remember the Jesus People Movement. I was a little boy at First Assembly of God in Peoria, Illinois, when some hippies wandered into a church service one Sunday night. They weren’t wearing shoes, and some of the young ladies were probably not appropriately attired by the standards of the day. And I remember that our pastor gave an altar call at the end of that service, and they just all came forward. Though I was just as a little boy, I recognized there was a moment when the church had to decide what to do. There was this sweet little blue haired lady who got up out of her chair and went down and put her arms around a young lady and prayed with her and brought her to Christ.
And that turned everything. That was the pivot point for that church, in that moment, that lady who certainly may have wanted things to be different than they were. It probably wasn’t her style. But she didn’t care about her style. She laid it aside, and she put her arm around that young lady, and it made all the difference. She loved her to Jesus. So, why do we do all the research? Why do we collect all the data? So we can understand our neighbors, and we can love them, and we can introduce them to Christ in a way that makes sense to them and then leads them into the great adventure of following Him day to day.
David Capes
It is a great adventure. Dr. John Plake, thanks for being with us today on “The Stone Chapel Podcast.”
John Plake
Thank you, David.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
