“Have You Thought About Getting People to Read the Bible?”

After Grace Point Church in San Antonio, TX participated in the Reveal ¹ study, which showed that the number one issue hindering spiritual growth was people knowing and understanding the Bible, they searched for ways to help their people engage in God's Word. Associate Pastor Mike Sharrow shares how You've Got The Time was the answer—though he didn't think so at first.

He shares, "We hear every publisher, every ministry, and every para-church organization say, 'We've got the best thing since sliced bread. It's going to change the world,' and eventually you stop believing it. But nine months before we heard about Faith Comes By Hearing, we were part of the pilot research for the Reveal study. They surveyed our congregation and then compared it to the rest of the country to determine the hurdles to spiritual growth and to transformation. They hired a consumer research scientist to take the data and bring back a perspective. We were all on pins and needles—what are they going to tell us? What is the secret we're missing?

The statistician said, 'I looked through all the different trends. There are people who lean this way and that way, but throughout all the data I've never seen such a dominant effect of one single trigger that can cause spiritual transformation.'

Really! What is it? Is it really cool small groups, is it really good children's programs, is it missions trips?

He said, 'Have you guys thought about getting people to read the Bible?'

The statistician continued, 'The data shows conclusively that if people really read and understand this book, it's just off the charts that their life changes.'

It's frustrating for a church that is Gospel believing, Bible proclaiming. We preach the Word, we have Bible studies, we give away Bibles, we have classes. We're not a Bible-lite church. And yet the ceiling effect in our congregation is people not knowing or not understanding God's Word. So you scratch your head and ask, what have we not done? So, we had a pastoral meeting and they said, 'Mike, your job is to figure out how to fix this. Figure out how to get this discipleship thing working, get everyone into the Word of God.'

Now I'm a business guy by background so I'm a little skeptical of numbers and how you count things, so when Morgan Jackson came and talked to us about Faith Comes By Hearing, I thought, it's very convenient for an Audio Bible ministry to talk about how people don't read. He started using pretty high statistics: more than 65% of high school graduates not reading. I found it inconceivable for a guy who loves books and sees people carrying gargantuan Bibles every Sunday. It couldn't be true in our church.

So I asked a friend who is a linguistics professor to do some straw polls for me. He came back heart-broken. In his graduate-level linguistics course, he said, 'Mike, only 15% of my graduate students have read any book in the last 5 years. They're reading textbooks, but in terms of reading because they enjoy and choose to, only 15% have read anything. Mike, their numbers were soft.'

I thought, so maybe they're not reading but they have to have read the Bible. We had the data from the study at a macro-level, so I surveyed just our engaged members—people with an average time at our church of 8+ years. We found 72% of them had never read the Gospels. Then I found out that 50% of my leaders had not read the Gospels. Just the Gospels.

So we took all that depressing data, took this hopeful vision cast from Morgan and thought, maybe there is something in this. Faith Comes By Hearing wasn't asking me to buy anything, they were just asking us to buy into the vision.

Then just before we pulled the trigger, we stepped back and thought, wait a minute, isn't there a fallacy in doing an audio program just like there is in doing a reading program? There's no shortage of people in Texas having Bibles. There's not an access issue. There's a prioritization issue.

If I just give everyone this wonderful media, that doesn't mean they're going to listen to it. It could go right on the shelf next to the Bible. We realized, if we really believe the number one issue hindering spiritual growth is knowing and understanding the Bible, why would we make it compete for attention?

So we spent months coordinating our ministry areas and saying, whatever you had planned for this fall, change it. We did children's devotional guides, youth discussion guides, and adult Bible study guides. For this 40-day period we wanted it to be impossible to be a part of this congregation and not be listening.

Listening to the Audio Bible opened up a whole new set of conversations because it wasn't Mike's opinion, it was, 'So Jesus really seemed to care about this. Help me understand why I have to do that because I can't get His words out of my head.'

CHANGING LIVES

I had a guy who came to Christ a year ago. He was a stock boy at a local grocery store. He brought his BibleStick and said, 'This is great! I stopped listening to Metallica and started listening to this while I stock shelves at night. I found out my mindset is totally changing when I change what I'm putting in my head. But it's broken. It keeps digitally skipping or something.' I told him it shouldn't skip. He said, 'No, it's looping. It's the same stuff. Jesus is born, then he lives, then he dies. He's born, he lives, he dies. I got to the fourth time and I know, I know, He's going to die.'

So he stopped listening to it. Here's a guy who has grown up around church his whole life and he couldn't figure out why the Bible was looping this set of stories four times. I told him, if you listen the fifth time, it totally goes off to a new set of stories.

We're so shocked to think of that kind of biblical illiteracy from someone who's been around church forever. And yet he's probably more representative of the common man than we think. As much as that's disturbing for ministers, that's reality.

Then you have people who know the Gospels but read it through a lens of convenience. A lady came to me one Sunday morning crying. She said, 'I've been angry at you since last Sunday. I do not like the Jesus of the rich, young ruler. The fact that he would not compromise. He didn't understand that there were certain things the guy struggled with and didn't want to give up and he let the man walk away. My Jesus would never let someone walk away. He would have chased him. He would have accepted him as he was and not made him give up anything.'
I asked, so why does that anger you?

She said, 'When I came to Christ years ago, I was very clear with God that there were things I wanted Him in and things I did not. That was the deal. But the Jesus in that story—I don't like what that would implicate in my life.'

I thought, that's wonderful. I love the fact that the words of Jesus are convicting her and troubling her spirit. I told her, I hope you get mad and yell at God and come to terms with what this means in your life.

Probably the best story would be the Brooks family. The oldest son is fairly mad at God but they thought, 'This is our last chance. He's here one more year.' They mandated, 'Every night at 8:30 we're going to listen to the MP3 Bible and talk about today's listening.' Well, there was wailing and gnashing of teeth. In that family with four teenagers, the last thing they wanted to do is sit with mom and dad listening to the Bible. The first couple of nights the kids were all angry and mouthing off. They got to the third, fourth night and were listening to the demon possession stories and how Jesus confronted those. Her son sat there with his arms crossed, but was really disturbed hearing the stories. He went to bed and woke screaming at two in the morning. Mother came running in, 'Are you okay?'

'I've been having these dreams that there's this dark presence trying to steal my soul and God is trying to call me to Him. But I'm standing in the middle undecided and if I didn't make a move quick my soul was going to be stolen. It just terrified me. I don't know what to do.' The family, at two in the morning gathers around this rebellious, hard-hearted kid and began praying over him and he weeps. He comes to breakfast the next morning with a totally different demeanor. He tells his parents, 'Thank you for forcing me to hear this this week.' Mom called me a couple days later, 'Thank you for encouraging me to keep going through this battle because it's not like everything is fixed, but my son is changing and there's something happening in him.'

Those are the things you don't know how to engineer. We just put the Word of God in their home and it breathed."

¹The first Reveal study from 2004 - 2007 surveyed 6,000 congregants from Willow Creek and 4,943 congregants from six other geographically and culturally diverse churches. The next Follow Me study surveyed 80,000 people in more than 200 churches in Nov-Dec 2007 and led to the two “breakthrough discoveries” that Christ-centered people show enormous capacity for increased kingdom impact, and the Bible is the most powerful catalyst for spiritual growth.