A NEW edition of the Bible Course, released by the Bible Society on Monday, features eight videos on how scripture “matches together as an overarching narrative”.
The course, first launched in 2018, has been translated into Welsh, French, Mandarin, Portuguese, Urdu, Spanish, and Bulgarian, and has been utilized by 140,000 people, the Bible Society says.
Its Bible engagement lead, Dr Andrew Ollerton, who contributed to the course, told the Church Times: “The decision to create a new edition was largely triggered by the success of the previous one. . . The world has modified rapidly within the last seven years since we released the [previous] version.
“So, this time, we’ve began by changing the content and, perhaps more importantly, the delivery style so as to reach younger audiences. That means it’s somewhat more fast-paced, has more energy, and there are rather a lot more visual elements.”
In the Bible Society’s report The Quiet Revival, published last month (News 11 April), almost one third of the 18- to 24-year-old respondents said that they were curious to learn more in regards to the Bible. Yet, of those that did, 35 per cent said that their faith was “undermined after they think/examine some parts” of it.
“Listening to those statistics suggests that we’re going to have a chance for the Bible course to have not only a discipleship role for existing Christians, but an evangelistic role — to share the message of the Bible with people outside the 4 partitions of the church,” Dr Ollerton said.
Updates to the course include a digital-hub experience, that has an “additional layer of content and a pathway for the audience to explore”. Articles, discussion-prompts, and other videos may be viewed on the hub, and a course guidebook is on the market to buy.
Eight “Bible experts”, including Claire Williams, the Revd Dr Helen Paynter, Nick Spencer, and David Harley, contribute to episodes “based on their academic specialism or scholarship”.
The course also incorporates testimonies from “people whose lives have been impacted by the Bible”, which, Dr Ollerton says, allows for more diversity of voices, and helps to forestall the course from being “too dry or academic”, since “every session has a private story. . .
“I believe the stories really help people inhabit the Bible story for themselves, fairly than considering it’s something distant and historic. If you’ll be able to make the Bible accessible and relevant, people of any walk of life who want to search out a message of truth and hope that might actually cause their lives to go in a greater direction are going to have an interest.”
Dr Ollerton said of the video content: “It’s so hard to represent the scope of scripture. . . We won’t satisfy everyone’s questions or answer all of the detail or objections, but what we could have done is given folks that big-picture view.
“We want people, by the top of the course, to feel like they know the way the entire Bible matches together . . . that helped inform those content decisions all the best way.
He concluded: “What excites me greater than the rest is seeing how individuals who feel like there’s no meaning or hope of their life will discover how Jesus can really bring that hope and meaning through the Bible.”
