Suppose you agree that ours is an increasingly postliterate age. The average person, including the common Christian, is reading less, and Christians of all ages, especially the young, lack the fundamentals of biblical literacy. Is that every one there’s to say? Is hunger for Scripture simply dying out?
By no means. Of all tech pessimists I could also be chief, yet few things excite me greater than what’s happening online with the Bible. What we see just isn’t declining interest in Scripture but an explosion of it. The query just isn’t, due to this fact, whether people still need and actively seek nourishment from God’s Word but how best to get it to them.
Let me share a snapshot of some promising attempts to offer a solution—to satisfy the world’s deep hunger with the pleasures, depths, and inexhaustible beauties of the Word of God. Call them “digital lectors.” In the preliterate era, most believers never read the Bible for themselves but heard it read aloud within the gathered assembly of worship. Those who read the Word were called lectors, which is Latin for “readers” and a term still utilized in liturgical traditions.
Online, recent lectors are meeting the moment, presenting the Bible in fresh and artistic ways. Sometimes, in a stunning closing of the traditional circle, they aren’t explaining or expounding the text, just reading it aloud. Either way, persons are listening.
Let me begin with three overarching themes before turning to specific examples. The first and happiest thing to say about these online Bible ventures is that they’re ecumenical. Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox are all rising to the occasion, using a combination of audio, video, and animation. So far as I can tell, there’s little but mutual support and blessing between producers in addition to listeners, and infrequently they feature crossovers and shared platforms.
It could be a fabulous irony of windfall if the offender for thus much division and polarization today—namely, the web and our digital devices—became an instrument of Christian unity. Lord, hear our prayer!
Second, I see an unlimited range of audience scale and composition. Some lectors speak to hundreds of thousands, others to dozens. Often, audience size is set by a given project’s targeting: Is it for girls or men, Black or white, seekers or old-timers, deconstructed or reconstructed, liturgical or charismatic, or all the above? Does it presume massive background knowledge or nothing but curiosity? Does it expect hours of leisure time for lengthy videos or nothing beyond quarter-hour a day for a fast listen within the automotive?
Third, alongside broad ecumenical convergence is a transparent gender divergence. Outside of essentially the most generic and massively popular programs, there are clearly demarcated female and male spaces for online Bible engagement. The latter consist primarily of authors and speakers who leverage their social media followings into Bible studies, online collectives, and theological reflection—by women, for girls. Think of Beth Moore, Priscilla Shirer, Jen Wilkin, Jen Pollock Michel, Haley Stewart, and Phylicia Masonheimer, in addition to organizations like She Reads Truth and Well-Watered Women.
The lectors I’ll review below are either reading for a broad audience or, in a single case, geared toward men. Of the lectors chatting with women, I’ll only say: Keep it up. So long because the functional effect isn’t a Jefferson’s Bible for the sexes—separate, expurgated editions for female and male—this gender divergence isn’t an issue. It’s an asset. What we see online is what we see in church: believers wrestling with Scripture as men and girls.
That said, the primary resource I’ll name is widely popular, including across the gender divide. BibleProject is the brainchild of Tim Mackie and Jon Collins, who made their first video together a decade ago. The result, of their words, is “a nonprofit, crowdfunded organization that makes free resources like videos, podcasts, articles, and classes to assist people experience the Bible in a way that’s approachable and transformative. We do that by showcasing the literary art of the Scriptures and tracing key biblical themes from Genesis to Revelation.”
“Videos,” “approachable,” and “literary art” are the important thing words there. Their YouTube channel has greater than 400 videos and greater than 4 million followers. Dozens of videos have between 1 and 4 million views. The videos are typically 4–7 minutes long and consist of a voiceover unpacking the foremost through-lines and connections each inside a biblical book and between it and the remainder of Scripture. The commentary avoids jargon and “Christian-ese” while distilling historical and exegetical insights for an audience that will never have read the text in query.
For my money, nobody does it higher. Over the years, their videos have been a mainstay in my college classroom, they usually at all times land with students. BibleProject can unlock even essentially the most esoteric or foreign text—Leviticus, say, or Ezekiel. It seeks the spirit of the sacred page through careful and loving attention to the letter. God is revealed within the words of the Word.
In the podcast world, The Bible in a Year is the heavyweight. Launched by Ascension Presents in 2021, it publishes one episode day by day and has repeatedly ranked as essentially the most downloaded podcast within the nation.
The show is hosted by Father Mike, a Catholic priest on the University of Minnesota Duluth. Father Mike is young, telegenic, and intensely personable. On his YouTube channel, he speaks straight to the camera and explains Catholic teaching and practice in an easy, direct, and unapologetic style. On the podcast, he takes 15–25 minutes to read the biblical text aloud before offering modest context and commentary. Episodes are surely planned but feel unscripted, like a spontaneous homily delivered by a sensible pastor who loves the Bible and knows it from the within out. It’s not surprising that believers of all types have flocked to this resource, numberless Protestants amongst them.
A really different resource comes from Jonathan Pageau, a French-Canadian artist, icon carver, and convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. Over the last seven years, Pageau has developed something of a cult following online. In addition to his art, writing, and public speaking, he founded Orthodox Arts Journal; began a podcast called The Symbolic World; began a YouTube channel and a publishing press by the identical name; and now has turned your entire enterprise into a web site and online community that, early in April, held a World Summit. Well-known Pageau fans include Bishop Robert Barron, Rod Dreher, and Jordan Peterson.
By his own description, Pageau explores “the symbolic patterns that underlie our experience of the world.” He argues that creation—in itself and in our experience of it—is intrinsically symbolic, and that the symbols we discover across all times and cultures (akin to contrasts of sunshine and dark, above and below, inside and without, female and male) are written into the world by God himself. They are God’s language, his special vernacular, and modern humanity is affected by a mass symbolic amnesia. We are not any longer conversant with God as we once were.
The result, Pageau contends, is a civilizational crisis. Even Christians at the moment are post-symbolic people: We struggle to interact symbol-laden Scriptures and to interpret the world via biblical symbolism.
Pageau’s followers—a lot of them young men who feel alienated or adrift—flock to him for symbolic exposition of Scripture and nature alike. For the primary time, possibly even after a lifetime in church, they find that the Bible just isn’t boring but beautiful, a peerless cultural artifact, a book with bottomless depths. Like Jesus’s kingdom, the Bible just isn’t of this world. Its voice, though never lower than human, is by some means greater than human. It is a method of grace.
For all their theological and stylistic differences, BibleProject and The Bible in a Year are Pageau’s single-minded comrades on this sense: Their task as lectors for a recent age is to make the Bible interesting again. Or to place it the opposite way—they refuse to let the Bible be boring.
How many churches, pastors, and well-meaning teachers have assumed their job was to elucidate the Bible away, to apologize for it, to shave off the hard edges, to gloss over the wacky, the wild, the spooky? But these elements are exactly what draw so many individuals to the Bible in the primary place. We must not attempt to tame Scripture any greater than we attempt to tame God. Even in a postliterate age, Scripture untamed will proceed to fascinate and transform us.
There are more examples I could give—many more. Alastair Roberts, of the Theopolis Institute and the Davenant Institute, involves mind. Roberts is a co-host of Mere Fidelity and, on his own, has recorded a running podcast seriescommenting on every chapter of the Bible (in addition to a crossover conversation with Pageau). Other ventures value mentioning include Holy Ghost Stories, Truth Unites, Pints with Aquinas, Practicing the Way, and Word on Fire. But my aim here just isn’t to be exhaustive; removed from it. The point is that something is going on.
Shrewd lovers of God’s Word are using the web to introduce or reintroduce a whole generation of drifting believers to the Bible. This generation may never grow to be readers in the normal mode: book in hand, turning pages. But they are encountering Scripture. Digital lectors are ensuring of it.
Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the writer of 4 books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry.
