John Plake - Why Is It So Hard For Me To Read The Bible?

Show Notes

John Plake - Why Is It So Hard For Me To Read The Bible? by Browncroft Community Church

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Peter Englert: Welcome to the Why God Why podcast episode. This is Peter Englert. I am one of the co-hosts of this show. I am here with our remarkable producer, Nathan Yoder, and our illustrious cohost Aaron Mercer. Aaron, how you doing today?

Aaron Mercer: I'm doing very well. I'm very excited about this conversation today.

Peter Englert: Well, we are bringing John Plake back. This is his second time. John Plake was a professor when I first got to know him. He's also currently working for the American Bible Society. The question that we're dealing with is why is it so hard for me to read the Bible, which is based on his recent study. And we've had some conversations about reading the Bible. So, yeah, I don't know. Aaron, do you want to just jump right in?

Aaron Mercer: Yeah, I think that will be great. I'm excited about this conversation. It's great to have you on the Why God Why podcast, again Jonathan. Thanks so much for that. And yeah, I guess isn't there a special club for people who have been here at least a couple times or something?

Peter Englert: John, do you want to the Alex Baldwin of the podcast or I don't know?

John Plake: I'm just glad to be with you guys again, it's great to have the conversation.

Aaron Mercer: Well hey John, I know you've talked with Peter a number of times in the past. And in particular on this podcast, but for people like me could you catch us up a little bit on your past how you got to where you're at now and then I definitely want to dig into the data later, but maybe we can just start with a little bit of your story?

John Plake: Yeah. So my background is kind of divided neatly into thirds. Before I came to American Bible Society, I spent about a third of my career, almost 10 years in pastoral ministry in the midwest. And then later in missionary service, predominantly in Asia Pacific, but also in some in Latin America and helping short term mission teams and even career missionaries, understand how culture influences the way we connect people to God's word and to the gospel in general. And then from that, I moved into Christian higher education, actually helping to train future missionaries and became the campus pastor at Evangel University in Springfield, Missouri. Which is where Peter and I got acquainted with one another through his brother. And so that was wonderful to be able to sit at the table and have some conversations with him.
And we got a chance to reconnect after I came to American Bible Society, where I serve as the Director of Ministry Intelligence, that job basically means I stand between the ministry program, people who are trying to get God's word into the hands of everybody in the world and help them understand it and engage with it and the data and metrics people who do all kinds of measurement and analysis and trying to understand what's going on in the world. And in this case, particularly in the United States with regard to people's views of the Bible, of faith and of the church.
And as part of that, I took over a study that has been going on now for 12 years, 13 separate studies. And it's called the State of the Bible. People can access that at stateofthebible.org, if they want to know a little bit more about it or download the most recent releases in the study, but it's just our chance to talk to Americans and say, what are you understanding about the Bible? What are your questions for the Bible? How are you engaging with faith? And so we learn a lot through that study every single year, and I have the privilege of being the executive editor and kind of principal investigator in that study.

Aaron Mercer: Wow. That's so interesting. So I know we're going to talk some more about some of your more recent findings from the State of the Bible, but I'm curious, and I think you got into this a little bit in your previous podcast, but that was like a year or so ago, right? So I'm really curious, how did you get from a campus environment, a campus ministry environment, to the data environment? I know you're kind of, you said you're acting as a bridge between those worlds right now, which is awesome, but you must have a love for data to be even there in the first place. What drew you that direction?

John Plake: I think that's funny. I do not have a love for data. I really don't.

Aaron Mercer: Okay. All right.

John Plake: I have a love for people and to the degree that data allow me to listen to a lot of people at scale and understand the challenges and the issues that they're facing. That's really what data does for me. And my curiosity about these kinds of things started when I was a young associate pastor working in northern Illinois and trying to figure out are we reaching everybody in our community? Is there anybody that we're missing? And I realized that my college education hadn't really prepared me for that, but I had questions I couldn't answer. And then when I got into graduate school and was looking toward missionary service, a lot of that training is based around realizing that the people you're going to be serving in another country or culture, are different than you are. And so understanding how they're different is really important so you can help connect the gospel to the questions they have and the challenges that they're experiencing.
And this is just an extension of that. So again, we recognize that culture changes over time. People have different backgrounds, varied experiences, but they all have questions that I think can be addressed from a framework that is contained in scripture. And how we understand where are the openings for the gospel and where are the openings for God's word and how do we help bridge the gap between 21st century America and this first century and earlier book is a really challenging subject, and it's what we in misology call contextualization. So how do we make those cultural and factual connections? And that's what gets me up every morning and helps me dig into the data so I can help people,

Peter Englert: Man, what a segue. So when you and I were emailing back and forth and I was reading over the report, I probably got in a little deeper and I was like, "Hey, let's do this question." And you came back and you were very gracious. And you said, "You know Peter, read the intro again." And I read the intro, which is rumbling with reality. And we landed on this question, why is it so hard for me to read the Bible? So what's funny about this question. I don't think this is a new question, but how about you shed some light to our listeners, why this question kind of emerged from this study?

John Plake: Well, I think what sparked the question and it's a really good and kind of evergreen question, but what sparked it was between 2021 and 2022 America really experienced a fairly sizeable shift in its engagement with God's word. The first thing that we saw was a major decrease in the proportion of Americans who say that realistically, they use the Bible at least three or four times a year. We call those people, Bible users, people who use the Bible on their own less than three times a year, we call non Bible users. And it's really this metric that we've invented as a way of saying, do you ever reach for the Bible? Do you ever like pick it up off the shelf or grab your iPhone and open You Version or whatever your favorite Bible app is. And do you ever reach for scripture or pop a CD in a CD player? Oh man, I'm starting to sound old CDs, but I still have the Bible on CD.
And so do you ever do that and try and engage with God's word or stream it to you on your device? And we saw this really big drop and we hadn't been expecting that. What we were hoping we'd report is that the movable middle, this sort of curious Bible exploration group would be growing and continue to grow. It had been on a four year upward trend. We also were hoping we'd see scripture engagement start to increase. It had been kind of flat for a few years and we wanted to see more people deeply engaging with God's word. Well, the bad news was that didn't happen. And as we began to dig into the numbers, we realized that there was something more going on in America that was making it harder for people to open God's word and then to live out the faith that's described in God's word. And that was the deeper story of 2022.

Peter Englert: So I think what I hear you saying is many people have struggles with why is it so hard for me to read the Bible and I think the classical struggles are it's an ancient book. I don't understand it. I know if it's relevant. I think what I hear you saying is, because you mentioned a number of these in there, whether it was the Ukrainian conflict with Russia, whether it was the racial reckoning, whether it was COVID, you felt that in this time, those were significant barriers, whereas that... And sometimes would actually push people towards the Bible. You felt that that stress might have pushed people away. Am I hearing you right?

John Plake: Yeah. So let's back up a couple of years when the COVID crisis initially happened, what we saw is kind of what we would expect to see. And that was that as people went into lockdown and things began to change, there was a lot more exploration of scripture going on. We saw an increase in people exploring the Bible, maybe not deeply engaging with it. Even Google searches about the Bible and biblical topics were up across America. And in fact, that was happening all around the world. And that had been sustained all through the COVID pandemic right up until January of 2022, when we saw a reversal of those trends and it was pretty dramatic as reversals go. In fact, it was so dramatic. We thought we'd done something wrong in the research process. So we went in and checked everything twice and three times, was our methodology messed up? Did we do this wrong or that wrong?
And as it turned out, we had actually run two parallel studies, both of them independent of one another. And they both basically told us the exact same thing. So we realized, no, we didn't mess up twice. It wasn't the sample. It wasn't the methodology. There's something real going on here. And so as we begin to dig into the data, what we discovered was really two things. One was the timing of the study. We were collecting data in the last three weeks of January. Now I know your time machine might be broken and you don't remember exactly what was happening in the last three weeks of January. I don't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday. So just to kind of refresh your memory in the last three weeks of January, the Omicron variant was really starting to pick up across America.
And it was particularly hitting in the midwest and in the southern United States. And these are the areas of the United States where more people traditionally have a connection to church and the Bible. And so they were struggling more perhaps than they would've otherwise. So if church had kind of been released from this social distancing or remote, and everybody had started to go back, well, now they were regressing. Now wait a minute. We can't go back to church. Wait a minute. We can't work in the food pantry, wait a minute. We can't volunteer in our community like we wanted to do before. And so what we noticed among Bible engaged people, people who really wanted to use the Bible was that they had a steep decline in the areas of scripture engagement that are about community, about worshiping together with others, about behaving generously with their time and their talent toward others, and about serving others in their community.
Often what happens is when people read the Bible, they experience God's voice speaking to them and saying, hey, John, I want you to do something in response to it. And that was the point of frustration. All of that, I want you to do something they couldn't do, mostly because of the pandemic. And there were no alternative ways. And I think subtly people began to back away from the Bible a bit, they set it down on the nightstand. They said, "I'll come back to it a little bit later." And we really hope that coming up in 2023, when we repeat the study, we're going to see that this trend has reversed. But in the meantime, the reality that we're facing in America is a lot of people who want to not just read the Bible as a form of ritual, but who want to read the Bible and respond to God's voice through it. They're struggling to really get that done.

Aaron Mercer: That's so interesting. Obviously it's not necessarily data that you want to hear and you're like, oh man what's the reason for that? I am curious, backing up trying to get maybe a broader view here. What was the trajectory that you've seen as far as Bible reading, Bible engagement on a more macro scale for say the last 10 years? Especially, if in so many ways 2020, 2021 were blips in a lot of different ways. They're important to look at, but what was the trajectory before and how does what you found so far in 2022 measure up to that?

John Plake: That's a great question. So we've been doing the State of the Bible research study since 2011. We have really good data going back that far. And so that Bible users metric that I talked about earlier, people who read the Bible on their own at least three times a year. So not a huge bar to cross, that's traditionally been right at 50% of Americans qualify as Bible users. Might be just a little bit below that, it might be just a little bit above it, but for the most part it's been right around 50%. But in 2022, what we discovered was that it dropped to 39%. Okay, so that's a 10% decrease that had been 50% before it dropped to 39% and change. And basically what that meant was there were 25 million Americans, almost 26 million Americans, who stepped away from the Bible and said, realistically, I'm not picking the Bible up at all.
That's a big shift, 25 million Americans. The other thing that we noticed was among scripture engaged people, that those who consistently interact with the Bible in a way that shapes their choices and kind of transforms their relationships with God and others, that number had been 64 million Americans in 2021, and it dropped to 49 million Americans in 2022. So people who are curiously exploring the Bible, we call them the movable middle had been 95 million last year. This year, it dropped to 66 million. So the only category that grew, of Americans with regard to the Bible was the Bible disengaged. Those who realistically don't ever make an attempt to interact with God's word, that group grew from 100 million to 145 million. So those are the big changes.

Peter Englert: I really appreciate how you're doing this. You're better with data than I am, but were the similar in if data helps people I'll look at it, but I'm so jealous of my co-host because he's into data like this, but.

Aaron Mercer: Well, actually, I have a follow up on my question. Can I ask it real quick?

Peter Englert: Sure.

Aaron Mercer: Related to the data. I mean, I am kind of nerding out a little bit right now. Is that right?

Peter Englert: I'll no-

Aaron Mercer: Peter laughs when I nerd out sometimes, so. So I just described it a potentially... I'm challenging my own question. I described it as a blip. The 2020, 2021. I am curious, obviously 2022 we're still in the middle of it right now, but how have you seen years like that? I know that your project obviously is it's relatively recent in the grand scheme of data that's out there. But as far as church attendance data, things like that in the past, if there's been a momentous trajectory, shifting moment in the history of our country, do you see, are these normally blips? And then they, you continue to follow the same course in the data or can there be a shift? And I know the shift right now, from what you're telling us right now, doesn't look like something that our Pastor Peter over here wants to hear about, but what have you seen in the past? And what are the possibilities you think there could be for the future?

John Plake: It's an interesting question, Aaron. And I always like to start answering questions like this with a big disclaimer, we are researchers, not fortune tellers. So we can't tell you what's going to happen tomorrow. We can tell you a little bit about the trends that have taken place in the past. And so there are a couple things I'd like to highlight here. One is that in the history of doing this kind of research, which is relatively brief in history terms. Since 2011, we've never seen a correction of this size ever. Of course, we've never had a worldwide pandemic either. So this is a major disruption. The second thing is that people say, well, why do you think scripture engagement dropped? In fact, I had a colleague of mine, being quite genuine and I think it was a worthwhile question to engage. She was asking us, do you think that what really happened was that older people are the ones who are most likely to be scripture engaged and they're also the most likely to die from COVID.
And so do you think what really happened was that older people died because of COVID and consequently, the number of scripture engaged people in America decreased through death. And so we didn't really think so, but we went in, we dug into the data and what we discovered was the change wasn't happening in older Americans at all. The change was happening among younger Americans who have school aged children. So it was happening among millennials mostly. And that was really fascinating to look at. In fact, in the most recent chapter that we came out with in May about the faith of our mothers, we discovered that moms are really under stress right now. And dads are under stress. If they have kids at home, they're having trouble finding time to engage with God's word and finding ways to engage with their faith meaningfully.
So is it a blip? Is it a trend? Prior to 2022, we had seen a four year trend of growth in the moveable middle, a lot more people engaging with scripture. We'd seen a four year decline in people who were Bible disengaged. And so those were both positive trends that have now reversed themselves. Time will tell. But I think my encouragement to those who are leaders in the church is to simply ask this question, given the reality that we see right now, how do we show up to serve those who are still looking to God's word for answers to their questions?

Peter Englert: I'm glad Aaron asked that question. I'm going to come back to my original question, but I think it's fairly important. I think most of our listeners are in their 20s or 30s. Not all of them are parents. And you made this very powerful comment. You said, "That it wasn't older people that stopped reading the Bible for God forbid passed away. It's more millennials." And I think how would you respond to the millennials that are listening to this? What did you find in the data that I wouldn't say is encouraging, but I think the church has talked about Bible reading almost as a kind of ultimate discipline, and we can kind of get into that. Whereas sometimes it comes across as judgment, but how did the data help you empathize with this generation as they're trying to engage the Bible?

John Plake: The thing I love the most about millennials, where we've done research with them is they want an answer to this basic question. Why should I care? I mean, if the Bible has something of value to offer me, would someone please make the case to me for what that value is? And I'm all ears, I'm open. But if the Bible doesn't have anything of value to offer me, then I'll look someplace else. Now you might think of that as self-serving or pragmatic or you can put whatever label on it you want to put. But the reality is that I think millennials are very curious about what the Bible has to say. They're curious about Jesus and they are open to knowing more if people will answer their questions. I think one of the traditional challenges, that Bible people have, pastors and church leaders is we often approach the task of communicating the gospel from the perspective of the Bible.
And that's not always bad, but at some point you got to connect the dots between the Bible, this ancient book that's not like any other book anybody's ever read, and how do we connect the message of the Bible? The themes of scripture, the teaching of scripture, to the questions that people really have about how they live their lives day to day. The Bible is not irrelevant, but the relevance of scripture is not always apparent to people who aren't familiar with it. And so that's the task of communicating the gospel that makes it meaningful and understandable to anyone in any place.

Peter Englert: So now I just want to follow up to that. So you recently released a chapter about mothers. We have a lot of young mothers that are listening to this podcast and I'd say some older mothers too, why don't you go a little bit deeper into kind of the findings and even your kind of pastoral look into it of, what really this seemed to be a group that engaged the Bible consistently, but there was a blip and a change. Why don't you go into that one?

John Plake: Yeah. Traditionally women with children in the home, we actually don't ask the question if you're a mother, what we do is we ask what's your gender, are you male or female? And then we ask, are there children under the age of 18 in your home? And then we use that to kind of look at the influence of having children at home. So when we talk about mothers, we're talking about women who have children under the age of 18, who are in their household. So let's just look back to what percentage of women with children in the home were meaningfully scripture engaged in, let's say, 2020. Okay, well that was 33% of women with children in the home were scripture engaged, 28% or 5% fewer are scripture engaged. If they don't have children in the home, that's in 2020. And that relationship tends to hold historically, women just do better with children in the home.
Interestingly fathers do way better with children in the home. So in 2020 men with children in the home, 41% of them were scripture engaged compared to 22% of men without children in the home. So there are really big differences for dads, but we were releasing this in May. So we focused on moms for Mother's Day. Okay. So that relationship has held. You have kids in the home, you're more scripture engaged because your faith becomes more important. You're asking other questions that maybe you didn't ask when you were younger. Maybe you didn't have kids. Maybe you got away from church or you were thinking about other things at that point in your life. But when kids come along, our faith tends to become more important to us. But in 2022, the situation has reversed.
So for women, with children in the home, only 15%, are scripture engaged that's down from 33% in 2020, that's a huge drop. And what about women without children in the home? 24% are scripture engaged, which is statistically unchanged from where it's been since 2020. So these are really fascinating data points that tell us moms are struggling a bit. In fact, when we asked moms about their stressors, how much stress they were experiencing and put those stressors into categories, we discovered that moms are in the highest stress category on average. And so there's a lot going on that women are having to balance. We've seen this in the news, right? The economic impacts of COVID-19, many women having to leave the workforce simply because they can't balance being the primary educator for their kids and being in school and not knowing when school's going to happen. And when it's not going to happen, when can they go to work, when can't they go to work, and these impacts are disproportionately falling on moms who have maybe hourly wage jobs, or they're not earning six figures and they don't get the kind of flexibility that you might get at a job at that level. They're younger, earlier in their career and balancing all of these things. So I have a lot of sympathy for young moms in particular.

Aaron Mercer: So Peter, thanks for asking that question. That was really interesting. You had mentioned earlier too, that ministry leaders need to think about what they're communicating to get people, to be interested in the Bible again, or maybe while they're communicating and thinking about, well, why are they not interested? Why is the data showing that they're not engaging the Bible? What do you see that as you're bridging this divide between those who are looking at the analytics, looking at the data and analyzing it, and those who are the ministry leaders, what is missing in their communication? What is it that they need to be saying or modeling somehow so that people will see that there is something important about engaging God's word and engaging the Bible on a regular basis?

John Plake: Yeah, Aaron, what I hear from people in our surveys, and I've heard this for several years now, is that the question of why should I engage with God's word? Why should I read the Bible? People mostly are motivated to read the Bible. They are very likely to say, they wish they read the Bible more. They say they read the Bible to connect with God or for a variety of other reasons. But when we ask them, why don't they connect with the Bible? It has nothing to do with the why, it has everything to do with the how. So, for instance, I think there's an assumption in the church that people just know how to pick up the Bible, read it and understand it. But when we've looked at people in the movable middle, and this is 30% to 50% of people who are in church with you every Sunday, depending on the church background that you come from 30% to 50% of people who are sitting next to you in church are probably not deeply engaging with scripture.
So why is that? One of the things that they tell us is that the language and the culture of scripture are just foreign to them. Now for a guy like me, I've got three seminary degrees. So it's hard for me to remember what it was like when I didn't know what the eye of the needle was or what a mustard seed was or why any of that was relevant to my faith. But there are all of these idiomatic expressions that are going on in scripture that require a certain amount of understanding. I remember when I was teaching at Evangel university, one of my students had gone on to seminary and he was studying advanced Hebrew. And he'd gotten to the place where he was trying to translate the book of Isaiah, which is really, I mean, that's advanced Hebrew, right? So he's digging in, he's trying to advance, trying to translate this scripture.
And he said "The problem I'm having is I know all the words, but I still don't know what it means." And that's partly because it's poetic and partly because it's prophetic. But I think we lose track of the fact that even in English, even in the New Living Translation, for instance, or the Good News Translation, when people pick up scripture, they don't automatically know what it means because culturally we've become more distant from the grand story of the Bible. It's just not as easy. You can't ask your second grade school teacher, or you can't ask your sophomore high school literature teacher. Hey, can you explain this to me? I don't really understand it. Americans have been walled off from access to what scripture means and how it should be applied in their lives.
So language and culture is tough. The format of the Bible is tough. It's not chronological. Most people don't know what the Tanakh is and it, why should they care? You know, how does that inform the way I read scripture. A lot of people pick up the Bible and they start in Genesis and they get to about Leviticus 18 and they're done. I mean, even if they wanted to read it straight through, they're lost at that point. So understanding the language, the culture of scripture, really they need a guide. They need someone who can help them start with their own questions and responsibly find answers in scripture to the questions that they have.

Peter Englert: I love where you're going with that. And I actually want to come back to one of my original questions, but Aaron had such a better question anyway. So, you made mention that you thought some of the data was down because people were reading the Bible and they couldn't respond. And what I find fascinating about that is as we talk about just religion in America, it's a little bit more individual, and I want to be careful as I want to be generous about this. I want to explore what Buddhism has to say. I want to explore what Christianity has to say. I want to explore the New Age, but when someone reads the Bible and really commits to it, there's certain changes that happens in them. So I guess, how do you kind of manage this tension of we live in this very individualistic society, but as people engage in the Bible, they actually become more communal and committed there and there's certain changes. How do you manage that tension in our culture today?

John Plake: I've said it before in other settings and maybe to just couch this response, my background is as a professor of intercultural studies. So I tend to see things in terms of culture. And there's a wonderful professor from Fuller Seminary and his name Sherwood Lingenfelter, and Lingenfelter talked about the gospel and culture. And there are different views about the gospel and culture. Does the gospel come alongside culture and make it better? Does the gospel emerge from within culture? Is it shaped by culture, et cetera, et cetera. And Lingenfelter said in a way that I didn't agree with at first, "That the gospel is fundamentally against every culture in the world. And every culture in the world is against the gospel." And what he meant by that wasn't that the gospel's design is to attack every culture or to tear down every culture.
But what he was saying was there are things about the gospel that are going to confront issues that are endemic in every culture, in society, in every culture in the world. And so it has a prophetic voice. The Bible has a way of putting its finger on me and putting its finger on my culture and the things that I was raised to value and say in the light of scripture and in the light of God's story, those things maybe aren't the best solution or the best answer. So I think you're right, that as people dig into scripture, they are sometimes confronted with changes that they need to make and that they need to consider. And one of those is this sort of hyper individualism that we have in the United States. That said, that's not what's going on here. Okay? So why is scripture turning down in 2022?
Is it because scripture is confronting the individualism in America? No, it's not because of that. It's rather the reverse. It's because people want to read scripture and through it have a sense that God is speaking to them and calling them to engage in their communities in really winsome and helpful ways. And they're frustrated in that engagement. They aren't finding an outlet for their faith because their faith isn't just supposed to be a ritual and their faith isn't just supposed to be something that they think about. They don't worship God between their ears. The longstanding tradition of the church for 2000 years is we worship God with our hands. We serve others on behalf of Christ because Christ has loved us. And so I think that's really where the rub is in America and God willing, I think we're going to turn the corner on that. I'm trusting that this will be a blip, but at the same time, I know that it won't be if the church doesn't recognize, hey, parents are hurting and people are looking for ways to live out their faith and make sure we are focusing on providing ways for people to live out their faith, even in the midst of a pandemic, providing ways to help moms and dads engage with scripture with their families, even in the midst of all the time pressure that they're experiencing.

Peter Englert: So I want to get practical here. I want you to take off researcher hat and put on pastoral hat. If we didn't use the why format... You said something about why is it so hard to read the Bible? It's really a how question, how do I do it? Be the guide on the side. And what would you say to people that ask this question, but it's really a how. Where would you tell them to start? What would you tell them to do? Where should they go?

John Plake: I think you start where you are. There's no need to start with Genesis and end with Revelation. You can start where you are with the questions that you have. Two things are really useful in that regard. There are some wonderful digital tools out there. I love the You Version Bible reading app, because you can download it and you can search for reading plans about the issues that are important in your life, where you're trying to find, what does the Bible say about addiction? Or what does the Bible say about relationships or about parenting or about whatever the changes that you're going through. So start with where you are. The second thing I'd say is use a guide. Nobody expects anyone to know where every story is in scripture. You don't have to be able to do that. Nobody's taking anything away from you if you can't remember where, you know, I don't know Daniel in the Lions Den is located or David and Goliath, or...
If you just don't know where those stories are, but you're looking for them. They are digital tools and guides that can help you. But the third thing I'd say is engage scripture with a friend. Now, what kind of a friend are you looking for? Well, you're looking for a friend who understands the Bible and who lives out a lifestyle that you appreciate, that is helpful and winsome. In other words, they look like they're winning at life. There are plenty of people who are willing to come alongside you and kind of skip a rock through the Bible. And they've got five favorite passages, and they're going to take you to those things. And that's good. Anytime you get into scripture, that's good.
But if you can find someone who will help you walk through scripture, find the answers to your questions and understand the big story of the Bible. Those are the best steps that you can take. I guess I got to give one more. And that's this. If the Bible that you have access to is your old family Bible with all the births and marriages recorded in it and maybe it's written in language that was really familiar in 1611, but you have trouble understanding it, feel free to find a different translation of the Bible. There's nothing wrong with the different translations of the Bible. So get the New Living Translation or get something that's more modern that you can pick up and understand. And that's really going to help make the message of the Bible come through in the English language. The Bible was written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. And since most of us don't speak those languages, we need some kind of a translation that makes it available to us to understand in modern English. And I think those modern translations help a lot.

Aaron Mercer: Those are great tips. I was just imagining someone trying to go back and get one of the Hebrew versions and make that [inaudible]. But yeah, no, certainly the English KJV and whatnot too, can be difficult. But I think what you just said, that's those are helpful things to be thinking about considering. And I was thinking, as you were talking, it seems like there's the issue of accessibility to the scripture doesn't seem like it would be a major issue. Although I guess if people to find it'd one thing if people to get to the digital store or the You Version Bible app or things like that that are out there. So the accessibility though, generally, if you look a little bit, if you just Google Bible, you'll probably start finding You version, Bible Hub and all sort of places like that. But what is the hurdle then that I... What could a ministry leader, a small group leader, or just a friend try to help? What's the hurdle someone can help to get their friend over to actually using the tools that are accessible there?
Is it something you mentioned doing a study together or something like that, is it something where someone should be looking to actually sit down with their friend and find a Bible study for them and work through? It was also thinking too, would you recommend even for ministry leaders, should we be hearing more small group sessions or even sermon series on actually the mechanics of how you read the Bible? What do you recommend to the ministry leaders that you're interacting with?

John Plake: Not that long ago, I had a young minister just starting out, he's maybe been in ministry for five years and he asked me, he said, "John, you do all this research. If you were starting out in ministry now, knowing what you know, if you were in my place now, what would you do differently than you did in the early 1990s when you were starting out in ministry?" And I thought about for that for a minute, and I said, "I would do everything differently. In fact, I'd do everything almost exactly the opposite of how I do it now and how I did it then." So let's think about how we present scripture. Even if a pastor is one of the rare people out there who leads a congregation through the Bible, chapter by chapter, verse by verse, we call it expository preaching, even if they're one of that rare breed of people, what they tend to do is they tend to come to Acts Chapter 7 and say, all right, it's the story of Stephen.
And so I'm going to do a bunch of research and I'm going to distill the story of Stephen down. I'm going to find out all the sources and I'm going to put together the most engaging, interesting, applicable message that I can about Acts chapter 7. And they might be really good at it. They may have done a spectacular job of that. And then at end of that, they'll give Acts Chapter 7 to their small group leaders and say, why don't you talk about how to apply this in our day to day lives. Now that's not bad. That's actually almost the best way, in my opinion, to do ministry today. But the actual best way to do it is the reverse of that. Have your individuals in small groups read Acts Chapter 7 ahead of time, have them do the spade work of figuring out what was going on in the history and the culture. Have them ask questions of the text.
And only after they've done all that work, do you preach your message on Acts Chapter 7, which can be exactly the same message. Here's why that's important. What pastors inadvertently do is they take all of the ways that God can speak to us through a passage like Acts Chapter 7. And they narrow them down to one particular message from Acts Chapter 7 and the way they believe they should apply it for their church. And that's good and what pastors should do, but it doesn't teach people how to take Acts Chapter 7, read it and understand it. And so this isn't just about Acts Chapter 7. I mean, it could be about the entire book of Matthew or whatever you want to say. I think people are sometimes inhibited from diving into scripture and attempting to understand what it has to say for them and how God is speaking to them through scripture simply because, well, pastor already said what it means. So we're done here. And we're not done here. It's supposed to be the start of a journey with scripture. So because of that, I think I would do it in reverse from the way I've done it all my life.

Peter Englert: It's interesting. We just had Mark Moore, the date of our recording we released his episode on why would I trust the Bible? And one of the things I loved that he said to our listeners was, "Just read a chapter and apply one thing." And I think it's in the spirit of what you're saying, which is invite people to do the work. Pastors and leaders, we can't work out muscle wise for you. I can't ask Aaron to bench press 300 pounds for me, even though he could.

Aaron Mercer: But I don't know if I bench press 300 pounds for myself.

Peter Englert: But yeah, I think what you're even saying from the research and the is there's a level as people engage it, they need a how, and they need a support and they need a guide, but they change in the midst of that.

John Plake: I think that's exactly right. I think if we consider reading the Bible to be a ritual form of worship, something that we do for God, I think we miss the point entirely. I think the Bible is God's revelation of Himself for us. And so it's this gift that we have to open and experience for ourselves. And like you said, nobody can bench press 300 pounds for me. Man, I wish you could. I couldn't do it for myself, but nevertheless, you can't hear God's voice for someone. God actually wants to speak to us through scripture and you can't have that experience if you're so inhibited by everybody around you, that you simply don't open God's word and read a chapter and apply one thing from it, ask God, can you speak to me through this? And then give him a chance to do that. What I've found is when people give God a chance to speak to them through scripture, he shows up and they actually experience the voice of God at work in their lives.

Aaron Mercer: So I got to ask this question. You were mentioning some of the not so good things that we are seeing, at least the immediate data. Hopefully this is a short term thing. I don't know if there was any data to come that you know about or things that you're are coming, maybe that can give us more hope. Is there more hopeful things coming in the 2022 report?

John Plake: Well, by the time this recording is made available to your listeners, they're going to be able to go to stateofthebible.org and download the first three chapters and chapter one and chapter two point out some pretty big challenges that we're experiencing in America with regard to the Bible. But chapter three returns to a theme that we've been exploring in collaboration with some great researchers at Harvard University's T.H. Chan's School of Public Health. And they have devised ways to look, at well, what does a good life look like? They call it human flourishing. What do I look like when I'm flourishing? And when we use those lenses, whether it's human flourishing or it's hope or its stress, whatever it is, when we look at people who are deeply engaging with God's word, they are overwhelmingly doing better and having a better life than those who are not engaging with God's word.
And it is just, to use researcher language, there's monotonic variants all over the place. The thing that's happening is the Bible is making a difference in individual's lives. And it just shows up in the data again and again, we're working on some more peer reviewed journal articles that we hope to have coming out later in the year. So there's so much good news for people who do engage with God's word. And that's why I think it's so important for the church to step up and say where people are struggling, we want to help them. When they don't know where to start, we're going to help them know where to start. When they don't know what it means. We're going to be there to explain what it means in a very relational way.
If I could, we were talking before, is the ability to study the Bible, is it taught or caught? And I was kind of captured by that idea, that whole question. And I remembered that really it is. It's caught in a way, because I think most people who decide to engage with God's word, they know someone from their past. I mean, or they remember someone who has been known as a spiritual person who deeply engages with God's word. And they remember them fondly. Now, obviously not everybody who reads the Bible is someone that you might remember fondly, but there are plenty of people who are spiritual folks, who you look at, or you remember, and you think I'd love to be like that someday. And so I think in that sense, there's an attractiveness to people who have allowed the Bible to shape their lives, but it's also taught and it's relational. It's not competitive. So it's not a competition.
It's not a Bible quiz competition, when you pick up scripture and try and learn how to understand it, oh, I got the answer wrong and that's minus 10 points or something. It doesn't work like that. I remember when my wife and I were dating. I had grown up playing somewhat competitive tennis with my brother and we would get together. He would beat me all the time, but he didn't beat me by a lot. And it was always competitive and we worked really hard at it. And so my date wanted to play tennis with me. And so I thought awesome. And so I showed up out on the tennis court in my standard competitive mode and I impersonated or right handed John McEnroe and tossed the ball up and hit my hardest serve and smoked it past her.
And I won the first game, whatever 45 to nothing. And I felt so good about myself and she never, ever wanted to see me again. I mean, we had to get past this because what she wanted me to do was hit the ball to her. So she could then hit it back. And I think it in a lot of ways, scripture engagement can be like that. Those of us who are way at the Jesus little brother or sister and of Bible engagement, and we understand all this stuff and we've forgotten more about the Bible than our friends know about the Bible. It can be hard for us to step back and meet them where they are. It's not about how well you know the Bible it's about how much you care for people. And by caring for people, you connect them to scripture at the point where they have a need, or they have an opening to God's word. And we trust God's spirit to speak to them in that moment, through his eternal word. And I know that sounds kind of crazy and mystical, but I think we get it backwards. We focus too much on interpreting the text and handling the text properly and not enough on the people who live in the context where they need God's words so much.

Peter Englert: So two last questions because I just kind of want to follow up. So you're only giving a preview to Aaron, myself and Nathan, our producer. But in the past, when you talked about the Harvard flourishing, what's it about 2022, that's so positive? Because you've said before that people that read the Bible tend to be less anxious players, less suppressed. What's one thing that stands out in flourishing that's super tangible and specific to help people understand what you're talking about?

John Plake: I think in the midst of the pandemic, when we first started looking at human flourishing research, what we discovered was that people who were deeply engaged with God's word were experiencing just as much stress as everybody else was experiencing. So this global pandemic, nobody had been through this stuff before and their stress levels using some standard ways of measuring post-traumatic stress. So that's the kinds of measures we're using here. That scripture engaged people, not scripture engaged people all had about the same levels of stress. What was going on for the scripture engaged people that was great was that they were flourishing at a higher level and they had higher levels of hope. What we've noticed now, as the pandemic is sort of beginning to wind down is that the stress levels of scripture engaged people have come way down and they are significantly lower than everybody else. And what we think about in social science research is this thing called resiliency or grit. There is a sense in which we see engagement with God's word, helping people be more resilient than their neighbors, helping them have hope and perspective that their neighbors don't have. And so, yes, things are going to get back to normal, but that new normal, when it includes God's word is a much more hopeful, much more connected, much more engaged place to be than for people who are not connected with God's word.

Peter Englert: Well, that's a good place to end with our last question. What does Jesus have to say about this question? So, so as we did the last time, Aaron and me are going to answer, and then as usual, whether it's a data researcher or pastor or missionary, you can clean up whatever mess we left. Does that sound good?

John Plake: You go right ahead.

Peter Englert: Aaron, I'm actually going to go first. So I thought about this question, why is it so hard for me to read the Bible, I just want to respond to one thing, what Jesus would have to say, maybe I'm putting this in his mouth, but. My one piece of someone that wants to start reading the Bible is don't start with Genesis, start with the New Testament in the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And I agree with John that there's going to be places that what's an eye of the needle, what are all these things, but there's also going to be these places where, Jesus is going to talk about anxiety. And we bring this verse up a lot, Matthew 6, that look at the birds of the air, there's a lot more that you'll capture and you'll see. And for people that are struggling with hypocrisy of the church, with Christianity, I think getting a vision of Jesus in the Bible with what you can understand will just do so much for you. So my only piece of advice is start with The first four books of the new Testament. They're also known as Jesus' biography, it's Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. So that's my one thing.

Aaron Mercer: Peter, I think this been a great conversation. Thank you John, so much for being on here with us. And I think that obviously Jesus wants us to be reading the Bible. That's one of the primary ways that God speaks to us is through a word that we have. And so I think that, we do need to get into it. I do love that there are so many tools that we can use now. So I think that hopefully someone could take that as encouragement. You could even just download the You Version app and find out whatever the verse of the day is.
And that's just a good place to start, but. And then there's a host of other tools to study, but I love that in the state of the Bible, there's the data that we can, we can chew on, but there's also the hopeful nuggets that you were just talking about too. And I know just from my own experience, I know that God definitely speaks through his word and he definitely comforts through his word. And so I think that he wants to continue to do that with all of us. So yeah. I'll pass it on John.

Peter Englert: You can clean up everything now, if you want.

John Plake: Thanks, Aaron. I think about Jesus and His use of scripture, the only scripture he had was the Old Testament. And he lived in a culture where there was a sizeable group of people, a very powerful group of people who kind of beat everybody over the head with their particular interpretation of the Bible. And they made it a weight and a struggle for people to understand and live by the word of God. But what Jesus did and he did it very consistently is he sought to kind of excavate God's word from the limitations and the errors that he saw in the culture around them so that people could experience God's love and compassion. I mean, he introduces his ministry in Nazareth saying he's there to bind up the broken hearted, to set captives at liberty. He always had a hopeful message.
He invited people out in a field to look at the birds of the air and the flowers in the field and see how beautiful they were and how God cared for them. And then he used this great little expression in Hebrew, [inaudible], how much the more does God love you? If he cares that much for a little bird that sells for a penny at the temple for sacrifice, how much more does he care for you? And I think what Jesus would want people to know is that the Bible is the story of how much he cares for you, no matter what you're facing. And he would invite you to experience scripture as an open invitation to a fuller life with God than you'd have apart from him.

Peter Englert: Wow. What a powerful place to close. You can find out more about the state of Bible at stateoftheBible.org. Am I correct on that? Yeah. And then you can find... John you're on Twitter. You're on LinkedIn. Those are kind of your two primary spots, right?

John Plake: Yeah. That's right.

Peter Englert: So, yeah, he's a great follow. John, I'm so glad our paths crossed. I'm so glad. I think this was a really encouraging episode. Thank you so much for being with us.

John Plake: Well, thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure to see you, Peter and Aaron great to meet you. Thanks for having a great conversation about the Bible.

Peter Englert: As we close this episode, you can find out more about the Why God Why podcast at whyGodwhypodcast.com. There you can subscribe. And you'll get great episodes like this one and then also more than that. So we hope you have a wonderful day. Thank you so much.