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- [00:03]
A
Do you feel like your church or school facility could be preventing growth? Are you frustrated or possibly overwhelmed at the thought of a complicated or costly building project? Are the limitations of your building becoming obstacles in the path to expanding your ministry? Have you ever felt like you could reach more people if only the facility was better suited to the needs of your community? Well, the team over at Risepoint can help you. As former ministry staff and church leaders, they understand how to to prioritize and help lead you to a place where the building is literally a ministry multiplier. Your mission should not be held back by your building. Their team of architects, interior designers and project managers have the professional experience to incorporate creative design solutions to move your mission forward. Check them out@risepoint.com that is RisePoint with an E. While you're there, schedule a free call to explore possibilities for your needs, the vision, your future, that sort of thing. Risepoint believes that God still uses spaces and they're here to help you again. Reach out to them today. That's RisePoint with an e.com RisePoint.com and Schedule A call today.
- [01:23]
B
Welcome to the Unseminary Podcast, the place where church leaders get practical insights, tips and strategies for ministry growth. Today, you're stepping into something bigger than just a conversation. This podcast is part of a bold mission to help 100 churches grow by 1,000 people. Whether you're dreaming of increasing your impact in your community, empowering your team, or reaching more people with the message of Jesus, you're in the right place. We're here to bring you the stuff you wish they taught in seminary, ideas and tools you can put into action this week to see transformation in your ministry. Let's dive in.
- [02:02]
A
Hey friends, welcome to the Unseminary Podcast. I am so glad that you have decided to tune in today. This is one of those episodes that there's a great resource in it that you're going to want to make sure you engage with. There's super helpful content. Plus it's about an area that I know so many of us are thinking about. We're wondering about, we're asking questions about so super excited to have John Plake with us today. He is the Chief Executive, Innovator, Innovation Officer and Editor in Chief of the State of the Bible Research series, which comes from the American Bible Society. And they're on a mission to make the Bible available to every person in a language and format each can understand and afford so that all may experience its life changing message. ABS has really a whole bunch of different tools and approaches and we're excited to kind of expose a little bit more about that today. John has been in ministry over 30 years. We'll just call it over 30 years. And it served as a pastor, missionary, professor, researcher. John, welcome to the show. So glad you're here.
- [03:03]
C
Thanks so much for having me today. It's great to be with you.
- [03:05]
A
Why don't you fill in the picture a little bit, tell us a little bit about your background, what brings you to your current work.
- [03:13]
C
Yeah, closer to 40 years now.
- [03:16]
A
Nice. Yeah, yeah, that's great.
- [03:17]
C
Comfortable to talk about that.
- [03:19]
A
That's great.
- [03:21]
C
Yeah. You know, I start out like a lot of people in ministry. I grew up in a home that ministry was central actually. Both my grandfathers were ministers, my father was a minister. Ministry is kind of the family business in a way. But I really did sense a direction from God when I was about 15 years old to pursue full time ministry. There was some detail around that ended up going to Bible college and then started what turned out to be about nine years of full time pastoral service. And I hadn't been in that for very long before I realized that everything I learned in Bible college was preparing me to serve a generation that no longer existed in a culture that was gone. And I thought, my goodness, I know God's word pretty well. And I mean, I'm a lifelong learner of God's word. I love the Bible and yet I didn't really know culture very well and I didn't develop those tools until just years and years of practice. Practice, some missionary service, wonderful teachers at Wheaton College and graduate school and, and just a lifelong journey of learning. So at American Bible Society, when I got here, the state of the Bible program or this research project was already underway and we'd been helped out by the Barna Group, which does some wonderful foundational work. And eventually it just kind of grew up and it got to a place where we had an internal team that was running it ourselves now in collaboration with the National Opinion Research Council or NORC at the University of Chicago. We just do, I think, what is the largest ongoing study of Americans relationship with the Bible and faith and the church. And we get to talk about it all the time. So I mean, the best job in the world.
- [05:03]
A
Yeah, that's so good. It's, it's great research. Something that I think should be on the kind of list of things that we need to be paying attention to. It's been a gift to the church for so long and something that we should continue to pay attention through now. Let's talk about specifically. We spent three plus decades, I didn't want to say almost 40. You know, I'm not saying that, I'm not saying that. I could say that. You know, a couple years ago I clicked across one of those numbers with a zero on the end as my birthday. And ever since then, I'm a little sensitive about the age thing. So anyways, as a ministry, you know, as a missionary, professor, researcher, you've done a lot. How does wearing all of those hats, what does that bring to you as you come to the data? How does that impact you as you think about really the state of the Bible research?
- [05:48]
C
Yeah, you know, I think research can be dull. You know, it can sound like it's all about writing questions or it's all statistics and numbers, but for me, the research is all about the people. It's all about the people in our communities that we're trying to understand better so we can serve them well with the gospel. I, for years have used the analogy that, that being in gospel ministry is like being a human bridge across a river. I grew up not very far from the Mississippi river in the St. Louis area, and there was a big 100 year flood when I was early on in ministry. And I mean, none of the bridges worked anymore because you couldn't get from one side to the other. And I thought, you know, that's a tragedy that I encountered sometimes in ministry where maybe I was deeply rooted in one bank of the river, the text, but I wasn't necessarily deeply rooted in the other bank of the river, which was the context, this lived experience of the people that I was, I was serving and that I wanted to serve in my community, but I needed to understand them better. So I wasn't just spouting, you know, Aristotelian logic to them or I wasn't just coming at them with the pat answers that I'd learned. Like, I'd never heard anybody in my life walk into my office and say, pastor John, you got to tell me what. Can you describe her Martylogy to me from like, I had to learn that in school, but that's not what people struggle with. They had different questions and I needed to love them and honor them enough to understand their questions and answer them responsibly and reliably from the pages of Scripture.
- [07:19]
A
Yeah, love it. Okay, well, we're going to dig into a little bit of, just a couple of the findings to kind of, we're trying to whet your appetite, friends, to take steps towards this. So the 20, 25 data showed, and we've seen this, a real bump in Bible engagement, particularly among millennials and men. If I'm reading it correctly, though, we saw 2026, a shift happen, maybe back down. And so what's going on? Actually, I heard another sociologist in a kind of a related field that was about church attendance, talked about the dead cat bounce that it was like, you know, which I thought, oh, that's a. But there's a similarity going on here. Pull this, this finding apart. Help us understand this.
- [07:55]
C
Yeah, apologies to cat lovers out there.
- [07:57]
A
Yes, exactly.
- [07:58]
C
We were hoping, you know, I think we were really hoping. We looked at 2025. We saw that men in particular leaning into the Bible in ways we hadn't seen recently, millennials doing the same thing there. There were some interesting numbers in 2025. And so when the 2026 numbers came to my desk in late January, I thought, I hope we're extending. I hope it's going to be a trend. But it wasn't. It was a blip. And there's more to it, though, than just the fact that scripture engagement didn't go up. It also didn't go down. And the level of people in America who are Bible disengaged, meaning they never pick up the Bible on purpose at all, that actually didn't go up either. What grew was this kind of curious explorer group in the middle that we call the movable middle. And over the last two years, it's grown by 9 million American adults. Wow. So what we do see is there's. There's openness to the Bible, there's experimentation with the Bible. The. But people are jumping in and they're trying it and they're not being able to get hold of it. And I think that's largely because of us, because Bible people who are around them aren't saying, please come do this with me. Let me help you. Let me honor you enough to respect your questions, to ask what you're dealing with, and help you explore those issues through the pages of Scripture.
- [09:20]
A
I love that movable middle man. That feels like the kind of group we want to connect with and reach out to in our community. Any other. When you've been thinking about this movable middle, what are some other kind of characteristics of those people or other things that, you know, are kind of telltale signs of this group as we're thinking about them, as it. As it pertains to Bible engagement?
- [09:40]
C
Yeah, they're an amazing group, and we're going to be talking more about them all year, but they are probably my favorite subject in America. There's 74 million American adults that are in the movable middle. 74 million of our neighbors who are like, and here's what they tend to say. They love the Bible. They think it's a great idea, but if you handed them a Bible, they don't know how to find what they're looking for. They don't know how to navigate it. They get confused by the language in. In scripture. I remember doing a. A focus group with a bunch of people in the movable middle. I was in Chicago. It was an area I was really familiar with. I used to pastor in that area. And we got them talking about their experience with the Bible, and we said, hey, does anything ever stop you or kind of, you know, make you check out because you're struggling with what's going on? And one young lady at the table said, yeah, you know, the language of the Bible is really hard for me to understand. It's a really old book. It uses expressions understand. And a gentleman sitting across the table from her just kind of chuckled and said, yeah, what the hell's a mustard seed? And everybody laughed. I was behind the glass, and I just about fell out of my chair because they didn't teach me to talk like that in Assemblies of God seminary. You know, that's just not the way we roll. But it was authentic. And he wasn't. He was just saying, boy, I don't. I don't get it. And. And then they said, you know, we really want a guide. And so we. At the time, there were some clergy abuse scandals that. Actually, there were billboards up in Chicago about clergy abuse scandals that all of us lamented. And so we're like, okay, listen, do you trust the church to be your guide? Because we saw these billboards, you know, and it's your city. And so what. What do you think? And they said, well, of course we do. I mean, it's terrible when people in the church abuse their position and abuse others, and that's not what they're supposed to do. But if we can't trust the church to help us understand the Bible, what good are they really? And so, yes, we're looking to you church to help us connect more deeply with the Bible, understand what it meant to the original hearers and readers, and how we apply it to our lives today.
- [11:48]
A
Okay, that's. That's. Yeah, that's really cool. I look forward to hearing more about the movable middle in this coming year. Another thing that jumped out to me, which I feel like Man, I've seen this in my church. This is like, you named a group that I see. But it's surprising. At least it's surprising on its face. So nearly half of weekly church attenders. Weekly church attenders, which is. That's like really engaged, you know, are not regularly engaging. Engaging scripture on their own. Man. What, so what should we do about that? That's an interesting. How does, how should that impact our discipleship strategy? What are you encouraging us to be thinking about, man? These people that are with us all the time, but they're not engaged with scripture?
- [12:32]
C
Well, I think the first thing to do is to just recognize it. You know, a lot of pastors that I've talked to, when we talk about scripture engagement, they tell me things like this. Everything we do is scripture engagement. I spend my whole week preparing a scriptural message. I'm, you know, we're preparing small group curriculum and Sunday school curriculum and all of this stuff. It's all about the. Everything we do is about the Bible. Well, okay, but I had a. I had a young youth pastor come to me not that long ago, and he said, john, look, you were me once a few years ago. If you knew then what you know now, what would you do differently? And the answer is I would do everything differently than the way I was taught to do it. Because what. In my tradition, there was a lot of emphasis on the preaching event. And I put a lot of effort into those communication events. But what I didn't put as much effort into is empowering people in my church to do what I was doing, which was dig into scripture, understand it for themselves, giving them the tools to do that. And then in May, we're going to be releasing a chapter just in a few, few days now, we're going to be releasing a chapter all about parents. And one of the startling things is the time pressure that moms are under. I mean, it's incredible. And so we need to understand where they're coming from and where they have barriers, but also have some compassion on them and help to support them when they're really facing struggles. Like they don't have enough time, they don't have the resources or the community coming around them. They. To help them to engage God's word more fulsomely, more transformatively. We know how to do this stuff, but we're not connecting the dots to everybody that's coming to hear us talk every week.
- [14:17]
A
That's good. That's good. I know I've in my seat as an xp. You know, I'VE overseen a lot of what we do on the programming side and what we do on the weekends. And I've, you know, it's like that. I don't think I've ever said this publicly. It's like the kind of behind the scenes conversation I've sometimes wondered. I've said, you know, like, what we do on the weekend to try to make the Bible understandable is so completely different than Tuesday morning in someone's life. Like, we pull out all the stops to make it interesting. We get like world class communicators, incredible graphics, you know, emotional music. All of this to try to. But then the question is, okay, so now on Tuesday morning when you're tired and you haven't had your coffee yet and you're just about to go read Scripture, man, like, that feels like a long ways away. There's like a gap there that I sometimes wonder. Maybe we're making it worse, you know, making. Maybe we're making it harder. I said that. You didn't say that. So maybe there's pastors that are listening here and they read this kind of report, they read this kind of finding and they're like, hey, that's interesting. But, like, what do I do in my church specifically? So, you know, we want to, we don't want to just leave people with a tough stat. I think we see that in our church. There's people in our church that are here all the time. They're not that engaged. But there's. But you've actually developed a new tool or ABS has developed a new tool to help us think through that. Why don't you walk us through it? Tell us a little bit about it. How does it work? Talk us how it can help us.
- [15:40]
C
Yeah. So recently we developed two tools that kind of work together. One of them you can find on the Internet at NextStep Bible. And it's just for anybody who's like, hey, I'm on a spiritual journey. I kind of stuck. I don't really know what to do next. Maybe you're just getting started exploring what it means to be a Christian. Maybe you're Jesus, little brother or sister, wherever you are, in that there's always a next step for us. And so what we've done is analyzed along about a million spiritual life surveys. And from this huge quantity of data, we've learned that people are at different places in that journey. There are different points on the map, and we want to make sure that they're equipped to have the right thing at the right time. I think Currently, there are 21,000 scripture engagement resources available there. They're absolutely free. They're in English, Spanish, and French. So go check it out. NextStep Bible. But if you're a pastor or you're a church leader, you're probably wondering, well, what's going on in my church? Right? So I see all the national data, but I think our tendency is to say, well, we're the exception.
- [16:45]
A
So true.
- [16:47]
C
We're doing okay. And. And so it's good to check our assumptions a little bit. They used to say a really Sad statistic that 10 o' clock on Sunday morning was the most segregated hour in America, which makes me sad. What makes me sad Also is that 12 o' clock noon in America is the most dishonest hour in America, because that's the hour when pastors tend to start greeting their people after the church service closes and they hear all these comments. Oh, Pastor, that was the best sermon I've ever heard. It wasn't. It just wasn't. All right, let's face it. There's somebody out there who preaches better than you do and better than I do. They're available on YouTube. People don't need you to be the best Bible teacher in the world. They need you to be the best pastor for them. And the tools to that are all about focusing on their relationship with the Bible, their holistic spiritual formation, and our leadership behaviors. And so for that, we built the next step for church assessment. It's actually standing on the foundation, or built on the engine block, if you want a different metaphor of the old reveal research that the Willow Creek association had come out with. It's no longer available. And we were able to acquire all of their historical learnings, but also add in things like human flourishing and e pastoral leadership behaviors that lead to churches really being missionally effective and strong. Excellent stuff on Bible engagement and spiritual formation. So the big challenge we had, I was talking with Dr. Ed Stetzer about this because he was at Lifeway Research when the transformational church assessment was being built. And it was always hard because analyzing this kind of data required a lot of human intervention. It's very, very expensive to do. It's very complicated to deliver. And even a small cost can be a barrier for churches that have strained budgets. It doesn't matter if you're a church of, you know, 2500 or 25,000 or 250. Right. There's always more places to put your money than there are dollars that are available to do it. So at American Bible Society, we said you know what? As a gift to the church, because we love the church, we need to make it completely free. And so you can go to church NextStep Bible. And you could sign up today. Literally, we're recording this on a, on a Thursday. You could go there today, and by Sunday, you could be launching your survey. Two weeks later. You'd automatically have results in your own online dashboard. You'd get key highlights emailed to you. There's a place for custom questions. There's just all kinds of really, really rich information there.
- [19:27]
A
So good.
- [19:28]
C
And it doesn't take the place of the kind of learning that you have as a pastor. You learn deeply in relationship with others. You're observing what's going on. You have a team that's around you. But what it does is it provides this valid, reliable sift and sort function. It's based on. Well, I don't even know how many. Well over 3,000 churches, well over half a million survey responses went into building this and making it a tool that, that is a good benchmark for you to say, you know what, if we want to move from where we are today to where God is calling us, here are the things we need to focus on.
- [20:04]
A
It's so good. And friends, I want to encourage you to go there. Just church.next step Bible. I know many of us have a heart for saying, listen, we want to measure more than just nickels and noses, the number of people that show up and revenue that comes in. And this is a great way to kind of inject at something that's at the core of what we're supposed to be doing as a church. So why don't we just give a little bit more detail? What is it, you know, what's it actually measuring? How is it, you know, how could it be helpful? How could it kind of dovetail with some of the things we're already tracking? Maybe give us, you know, what kind of insights are we going to gain from this if we, if we put our people through this?
- [20:40]
C
Yeah, maybe it's worthwhile to just back up and say it's based on a congregational assessment. So really, this kind of work is all about just listening to your congregation at scale. So if you have 25 people coming to church, you can probably have this conversation with them if you know how to ask the right questions. You can go to the website. You're like, what's in the survey? Just there's a button you can click. You can read the whole survey. It's fine. We're not going to try and surprise you with anything but really simple stuff. How's your relationship with Jesus? How often are you interacting with scripture? What difference is that making in your life? We ask the standard Harvard human flourishing questions. We ask about how the pastoral team or the senior pastor, him or herself, is doing at actually modeling Christlike leadership for you. And all of that reporting then gets brought into a database. It's all anonymous. So individuals don't. They don't have to tell you who they are. They can't tell you who they are other than by characteristics. And you're going to get this really good, robust picture of what's going on at the church. Now, what does it take for somebody to do that? It takes about 20 minutes of their time. And time is expensive, right? People always have too much to do. So in return for that investment, at the end of their survey experience, they will have already told us everything we need to know to match them to great resources and at NextStep Bible, and with their permission, not without it, they can click a button, pass that data over to the individual NextStep Bible platform, they can create an account, and right away they're going to be finding things like youversion Bible reading plans that are just for them. If you've got people in your church and they're outliers, they're. They're way more spiritually advanced than everybody else, or they're just getting started and everybody else is way ahead of them, these kinds of tools create bespoke pathways for them so they know what to do next. All the while, the church leadership can sit back and say, okay, here's our results. And as a team, now, what do we need to do to serve the whole congregation?
- [22:50]
A
Well, I love this. You know, this is what incredible tool that you've put together here for our churches to wrestle through and to, you know, not only help us as a church, as we're thinking about these issues, but then help individuals in our church. Or what would be some of the ways that churches might use the data that's generated to impact what we're doing in our programming? How could we use this to improve what we're doing?
- [23:14]
C
Sure. There are really three things we want everybody to do. First, just discover what's going on. Just, just check your assumptions at the door and say, okay, what did the data tell us about what's going on in our church life and in our people's lives? That's the first thing. Second thing is, it's going to surface for you the top three things that you're Doing great, and it's going to give them to you in the report. And you need to throw a party. Like, there are people who make these things happen for you. No pastor's doing this all by themselves. And so plan a party, celebrate what's going well. The third thing it's going to do is it's going to give you suggestions about, okay, here's where your congregation is today. It won't support surprise you, but it might inform you. I, I've never seen a pastor look at the report and go, ah, you guys got it wrong. Usually they, they see the report and they go, yeah, okay, I've had.
- [24:10]
A
Yeah, yeah, right.
- [24:11]
C
But we don't, we don't have time. We don't have the resources, we don't have the expertise to be able to sit down and, and kind of scientifically walk through this process. So we do that for you. We deliver the report, and then we're going to give you two key action items that we think churches like yours, in a similar place have done that have helped move them toward spiritual health and missional effectiveness. And that's really what it's all about. We want your congregation to be spiritually healthy. We want your, your church as a whole to be missionally effective. And when that happens, often there's numerical growth, often there's financial growth, but there's certainly more missional impact that's coming through your congregation, and it's workable.
- [24:54]
A
Yeah, that's cool. So if I'm like a church of a thousand people, let's say, and just round number to picking it out of the sky, what kind of percentage of my congregation would I need to take this to give me a reasonable, you know, statistical, you know, feeling good about the data for it? What kind of number should I be thinking about?
- [25:15]
C
Well, the first thing is we built in a tool that will tell you how to get to a margin of error of plus or minus 3%. And that does vary depending on the adult attendance that you have. So let's say you got a thousand adults. And by adults, I mean anybody in high school or older can probably take this survey and you can cut the data like by gender or by age. All of that live filtering is in the online platform. So you're the youth pastor and you're like, well, wait, tell me about the young people that took the survey. You can just look right at them and compare them to the rest of the congregation, which I bet will be enlightening. But, but nevertheless, how many do you need? If you're a Church of a ousand, it's about 275.
- [25:55]
A
Okay.
- [25:56]
C
If it's a smaller church than that, then you're still going to need a pretty significant percentage. So if I roll that all the way down to a church of 100, you need 80.
- [26:05]
A
Okay.
- [26:06]
C
And if you roll that up to a church of 5,000, well, you don't need that many more than 275. So you're going to report that out to you. It's very, very doable. And, you know, I've pastored at large churches and I pastored a small church. And I'll tell you, when I pastored a church of under 100, I could have gotten a census of the people, like everybody to do a survey like this. They would have been glad to tell me these things. And it's not that I couldn't have had a conversation one on one with most of the adults in the congregation. It was something different. In that case, I actually didn't know what to ask. I used to run into this when I was a campus pastor at a Christian university and I would have young people walk into my office and I was like, I know I should be able to help them, but the challenge they're facing is different than anything I'm familiar with. I don't have any analog for this in my personal experience. And so this sort of takes the mystery away. We don't ask fluffy questions. We ask research proven questions that are going to give you the information you really need so you can take action.
- [27:08]
A
That's amazing. That's. I think it's such a great tool for people. I can see how, you know, be so helpful for folks that are listening in to, you know, be able to plug in, grab this experience for their people, help their church, help the folks that are attending. That's. That's incredible. So, you know, you've picked an interesting vocation to be connected with the American Bible Society. And because, you know, this is such a critical, important part of developing people's relationship, obviously with Jesus, it's core to all of it. And we have seen a long, historic downward trend. And you're pushing against that, which is amazing. But what gives you hope in the middle of all of that? When you look at the church around, you know, the country, where do you see flashes of just good things going on that are like, you know, when it comes to the relationship with scripture, that even, you know, even when we see maybe the overall numbers are not as great as we want them to be, what are some kind of flashes of Hope we should. That we could encourage folks with today.
- [28:06]
C
Well, I'd like to maybe point to just three things that leap to mind. The first of them is I never talk to anybody in the church who says the Bible's a bad idea. Everybody likes the Bible. We're all trying to figure out how to communicate its message better, to understand it more deeply. It's transforming our lives, and we want to be able to share it with others. And that's great, because, number two, there's nothing that makes a bigger difference in somebody's spiritual life than their relationship with the Bible. I mean, absolutely nothing. And I'm saying this as a researcher. I've tested it. I can't find anything that makes a bigger difference. In fact, when we looked at Christian college and university students, 60% of their overall spiritual health across lots of domains, Beliefs, practice, putting faith into action, loving God, loving others, all these things. 60% of the variance in their spiritual health is solely accounted for by their relationship with the Bible. So if we can help people have a dynamic relationship with scripture, we win. That's all there is to it. It's just that simple. And so that is really encouraging. And then the third thing. The third thing is. How do I say this nicely? I'm from Gen X. And so to my baby boomer friends, I'm sorry, but you guys don't have the influence that you once did. And that's a good thing, because there's new openness among millennials and Gen Z and even younger Gen X that we just don't see among baby boomers. It's like baby boomers made up their minds in the 60s and early 70s and said, this is what I believe, and I'm not changing. They haven't. That's not to say that someone who's a baby boomer can't have a spiritual experience and transformational experience. It does happen, but on the population level. Like when we looked at the Bay Area of San Francisco, if you look at the scripture engagement, church engagement, love God, love others data in the Bay Area, it looks like what you'd expect until you strip out the baby boomers. And then suddenly it looks better than every place else in America. You're like, what's going on? Well, it looks like all the unreconstructed hippies that moved to the Bay Area are actually holding a lid on the population numbers. And when you remove that and you go, oh, wait a minute, let me look under the headline and say, what's happening? There's more going on than is easy to see. And I think this happens in big national trends. Oh, is scripture engagement up or down? Is, you know, church attendance up or down? What's going. Big national trends. Yeah, okay, those are helpful and we want those to change. But what's changing first is below the fold. Things in Gen Z, things among millennials, things in young men, those things are starting to change. And I think those are the first glimmerings that God is at work in a new way in America. And I can't wait to see it.
- [30:54]
A
Yeah, that's a, that's a great word. And that lines up with what we're seeing, even just experientially talking to churches across the country, you know, we're, we're seeing there is something going on with younger generations, which is great to see. I was, I was born in 1974, the lowest birth rate year of the 20th century. I am classic Gen X. Like, you know, I am like, statistic. I'm the statistical average Gen X and has spent a lot of my time trying to hand stuff from the boomers to the millennials. And yeah, there's lots of encouraging news there, particularly with the younger generations. I also want to speak to the work I've done in the church growth. Stuff that I've done in coaching, I've done with churches. One of the things that's just undeniable is churches that have a high view of scripture, that is, they're trying to get people engaged with scripture. They, they talk about it like it's actually true. How do we say that? I don't know. What's the best way to talk about that? Those are the churches that are prevailing, and that actually works out statistically. You see that time and again. Talk to us about that dynamic, which is kind of co. Related to the things we're talking about today. What, from your perspective in the stats and all that, how have you seen that work out as you've looked at churches across the country?
- [32:08]
C
Yeah, I think you're exactly right. The churches that are the healthiest in America, that are growing, that where people are spiritually healthy, have a really dynamic relationship with scripture. And it kind of, it cuts across tradition. There are some traditional things going on. I was listening to Justin Brierly and his surprising Rebirth of Belief in God podcast. And it was from last season, and he had someone on, he was interviewing, and what she was saying was, there are. The parts of the church that seem to be thriving are kind of the, the, the older, the ancientness traditions, whether it's Catholic or orthodox, what she called, somewhat irreverently, the smells and bells side of the church. And on the other side, kind of my end of the swimming pool, I'm from the Assemblies of God, so the Pentecostal and Charismatic side. And she said, what's going on is that both ends of that spectrum are totalizing. They're saying, you know what, the Bible places certain expectations and demands on people. Christ places certain expectations and demands on people. And these parts of the church aren't sort of shy about talking about that from a biblical perspective. She said, what's, what's dying is that part in the middle where we've reduced church to a PowerPoint and a, you know, an Excel spreadsheet. And she said that part of the church seems to be dying and no one's coming to the funeral.
- [33:32]
A
That's good.
- [33:33]
C
Hey, right, yeah. If we revitalize our relationship with God through scripture, there's a next step for every, every church. It doesn't matter what, you know, whether you're mainline or evangelical or, you know, Pentecostal or orthodox or whatever it is, but. But reviving our relationship with God through scripture is really where it's at.
- [33:54]
A
That's so good. I, yeah, I call that middle group the just because it rhymes doesn't mean it's true group. You know, like the, you know, we. They're just like, it's all my thoughts. No one wants to come and find us. They want to find God. Ultimately. Ultimately. Well, I don't want to pick any fights with anybody that's listening in, but I really appreciate today's conversation. John. This has been great. So we want to send people to church. Next Step Bible Man. The. The promise of. In two weeks, your church could have a comprehensive report on spiritual hell, on where your church's spiritual health is at. That's a huge promise. And so again, just go to church. DOT Next Step Bible. Any kind of final words as we wrap up today's episode.
- [34:32]
C
You know, you might be familiar with Callie Parkinson. Callie was the co author of all of the Reveal books, every single one of them. She was head of communications for the Willow Creek association when they were running this. She's probably had more conversations with pastors and church leaders about survey results like this than anybody I know, maybe than anybody alive. And Callie likes this so much, she said, john, I want to have a personal consultation with the first hundred churches that go through this. And so if you want to be in that group, she's going to offer to spend an hour with you and just walk through your results and help explain it. There are videos throughout the platform that will explain it as well. And you can't beat talking to Callie. She loves pastors. She says you're the salt of the earth and she just really wants to serve you because the work that you do to save people is just so valuable to her. So anyway, just wanted to offer that I know you'd probably love to meet Cali.
- [35:30]
A
Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, appreciate you being here today. Thanks for the great work you do at the American Bible Society. John, Appreciate you being on today.
- [35:37]
C
Thank you, thank you.
- [35:38]
B
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Unseminary Podcast. If you found today's conversation helpful, I'd share it with a friend in ministry. It's a simple way to spark communion ideas and grow together. Also, don't Forget to visit unseminary.com to sign up for our email list. You'll get exclusive resources and practical tools delivered straight to your inbox to help you lead your church more effectively. Most importantly, take what you learned today and put it into action this week. Ministry impact starts with small, intentional steps. See you next time.