Your Church May Know Less Bible Than You Think (And What to Do About It)

In November 1900, Mark Twain delivered a speech titled “The Disappearance of Literature” to the students at Connecticut Wesleyan University. With signature slyness, he told them, “I don’t believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don’t want to. That’s something that you just want to take on trust. It’s . . . the definition of a classic—something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

Twain was noting the beginning of the illiteracy rockslide that we now witness as an avalanche. The statistics we see in the age of smartphones and social media bear out our eroded literacy: In 2003, average Americans older than age 15 read 21.9 minutes on a given day. By 2010, the number had dropped to 18.3 minutes, and in 2025, it had sunk to 16.2 minutes a day. Imagine how ChatGPT will gut that number even further in the next few years.

America is moving rapidly into a postliterate reality, a sort of new Dark Ages, one in which we consume information in images and sound bites, all predigested for us by others. Consider the implications for a system of belief whose transmission from one generation to the next is staked on a book.

Christian Literacy Crisis

A new survey from Lifeway Research throws into stark relief the chasm between Christian commitment to and knowledge of the Bible. More than 2,000 Christians who attend church in a typical month were surveyed across eight categories of Bible knowledge: major people, passages, events, divisions of Scripture, and more. The researchers designed questions around what would be typically well known rather than obscure.

Two out of three respondents scored less than 60, a failing grade. Fifty-five percent could not correctly name the first king of Israel. Only 11 percent could correctly order four major Old Testament events, and only 27 percent could correctly order four major New Testament events. Forty-four percent failed to identify the book of Mark as belonging to the Gospels. Two out of three respondents wrongly believed Hezekiah was a book of the Bible, and 44 percent believed the Gospel of Thomas was as well.

Christians have succumbed to the general literacy crisis of the culture. The “people of the Book” don’t read it. The Bible itself, the classic of all classics, has apparently become a book that every Christian wants to have read, and few Christians want to read. If we do read to sustain our faith, we’re more likely to read books about the Bible than the Bible itself. We may consume sermons or podcasts or use devotional resources that cherry-pick verses to give us a positive emotion in 10 minutes or less, but largely, we’ve become curators of other people’s opinions about a book we don’t read ourselves.

Failure of Discipleship

I believe these results show a failure of discipleship strategies, one with massive implications: We cannot pass along to someone else what we ourselves don’t know.

How can the church fulfill the Great Commission if it’s incapable of teaching others to observe everything Jesus commanded? The numbers show we haven’t taught even the basics. If the church were a local public school responsible for teaching basic math and reading, we would receive a failing grade and face funding sanctions.

The ‘people of the Book’ don’t read it.

Yet, according to a 2024 Lifeway Research survey of 2,620 Protestant pastors, 52 percent are satisfied with the state of discipleship and spiritual formation in their churches. Twenty-nine percent report that they regularly evaluate discipleship progress among their congregations. When asked their first priority in discipleship, the largest number responded that it be “biblical knowledge focused.” And in response to the question “What approaches does your church specifically use to disciple and encourage the spiritual development of adults in your congregation?” 89 percent responded the sermon, the top answer by a 20-point gap, with adult Sunday school listed second.

The sermon matters enormously. But we’re learning that the sermon alone cannot do the heavy lifting of solving the Bible literacy crisis. It’s a passive learning environment, a one-way communication. Imagine if your local public school believed passively listening to a lecture was the only way to form students into contributing citizens. Why does the local church think people comprehensively learn the Bible in such settings?

Imagine also if your local public school recommended peer-led discussion groups as a primary vehicle for educating students. Imagine if the time spent in these groups was used to reflect for 30 minutes or so on what was taught in a lecture several days before: Mrs. Harker lectures on the quadratic equation for 30 minutes on Monday; students discuss how to apply the quadratic equation to their lives for 30 minutes on Wednesday. Who’s passing an algebra exam? Yet, 95 percent of pastors surveyed responded that discipleship isn’t completed in a program but in a relationship. Hence, the ubiquity of the community-group model in evangelical churches.

We Know What to Do

The wildest part of this disconnect about how to teach what’s good in a way that sticks is that we know the answer. The answer isn’t a new thing but an old thing recently forgotten. The church must return to its roots as the solver of illiteracy, both within its walls and also without.

Education pastors can be tempted to dabble, trying one thing or another to see what their church members might find interesting, buying the latest study from a Christian publisher on the assumption it’s good. The idea that there are well-attested best practices for Christian education seems to have gotten lost.

Just like a healthy local school, churches need to reclaim active, dedicated learning environments—spaces designated explicitly for the purpose of teaching the Bible. They need to think like educators: What is the scope and sequence for what we’ll teach? And they need to ask a better question than “What do my congregants want to learn?”

I didn’t want to learn grammar, but thank goodness, Mrs. Wagner knew I needed it and taught it to me anyway. Her evident enthusiasm for the topic fascinated me. What was I missing that she knew? I learned grammar in a dialogic space taught by a subject-matter expert with an evident love for her subject. That love was contagious. Imagine if the church taught people the Bible like Mrs. Wagner taught grammar. It might become the classic of classics that every Christian actually wants to read.

Christians possess the most beautiful and compelling book of all. Because a book forms the foundation of our faith, Christians have always been invested in solving illiteracy. We’ve striven to train people to read because reading is essential to the promulgation of our faith.

The roots of public education and university systems lie in Christian efforts to grow literacy. The availability of vernacular translations of the Bible is the result of a concern for readability for all. Sunday school began in the late 1700s as an effort to educate children who worked in factories prior to child labor laws, seizing their one day off work as a literacy opportunity.

Christians have been literacy champions in previous dark ages—and Christians can be again.

Don’t Look Away

In the first article I ever wrote for The Gospel Coalition back in 2012, I considered the Bible literacy crisis: “Why does biblical ignorance continue to dog the church, despite the good intentions of leadership to obey the Great Command to make disciples? I believe the answer lies in our definition of a disciple. A disciple is, literally, a learner—one who follows another’s teaching.”

Fourteen years later, I’m still asking church leaders to remember to teach learners as the most basic function of discipleship, and to do so with proven tools. Don’t look away from the problem. Don’t tell yourself it’s the problem of the church down the road. In a cultural literacy freefall, all churches will feel the negative effects in Bible literacy rates.

Christians have been literacy champions in previous dark ages—and Christians can be again.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Lifeway Research hasn’t just released a survey of someone else’s problems. They’ve created a diagnostic tool for individuals and churches to use to assess their own Bible literacy: 25 questions of a similar nature to those asked in the Bible Literacy survey. The next time you gather with your community group, Sunday school class, or congregation, give them the link and see what their scores reveal.

If your church members fall short, here’s good news: By reinstating simple best practices about how people learn, we can reclaim Bible literacy and help with general literacy at the same time.

For more on how to get started, you can listen to the TGC25 breakout I taught with my colleagues J. T. English and Kyle Worley. There are no new gimmicks or tricks, just old things recently forgotten. May this generation of Christians be found faithful to retrieve what has been lost in the dark, that one generation can tell the next, and the next, and the next the wonderful works of God.