The more seasoned they were as Bible readers, the harder they were to convince. This was my experience as a pastor.

Our small team of church staffers had a conviction. Not only did we want to emphasize Bible reading, but we also hoped to introduce Bible engagement to our church of more than 6,000. So we were promoting an eight-week reading experience through the New Testament that included daily reading and weekly small-group community discussion. We wanted our people to read and discuss large sections of Scripture, rather than drilling down deeply into one particular biblical text.

The more knowledgeable Bible readers in our church didn’t like the plan, and they let us know.

These men and women were mature in Bible content. They understood the origins and authorship of most books of the Bible. And they had a deep understanding of the nuances of Pauline theology. Yet these learned leaders were less than interested in even considering a new way of engaging with God’s Word. They simply could not grasp why a pastor and other church staff members would suggest a different approach to examining and engaging with the Holy Scriptures. You would have thought we were confiscating their study Bibles and replacing them with children’s storybooks.

How could it possibly be so difficult to enlist men and women who love Jesus, and love the Scriptures, to get on board with a Bible-reading campaign?

The challenge of Bible engagement

Bible engagement requires new approaches. Some of these approaches will be different from what people learned in Sunday or Sabbath school classes growing up, in fellowship groups on their college campuses, and in Bible Study Fellowship classes as adults.

So how could we get over this hurdle? How could we draw our most experienced people into the process of developing new ways of Bible engagement for the whole church.

1. Express the need. Researchers from Barna to LifeWay to the Center for Bible Engagement all reveal that fewer people are reading their Bible today than they were a generation ago. We began to communicate this fact clearly and consistently. This gave our pastoral leadership something that linked the intellect with the heart. We needed a way to connect people’s love for the Scriptures and the fact of an increasingly non-Bible reading culture, to our pastoral desire to see more people engage with God’s Word.
2. Go church-wide. In our vision casting, we made it clear that Bible engagement was not merely some extra activity, not a pastor’s pet project, not just the next ministry fad. We needed to commit to it across the board—small group leaders, Sunday School teachers, student ministry leaders, and kid’s ministry teachers.
3. Get fresh eyes. Our first step in training was simple; ask the Bible scholars and the Bible students to set aside all that they “knew” and encourage them to read the Word of God with fresh eyes, an open mind, and a humble heart. We sought to move our experienced Bible readers from a posture of seeking to simply understand a text, to the action step of seeking to apply the text to real-life situations.
4. Ask new questions. Our next step was to help Bible readers—of any spiritual maturity level—to ask different questions. Are we reading to learn every detail about Jesus’s earthly life? Or are we reading to understand how the things Jesus taught challenge our lives? Are we reading to learn every nuance of Pauline theology? Or are we seeking to live out that theology in a 21st-century context? We pushed Bible readers to engage with questions that stirred the soul—not just the mind.
5. See the big story. Lastly, our training consisted of reading large segments of God’s Word together, and then corporately interacting with a new set of questions that arose from this process—questions that brought God’s Word from intellectual understanding, to engaging with the heart, and ultimately to Bible-based actions through our hands.

Essentially we were challenging people to lay one book aside, and pick up another. The two books? Set aside the Bible commentary, and grab a journal to take note of how the Holy Spirit can put God’s Word into action in our hearts, our minds, and through our hands.