Ask ten friends about what they eat, read, or watch on TV, and you won’t get cutting-edge social data, but you might sense some new trends in the making—and it’ll give you something to chat about.

Last month we put out a short survey on this blog about Bible engagement and your church. We were delighted to get 241 responses from busy leaders. Our pollster friends would quickly remind us that the resulting information is not really scientific, since the respondents were self-selected from a distinct pool of church leaders. Still, a close look reveals a few talking points.

We asked you to rate your congregation on two factors: Bible knowledge and Bible interest. Every so often a survey will reveal some woeful lack of Scripture intelligence, but I’ve always been more interested in interest. If people don’t know who killed Goliath, they can look it up. But do they care about that story? Do they get jazzed by the way God has worked in the lives of David and Esther and Peter and so on? Are they eager to open the Word?

A majority chose the “moderate amount of both knowledge and interest” response, and it was rather heartening that only a few selected either of the “not very interested” responses.

You tended to rate the Bible engagement of your church (reading the Bible four or more times a week) between ten and fifty percent. Our official polls have shown this number to be seventeen percent nationwide. You would expect churchgoers to be more Bible engaged than the general public, as we find here, But why are there so few church leaders in this survey reporting even half of their congregation as Bible engaged? Clearly we have work to do.

What’s the greatest hurdle to Bible engagement in your church? “Not enough teachers or group leaders,” replied a quarter of the respondents. Another twenty-one percent said, “Our younger folks haven’t developed habits of spiritual discipline.” The high response to “Other” suggests there are many more reasons we didn’t list, and we’d love to hear from you about those.

We floated one idea: a daily email pushed out to the congregation with a Scripture verse and a question for reflection. Some churches are already trying this. Here we were asking how effective you thought it would be. How many of your people would spend even five minutes a day on this? Well more than half of you thought that at least 20% of the congregation would spend that time.

And if that’s the case, here are some follow-up questions: How many of these people aren’t already engaging with Scripture? How many new engagers could be created through this email method, or through other creative tech ideas? That’s worth thinking about, and talking about.

Next week: A deeper look at the data