The Year of the Bible is underway as missions organizations, churches and other ministries are seeking to usher in a grassroots “Bible revival.” One evangelist believes many, including Christians, have yet to learn to love the Word of God.
“I just think we’ve taught a generation how to love good preaching and how to love good worship, but we’ve never learned how to love the Bible,” said Nick Hall, who some have referred to as the “Billy Graham of the next generation.”
“I think in a lot of our churches and ministries, the majority of the people just aren’t reading the Bible for themselves. And so as biblical literacy has gone down, it has had a domino effect on a million things in our church and in our culture. We find that when people read the Bible more, they love their neighbors more, they’re more involved in compassion and justice initiatives and they’re more involved in evangelism.”
The Year of the Bible movement was established by a coalition of international ministry networks called The Table Coalition, formerly known as the Mission America Coalition. It hopes to be the largest digital next-generation biblical marketing campaign in history. The aim of the movement is to inspire people to make 2020 the year they make the Bible a “foundational part of their lives.”
“It’s one of those deals where a lot of us have these understandings that the Bible is boring or the Bible is judgmental or the Bible is archaic,” Hall told The Christian Post. “We just want to help people see that there’s a different narrative.”
The goal, he said, is to inspire as many people as possible to dedicate their year to God’s word and listen to what He has to say in their life.
As the movement aims to end Bible poverty worldwide, one of the problems in Western cultures today, organizers say, is that the Bible is becoming less significant as more children are growing up without exposure to the Gospel or a biblical worldview.
Barna research suggests that while almost half of Americans identify as Christian, only a small fraction of Americans hold a biblical worldview.
Hall explained that the aim is to inspire people to form a biblical foundation for themselves at a time in history when it is “so easy to be led by feelings and emotion.” He said it is important for the next generation to be “anchored on the rock and not on the shifting sands of culture.”
“The story of King Josiah has kind of been our biblical framework,” Hall, the founder of PULSE and the visionary behind the Together ecumenical Christian events, said.
SOURCE: Christian Post, Samuel Smith
All Content & Images are provided by the acknowledged source