Tim Hutchings, Religion, Media and Social Change

Now the Bible is an App: Digital Media and Changing Patterns of Religious Authority

Tim Hutchings, Durham University

Contact: t.r.b.hutchings@dur.ac.uk

Published in Religion, Media and Social Change, edited by Kennet Granholm, Marcus Moberg

and Sofia Sjö (Routledge, 2014). Chapter 9, p143-161.

In 2007, the American megachurch LifeChurch.tv launched a new project called

YouVersion, an online Bible that encouraged users to personalise the text with their own

highlights and commentary. YouVersion expanded onto a mobile app in 2008 and reached the

landmark of 100 million installations worldwide by the summer of 2013 – an event marked by

front-page coverage in the print edition of the New York Times 1. The Bible App is now just one

of YouVersion’s family of Bible products, including the website bible.com, the events

management system YouVersion Live, and the interactive storybook The Bible App for Kids.

The Bible App does not include commentaries or tools for linguistic analysis, but allows

the user to access different translations, follow a reading plan, add their own notes, bookmark

and highlight favourite passages and to share verses through social media. Demographic

information about YouVersion’s users is very limited, and since one individual can install the

app on multiple devices we cannot even be sure how many users the Bible App really has.

Statistics regarding age, sex or religious affiliation are not recorded. YouVersion does record the

location of users, and announced in August 2013 that the Bible App had been installed in every

country in the world2. The Bible was available in 375 different languages at that time, with the

app itself fully translated into more than 30; by the end of March 2014, the range of languages

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offered had risen to 528.3

This chapter explores the ways in which YouVersion may be changing relationships

between readers of the Bible, their pastors and the Christian publishing industry. Drawing on

YouVersion’s public communications, analysis of YouVersion products and my own surveys

and interviews, I consider three approaches. These three approaches have all been influential for

the wider study of digital religion, raising important questions about the distribution of agency in

the relationship between technology, culture and hierarchy.

My first approach assesses the proposal that digital media could act as a solvent to

religious hierarchy, empowering individuals to form their own networks and practices, find new

information and evade official supervision. Digital Bibles have been cited to support this

argument, viewed as technologies that inevitably facilitate personal interpretations at the expense

of more established authorities. This position risks an inadequate appreciation of the ability of

religious elites to adapt and re-establish their centrality, and I address this issue in my second

approach. Digital Bibles must be understood not just as personal reading tools but as designed

technologies, carefully structured to promote particular practices and values. A historical

perspective is essential, analysing YouVersion as both a digital innovation and a continuation of

centuries of evangelical publishing traditions. My third approach shifts attention to the

communal experience of YouVersion as the hub of a network of Bible-focused messaging,

examining some of the ways in which a digital Bible can intentionally and perhaps

unintentionally encourage new patterns of communication between users.

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Methodology

Studying a mobile app is not methodologically straightforward, and my research has

combined a range of methods to analyse the production, form and use of YouVersion. I have

conducted an online survey of users of digital Bibles, collecting 257 responses. I have used

YouVersion myself, following reading plans and exploring the structure of the app. I have

conducted interviews with YouVersion staff and users by telephone and face to face. I have also

analysed YouVersion’s own online and print publications. This article draws on three of these

sources: analysis of the YouVersion app, YouVersion’s blog and other publications, and my own

survey.

Each of these methods offers valuable but partial insight. YouVersion’s Bible App is

created by a design team, used by individuals around the world, and discussed by Christian and

non-Christian observers. This suggests at least four distinct areas that merit study: the processes

through which the Bible App is produced, the structure and content of the app, how the app is

used, and the discourses that emerge across different online and print media as commentators try

to make sense of YouVersion. All four research areas cross multiple offline and online locations

and networks, further complicating the challenge of research. A multi-method, multi-sited

research approach is needed to engage as thoroughly as possible with this technology.

YouVersion’s blog is a particularly valuable source of data, because YouVersion

regularly announces statistics that give some insight into user behaviour. This information is far

from exhaustive, but often the only data available to observers outside the company. Data shared

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by YouVersion is of course carefully selected to promote the company’s image, so YouVersion’s

blog, website and other publications must also be analysed as platforms for the construction of

discourses around the app. YouVersion’s homepage is designed to appeal to interested visitors,

encouraging them to download the Bible App for themselves. Blog posts are aimed particularly

for app users and Christian supporters, celebrating YouVersion’s progress. The blog and website

can be compared against sources intended for alternative audiences, such as CEO Bobby

Gruenewald’s interviews for Christian and non-Christian magazines.

My own research has included a 12-question online survey. This survey was intended to

collect basic demographic and usage data in order to identify a diverse sample for a smaller set

of follow-up interviews. The survey itself was of course not representative of the global

population of digital Bible readers, but suggested hypotheses meriting further investigation. I

publicised this survey through postings to BigBible.org.uk, a Christian blog operated by my

research centre at St John’s College, Durham; through Facebook and Twitter; and by distributing

business cards at Christian events in the UK and USA. The survey included one open question –

‘in what ways, if any, have digital media changed your relationship with the Bible?’ – and I

quote examples taken from the 201 replies to that question in this chapter.

Introducing YouVersion, the Bible App

According to Bobby Gruenewald, the rise of user-generated online media means that

‘content isn’t king anymore. It has been dethroned by engagement.’4 Bible publishers need to

respond to that shift by moving beyond the static printed page and allowing the reader to become

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‘part of the story’. YouVersion was first launched as a website encouraging this vision of

engagement by offering ‘an online Bible where people could not only read Scripture, but could

also associate and annotate any web media […] to a verse or series of verses.’ Gruenewald

portrays this as a ground-breaking technical innovation for the time: ‘the early days of

YouVersion predated Google Books, the Kindle, and its analogues. There weren’t examples of

people taking literary works and allowing users to annotate them with media and contribute

content.’ The first iteration was only a limited success: ‘with only 20,000 people using it, it

didn’t appear this concept was catching on’.

The launch of a YouVersion mobile app in 2008 uncovered unexpected new possibilities,

drawing attention to the importance of accessibility as well as user-generated annotations. ‘The

nearness of the content’, its location on a handheld mobile device instead of a computer screen,

‘increased the amount we engaged with it personally [...] proximity directly affected

engagement’. The app became a runaway success, installed 80,000 times in its first three days.

YouVersion’s homepage – now found at the prestigious URL bible.com – focuses

throughout on the language of individual convenience and personal choice. Download

YouVersion to your mobile phone, and ‘you’ll have your Bible with you no matter where you

go’. You won’t even need to decide which passage to read: choose a reading plan, and ‘every

day you’ll find a Bible selection waiting for you’. You can ‘make your on-line Bible experience

just the way you like it’, by personalising your choice of translation, font and text size, and you

can add highlights and bookmarks ‘in your favorite colour’.5 As we shall see, Gruenewald argues

that this emphasis on personal tailoring, accessibility and interaction works to drive

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‘engagement’.6 The YouVersion homepage translates this ambition for a Christian audience,

promising to ‘bring God’s Word into your daily life’.7

The sharing and discussion of verses through social media is an important part of

Groeschel’s strategy for engagement, and YouVersion deploys a range of promotional strategies

to encourage more frequent sharing. The interface of the app itself is designed to prioritise social

media. When the app is opened, the top half of the first screen is used to display the a selected

Bible text. The most prominent object on the screen is a bright blue horizontal bar, stretching

across the centre, which can be tapped to share this ‘verse of the day’ through Facebook, Twitter

or the messaging service Path.

YouVersion also includes more than 600 reading plans, each offering a selection of

passages with accompanying reflections. These reading plans may focus on particular themes,

issues or sections of the Bible, or tie in with new books, new music or a particular sermon series

offered at a high-profile church. For example, in January 2014 YouVersion’s blog posted a list of

ten plans to help ‘make the Bible a daily part of your life’, aimed at those considering a New

Year’s resolution.8 Two were designed to take the reader through the whole Bible, three

promised devotional materials, and the remaining five focused on self-help themes: living

without fear, building healthy relationships, spiritually-empowered dieting and financial advice

(twice). Six of the ten suggestions were linked to a well-known evangelical Christian leader of

the past or present, from the devotional ‘Day by Day with Billy Graham’ to the much more

specific ‘Dave Ramsey’s Financial Wisdom from Proverbs’. To coincide with the Dove Awards

for Contemporary Christian Music, YouVersion suggests a list of reading plans created by the

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nominated singers and bands, including ‘insights’ into the meaning of each song on Matt

Redman’s latest album, ‘a deeply personal look’ into Dara MacLean’s ‘passion for Jesus’, and an

‘in-depth look at life’ as revealed by the ‘ministerial stories and personal experiences’ of the

band Casting Crowns.9 As added incentive, YouVersion announced its third annual 21-Day

Challenge on January 21st. ‘You’ve shared with us time and time again that reading the Bible is

important to you’, and ‘YouVersion loves to help you follow through on your good intentions’,

so users who complete 21 days of any reading plan will be entered into a prize draw to win iPad

mini, Nexus 7 tablet or a prize pack of YouVersion-branded clothing and stickers.10

As this list of reading plans makes clear, YouVersion is not operating in isolation from

the wider marketplace of Christian publishing and commerce. Gruenewald speaks dismissively

of older publishing systems, arguing that while ‘well-meaning publishers spent significant time,

energy, and money distributing Bibles’ around the world, ‘there was little focus on whether it

was being read or how to increase engagement.’11 Nonetheless, YouVersion soon found that its

efforts to transform distribution could not succeed without partnerships with established

publishers. According to Gruenewald, ‘it didn’t occur to us that modern Bible texts are all

copyrighted works that publishers have invested millions of dollars in developing.’ Many of

YouVersion’s reading plans use content provided by Christian publishers and music labels,

operating in part as adverts for further content that users could opt to purchase.

The need to make Bible translations available digitally while retaining control of

copyright has remained a challenge for YouVersion and other digital Bible products. To address

this issue, a new organisation called Every Tribe Every Nation was launched in 2012 in

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collaboration between wealthy American Christian donors and three of the largest Bible

publishers: American Bible Society, Biblica and Wycliffe Bible Translators. ETEN’s vision

statement declares that the organisation is ‘committed to using the latest technology to get God’s

Word to every person on Earth’12, funding translation and digitization projects and centralizing

thousands of translations in a single Digital Bible Library. YouVersion is one of DBL’s ‘library

cardholders’, able to access texts in the library without compromising their owners’ intellectual

property.

In November 2013, YouVersion expanded its focus on promoting Bible ‘engagement’

with the launch of a new product, ‘The Bible App for Kids’. The Bible App for Kids shares some

of YouVersion’s major themes, particularly the emphasis on frequent engagement, but replaces

the plain text of the Bible with animated story-telling. Offered free of charge, The Bible App for

Kids promises to ‘help your kids fall in love with God’s Word’ through an animated storybook.13

According to YouVersion’s blog, the app offers ‘a delight-filled Bible experience just for

children’, easy and safe to use without adult supervision.14 Each new story added to the app –

eight in total, as of March 2014 – features ‘colorful illustrations’ and ‘touch-activated

animations’, supported by ‘games and activities to help kids remember what they learn’. 15 These

stories will introduce children to ‘the big story of the Bible’, through ‘experiences designed to

encourage kids to return again and again’.16 YouVersion claims that the Bible App for Kids was

installed 450,000 times on launch day,17 reaching 1 million installs in the first week18 and 2

million in the first month.19 YouVersion’s descriptions of the Bible App for Kids promise a tool

that will be educational, entertaining and transformative, engaging children with stories and

games in order to teach them ‘the big story’ and train them into a permanent relationship with the

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Bible. After a week, YouVersion declared that ‘we’re amazed at how God has already been

using the Bible App for Kids to connect children with the story of God’s love’, sharing five

testimonials collected from Twitter. 20 In four of the five quoted tweets, a parent reports their

child’s emotional reaction to the app and connects this to spiritual transformation: ‘Walked in on

my son tearing up as he watched Jesus die on the cross on @BibleAppForKids. Praying for the

call on his life this morning!’21

Dissolving Covers: Digital Media as the Antidote to Authority

In the late 1990s, theologian Tom Beaudoin published one of the first reflections on the

potential impact of digital reading for Christian spirituality. Beaudoin argued that hypertext

would forge new, unpredictable connections between texts, undermining attempts to impose

fixed interpretations by supporting individual journeys of discovery. ‘It is impossible to have a

sacred text in cyberspace’, he argued: ‘a cyberBible is always wandering’. 22 Digital religion

scholar Rachel Wagner has recently revived this argument, claiming that ‘the Bible itself

becomes fluid’ as a digital text, ‘its fixed covers dissolving into a host of linked sites that

describe competing biblical histories’, available for the individual to select and combine as they

wish.23

Wido van Peursen, digital humanist and Hebrew Bible scholar, has challenged this

dissolving-covers approach from a historical perspective. The idea that the Bible is a tightly-

bounded object with set contents and a fixed cover is made possible only by the codex, ‘a

technological innovation that took place after the composition of the writings that the Bible

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contains’.24 Prior to the adoption of the codex form, biblical texts were written in scrolls. The

codex made it possible to bind many texts together in one object, encouraging the emergence of

a more fixed sense of a ‘canon’ of sacred writings. Even then, the list of texts gathered into one

codex could vary between copies, with non-canonical works or lectionary materials sometimes

added. Including the whole canon in a single codex became commonplace only after the

invention of the printing press, and the idea that Christians should read the whole canon emerged

even later with the 17th-century Pietist movement.25 According to van Peursen, ‘the

conceptualization of the Bible that is allegedly under threat due to the digital medium is not the

shape that the Bible had when it was composed or in the earliest period of its transmission… the

reading of the Bible through the digital medium means to a certain extent a return to the period

before codex and printed book, in which the transmission was also fragmented and fluid.’26

The idea that digital media dissolve (or, according to Peursen, redissolve) the covers of

the Bible is one example of Beaudoin and Wagner’s larger argument that digital media

encourages a more selective form of faith. According to Beaudoin, the spirituality of Generation

X – born in the 1960s and 1970s – draws on popular culture while maintaining an ‘ironic

distance’ from religious institutions, and is expressed and resourced through the internet.

According to Wagner’s more recent research, the power to digitally select and combine religious

resources intensifies the longer societal trend toward ‘seeker’ religiosity identified by sociologist

Wade Clark Roof. There are two underlying ideas here: media technology, particularly digital

media, empowers users to access a wider range of information and resources while bypassing

traditional gate-keepers; and users will take advantage of this technologically-empowered

freedom to develop less conservative ideas and less hierarchical forms of social organisation.

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We can see some evidence that users of digital Bible technologies are resisting the styles

of reading encouraged by app designers. According to journalist Kimberley Winston,

YouVersion has proven popular with atheists seeking ammunition for online debates. 27 Winston

interviews atheist Tom, who praises YouVersion highly: ‘It’s free, it has good search features so

I can search for certain words like ‘unicorns,’ and there are a ridiculous number of versions […]

It is supposed to be the Word of God, yet when you go from one version to the other you see

how much the text varies.’ Winston also interviews atheists who use Bible apps in less

combative ways, including Brian, who uses YouVersion on his iPad to follow the teachings of

the church he once attended: ‘I can get the church’s opinion and then I go read it for myself and

see the difference.’ YouVersion’s Gruenewald reframes these accounts as Christian victories,

celebrating any app that can ‘get the Bible into the conversation’. Gruenewald might take

comfort from Winston’s conversation with ex-Mormon Adam, who had ‘never read the Bible in

its entirety’ until he turned to YouVersion because he ‘felt he should know more about it’.

My own survey attracted responses almost exclusively from individuals who described

themselves as Christian, and very few of my respondents suggested that their actual thinking

about the Bible had changed. Like the atheists in Winston’s article, these Christians celebrated

reading the Bible as a way to strengthen their pre-existing views. Many reported reading the

Bible more often, primarily because it was more accessible: ‘the Bible has become part of my

life. It's there to guide me through every day-to-day situation.’28 This achievement is already

strongly encouraged by Christian communities, particularly in the evangelical tradition. This

kind of shift represents the submission of the self to the normative demands of religious

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authority, quite the opposite of a wandering, coverless cyberBible.

In a very few responses, however, users did describe experiences that could be

interpreted in line with Beaudoin and Wagner’s liberalisation thesis. These respondents praised

the social dimension of digital media for bringing them into contact with different competing

ideas. One respondent mentioned using Facebook to find and reflect on new and contrasting

interpretations.29 Another claimed that ‘discussing what some passages mean in an on-line

community has made me far more liberal in my interpretation of the bible, whether paper or

digital.’30 A third stated that a digital Bible ‘allows different insights, particularly from a range of

different voices who allow me to see parts differently’.31 There is certainly no necessary or

universal connection between access to digital media and any increase in interest in non-

traditional views, but a very small number of the respondents to my survey did report this effect.

One recent proposal offers a variation on the ‘dissolving covers’ thesis, suggesting that a

more flexible text could empower religious leaders and institutions rather than individual

practitioners. Stephen Smith, who works for the website BibleGateway as an employee of the

publishing house Zondervan, has experimented with a range of digital ways to reimagine the text

of the Bible. At the 2013 BibleTech conference in Seattle, Smith presented a proof-of-concept

demonstration of a new tool he called the ‘Franken-Bible’. The Franken-Bible (now available

online as AdaptiveBible) builds on existing translations of the Bible into English, and aims to

‘combine [these] translations algorithmically into something that charts the possibility space of

the original text’32 – generating, as the AdaptiveBible.com homepage puts it, ‘an automatically

derived translation of the Bible’.33 The user is able to make their own decisions for each word,

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choosing from the range of options already approved by earlier translators. This may seem

laborious, but Smith suggests that this kind of semi-automated Bible translation, responsive to

theological preferences without requiring expertise in original languages, could appeal to church

pastors or denominations hoping to create a distinctive Bible for their followers. Speaking to

Christianity Today reporter Ted Olsen, Smith acknowledges that he has ‘mixed feelings’ about

this development, which undermines the authority of scholars and conventional publishers and

‘gives more power to informal networks, celebrity pastors, and those with a reason and means to

push their own personal translation’.34 Smith’s argument is that this kind of development is

inevitable, whether or not he creates the technology himself – ‘someone is going to do this, and

that will radically change how we interact with the Bible.’

Religion and Persuasive Technology: Encoding Authority

Internet scholar Charles Ess offers another counter-argument to the dissolving-covers

approach, based on observation of the flexible response of established hierarchies to the

disruptiveness of digital media. For Ess, ‘initial grassroots efforts to exploit the Internet and the

Web for political activism are soon squeezed out as extant power centers learn, if somewhat

more slowly, how to use the Web and the Net to re-establish their dominance and centrality

online’.35 Networked communication and access to resources might destabilise old industries and

hierarchies, but it has proven possible for those industries to adapt and regain control.

Digital religion scholar Heidi Campbell has recently developed the Social Shaping of

Technology tradition to attend to the specific context of religious communities. Campbell’s work

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on the ‘religious-social shaping of technology’ complements Ess’s observation of re-established

centrality and proposes a mechanism through which this process can operate.36 Campbell argues

that religious communities actively shape the technologies they use and the discourses through

which they make sense of them, seeking to identify benefits of new technologies and take

advantage of them without compromising their core beliefs and values. This process of

negotiation can lead to the development of new technologies and media practices, or the

establishment of new boundaries for appropriate media use. Established religious leaders can

play a key role in this negotiation process, encouraging the adoption of technologies and

practices that reinforce the social and conceptual system of their community.

YouVersion is an excellent example of a religiously-shaped technology, designed to use

digital media in the service of classic evangelical ambitions. YouVersion’s goal is ‘engagement’,

or – in the more traditional Christian language used on YouVersion’s homepage to attract

potential customers – ‘to bring God’s word into your daily life’. LifeChurch.tv’s website hosts a

page soliciting donations to support YouVersion, and for this audience the project is described

not as a publishing success or a user-friendly tool but as a unique weapon of spiritual and

societal transformation:

We believe we could see half a billion people—or even a billion—engaging with Scripture

through the Bible App. What the printing press did for Bible engagement more than 400

years ago, YouVersion has the potential to do for Bible engagement in this digital age.

Together, the YouVersion community is leading the revolution for our generation to become

the most Bible-engaged in history.37

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There is nothing new about comparing the internet to the printing press – the well-known

e-book archive ‘Project Gutenberg’ began digitising and distributing texts in 197138 – but the

analogy bears particular weight here. By comparing YouVersion to the fifteenth-century printing

press, LifeChurch.tv implicitly connects the ‘revolution’ of digital Bible engagement to the

Protestant Reformation, and identifies YouVersion itself as the engine of global spiritual

transformation.

The dream of using new technology to promote Bible engagement also has more recent

parallels. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the expansion of the British Empire and

new advances in cheap, high-volume printing meant that ‘for the first time in history, a

theological vision could make use of political and technological developments to imagine a

global Christianity’.39 In 1804, a group of evangelical Christians in England established the

British and Foreign Bible Society, the predecessor to today’s United Bible Societies. At the first

meeting of the new BFBS, members committed to the goal of encouraging wider distribution of

the Bible ‘without note or comment’, relying on the plain text of the Bible to speak its own

message. By avoiding interpretive commentary, the BFBS hoped to preserve complete

independence from religious institutions, appealing to all Christian denominations without

alienating any. YouVersion is affiliated with a specific church, LifeChurch.tv, but shares the

BFBS’s ambition to encourage Bible reading among all Christians around the world. Like BFBS,

YouVersion has faith in the transformative power of plain text of the Bible, encouraging the user

to read the Bible for themselves without the distraction of commentary. Engelke argues that

‘business acumen was central to the Society’s early success’,40 citing the focus of the Society’s

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archived papers on costs and contracts rather than doctrine, and we can see this professionalism

echoed in YouVersion’s emphasis on high-quality digital design.

YouVersion and BFBS differ on the question of finance. The BFBS committed from the

outset to charging money for all of its Bibles, often selling at a loss and encouraging donations to

cover shortfalls in revenue but never giving Bibles away for free. YouVersion, in contrast, is an

entirely free app. The financial cost of printing paper Bibles is significant, but this difference in

media does not entirely explain this difference in business models; The Gideons, a Christian

organisation founded in 1899, began placing Bibles in hotel rooms free of charge in 1908.41

BFBS believed that recipients of its Bibles would only take them seriously if they had made an

active, costly commitment to reading: ‘people do not value what they get for free’.42

YouVersion’s decision to distribute free Bibles can be justified in several ways. For

example, free distribution of a high-quality product helps the Bible App stand out in a crowded

online marketplace, while the idea that YouVersion is working to distribute God’s Word without

any motive of profit is undoubtedly attractive to Christian donors. Downloading the app is itself

a gesture of commitment, quite different from the act of passively accepting a Bible handed out

by a missionary; perhaps YouVersion only appeals to those who have already decided, for other

reasons, that the Bible is something they need to read. Once YouVersion is installed, the app

itself can try to remind its owner to read it through a variety of alarms and notices. Given the

relatively low cost of developing and maintaining the app, it may simply not matter to

YouVersion if only a small proportion of installed apps are actually used. These are plausible

hypotheses, but further research is merited here – by academics and publishers – to determine the

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impact of a financial cost on a user’s relationship with a digital or printed Bible.

If YouVersion’s ambitions are founded in evangelical theology, its methods are more

innovative, combining traditional evangelical approaches to the problem of ‘engagement’ with

contemporary digital strategies. Writing for an audience of publishers, Gruenewald claims that

YouVersion has identified ‘seven factors that drive engagement’: ‘social interaction;

personalization; multiple devices and formats; gamification; community contribution; multiple

languages; and personal investment.’43 These factors emphasise community, accessibility and

investment. YouVersion has succeeded because users ‘aren’t just consuming content, they’re

engaging in conversation about it with their community’ through social media and bringing

‘additional value’ through their annotations – areas Gruenewald argues that traditional Bible

publishers have been content to ignore. Content now ‘needs to be present in our lives and

literally meet us where we are’, and that means being available in many languages and formats.

Users should be encouraged to spend time adjusting and perfecting their personal copy of the

text, rewarded for their engagement, and encouraged to become ‘passionate advocates’ for the

product in ‘their sphere of influence’ – some users work as volunteer translators to improve

YouVersion’s range of languages. According to YouVersion’s own statistics, based on a survey

of YouVersion members, this strategy for engagement has been highly successful: 77% said they

‘turn to the Bible more because it’s available on [their] mobile devices’.44 The sample size and

demographic of this survey have not been published, so the reliability and generalisability of this

statistic cannot be assessed, but its rhetorical value in YouVersion’s construction of its image is

considerable.

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Gruenewald’s engagement strategies have much in common with the ‘persuasive

technology’ approach pioneered by Stanford professor BJ Fogg. Fogg’s approach is intended to

help develop technologies that work to change their users’ behaviour, and also involves seven

processes: reducing the desired behaviour change to a simple task, tunneling the user through a

fixed routine, tailoring information to the individual needs of the user, suggesting desirable

actions at appropriate times, allowing users to monitor their own progress, keeping their progress

under surveillance, and rewarding the user for achievements.45 Fogg argues that these processes

can be applied to technologies designed to impact a user’s health, political views or workplace

productivity; YouVersion demonstrates their applicability to religion.

Several of Gruenewald’s seven factors mirror Fogg’s persuasive processes, while also

continuing older evangelical Christian practices. As technology author Nir Eyal has argued in an

essay for The Atlantic, YouVersion ‘is a case study in how technology can change behavior

when it couples the principles of consumer psychology with the latest in analytics.’46

YouVersion’s approach to gamification involves awarding badges to successful readers, echoing

Fogg’s emphasis on rewards but also remediating an older Christian tradition of awarding prizes

for Bible knowledge. Gruenewald’s ‘social interaction’ involves discussing Bible texts and

users’ progress with their Bible reading, using social media to update the traditional ideas of the

Bible study group and the Bible-text billboard, but ‘social interaction’ can also be understood as

a form of the ‘mutual surveillance’ and action suggestions encouraged by Fogg. Eyal observes

that ‘triggers are everywhere in the Bible app’, arguing that frequent messages between users can

help keep them engaged.

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A Bible reading plan can already be understood as a form of ‘persuasive technology’,

reducing the daunting task of developing a regular reading habit to a fixed daily routine of short,

specified texts and allowing the reader to track their progress. YouVersion’s digital reading plans

follow Fogg’s model even more closely, making the day’s texts easy to find – as Eyal puts it,

‘the Bible app is designed to make absorbing the Word as frictionless as possible’ – and issuing

regular rewards. Reading progress is recorded (in keeping with Fogg’s emphasis on

surveillance), and the app uses this data to feed back automated reminders and alerts to users

who fall behind their schedule.

For some of the respondents to my survey, these tactics proved effective: ‘Having a

reading plan that sends me push notifications on my phone keeps me accountable to keep up with

the reading goals I have set. Thanks to my Bible app, I read the Bible much more consistently

and purposefully.’ Others were less convinced, reporting competition from other action triggers:

‘It's hard to be disciplined with device-based Bible reading, because the Bible is just another app

among apps or an e-book among e-books. Notifications about e-mails, etc, can easily distract

from reading.’

The most interesting divergence between YouVersion’s technology and Fogg’s model

lies in the intersection between surveillance, tailored information and suggested action.

YouVersion does record data to track how the app is used, and this data could, potentially, be

used to suggest what users might read next, shared automatically with other users or

communicated to church authorities. It would be possible, for example, for a church pastor to

track the reading habits of their congregation and use this information to plan future sermons,

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programmes or personal interventions. Eyal proposes a more intrusive vision, combining GPS

and local mapping to automatically guide users away from moral danger: ‘A young man walks

into a strip club. His phone vibrates, and he reaches into his pocket [...] It's God, telling him to

leave.’47 YouVersion has attempted to introduce more limited forms of peer surveillance before –

in 2009, for example, Bobby Gruenewald promised that ‘soon, you’ll be able to build a support

system by opting in for accountability emails to you and/or a friend’48 – but these efforts have

not yet developed into a major part of YouVersion’s product offering or public discourse.

‘Bible Tweets Changed My Life!!!’: YouVersion and Networked Authority

So far, this chapter has focused on YouVersion’s engagement with the individual user,

assessing the argument that digital media actually encourages more individualistic, fluid styles of

reading and analysing the digital Bible as a technology carefully shaped to perpetuate established

religious values and practices. This final section of the chapter will approach this question from a

third angle, analysing YouVersion as a network for communication between users and religious

authorities.

According to sociologists Barry Wellman and Manuel Castells, Western society has seen

a gradual shift over the last century from communities to networks as the ‘central form of

organizing interaction’,49 facilitating new patterns of business, education, politics, relationality

and leisure. In networked societies, communication and connection are fluid: ‘boundaries are

permeable, interactions are with diverse others, connections switch between multiple networks,

and hierarchies can be flatter and more recursive’.50 This shift is not new, of course – it has much

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in common with Ferdinand Tönnies’ distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft – but

Wellman and Castells have both argued that the internet has proven to be the ideal technology

for accelerating this trend. It is the internet that most powerfully enables individuals to find

information and choose who they communicate with, when and where. In a network, power is

located with those who own, structure and restrict the system of communication. This includes

those who control the underlying technology, but also those users who can form the most

valuable connections and encourage others to listen to and communicate their message.

One example of YouVersion’s role as a communication network is YouVersion Live, an

project launched in 2009. YouVersion Live connects mobile devices across a congregation

during live events, free of charge, enabling pastors to share their sermon notes and relevant Bible

verses directly with their audience. The service also allows users to add their own notes, ‘vote on

a poll and see the results live, ask questions anonymously, give, request prayer, and take it all

home with you on your phone’.51 Nir Edal sees YouVersion Live as a key promotion for the

Bible App: ‘once the head of the church is hooked, the flock is sure to follow’.52

YouVersion Live is just one example of LifeChurch.tv’s commitment to building high-

quality digital resources and giving them away free online. Pastors are invited to download

sermons and teaching resources free of charge to use in their own congregations,53 but they can

also download software to help stream their own services online54 or to keep track of

congregation data including attendance and donations.55 The most committed admirers of

LifeChurch.tv can register more formally as Network Churches, remaining autonomous but

receiving leadership training and agreeing to use LifeChurch.tv’s teaching resources for their

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own events.56 LifeChurch.tv’s free digital resources can be understood as an exercise in brand-

building, generating mentoring relationships with other churches worldwide. The church’s

influence is amplified not only through more traditional means, like books and appearances at

leadership conferences, but also through creating the actual technologies that other churches

need to function. For Nir Edal, ‘nothing signals the dominance of Gruenewald’s Bible app quite

like the way preachers in some congregations have come to depend upon it.’

The idea that pastors might become dependent on a mobile app has caused some

resistance from Christian observers. One of the most frequently-cited objections to digital Bible-

reading has been that the Bible should be a visible and distinctive symbol of God’s authority.

According to Christian theologian Matthew Barrett, for example, ‘I'm concerned about replacing

the physical Bible with a tablet in the pulpit […] the tablet as a replacement for a hardcopy of the

Bible sends an entirely different message to the congregation […] It is an icon of social media

and a buffet of endless entertainment’.57 It is the networked nature of the mobile device, its

instant connection to resources, diversions and people, that so disturbs Barrett. The tablet is new,

impersonal and anonymous, merely a portal. The paper Bible, in contrast, ‘perhaps leather-bound

and worn from constant use […] sends a loud and bold message to the nearest passersby about

your identity as a Christ follower’. Its physicality is necessary, to ‘visually remind us that we are

accountable to this gospel and to one another’ and to teach us that each brief text of the Bible is

located in a particular context within the whole book.

For YouVersion, the networking capability of a mobile device is one of its greatest assets.

Through a mobile device, the Bible can become the hub of conversations and interactions, a store

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of messages to annotate and share. Sharing is promoted through YouVersion’s ‘Verse of the

Day’ feature, visible whenever the user opens the app, and any verse can be shared to Twitter,

Facebook or Path with three taps. As an additional encouragement, YouVersion launched the

#Verse2014 campaign in January, encouraging users to ‘choose one verse that captures what

you’re seeking in 2014’.58 Participants were instructed to focus on this verse in their prayers and

readings, to ‘make your verse visible’ by displaying it in a bathroom mirror, car or workplace,

and to ‘share your verse’ with friends and family through social media.

According to Twitter employee Claire Diaz-Ortiz, ‘Pastors tell me, Twitter is just made

for the Bible’, with verses just short enough to tweet in 140 characters. 59 In my own research, I

have encountered some equally positive responses to the practice of circulating Scriptures online.

A woman pastor explained in our interview that she selected inspirational Bible verses to share

each day through Twitter with a network of other women who shared her occupation, seeing

herself as a source of encouragement. ‘Bible tweets changed my life!!!’, another woman wrote in

response to a survey question.60

YouVersion occasionally releases lists of the most popular Bible verses, and these lists

suggest that the practice of sharing verses through social media favours a specific type of

content: inspirational, uplifting messages, with explicitly religious content, focused on

encouragement. In 2013, the three most-shared verses read ‘This is the day that the Lord has

made; let us rejoice and be glad in it’ (Psalm 118:24); ‘So humble yourselves under the mighty

power of God, and at the right time he will lift you up in honor’ (1 Peter 5:6); and ‘Do not fear,

for I am with you; do not be afraid, for I am your God. I will strengthen you; I will help you; I

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will hold on to you with My righteous right hand’ (Isaiah 41:10). Of the ten most-shared verses

in 2013, five come from the Old and five from the New Testament, but only one from the

Gospels. Eight of the ten most-shared verses refer explicitly to ‘God’ or ‘the Lord’ and only one

mentions ‘Christ’. The only exception is Matthew 7:7, a particularly encouraging saying of Jesus

that promises God’s help without using a title: ‘Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you

will find; knock, and it will be opened to you’.61

All ten most-shared verses deal in some way with God’s promises of help for humanity.

All ten call for courage and perseverance, rather than addressing doctrinal or ethical issues. Only

one, Ephesians 5:25–26, is commonly cited as evidence in Christian debate. This verse calls on

husbands to love their wives just as Christ loved the church and follows a call for wives to be

subservient to their husbands, and is much-discussed in arguments over Christian gender roles.

Even here, it is notable that the instruction to love in Ephesians 5:25 is widely shared rather than

the call for female submission that precedes it in verse 24. These observations suggest that users

tend to share verses that have a simple, encouraging message and an explicitly theistic

framework, but no controversial or provocative content. Pauline Hope Cheong has argued that

prayer tweets ‘help build a sense of closeness and ‘religious connected presence’ amongst the

distributed family of faith believers, to recreate and reaffirm Divine and corporeal bonds’, 62 and

it is highly plausible to suggest that the same processes are at work in these shared Bible verses.

From a network perspective, then, YouVersion is significant on several levels.

YouVersion Live is a technology that enables pastors to communicate with their congregations,

supporting limited, non-disruptive kinds of feedback. In making this technology available for

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free, YouVersion strengthens its brand profile and image and encourages the emergence of

networks of churches dependent on the teaching and training of LifeChurch.tv. The Bible App,

meanwhile, allows the user to access the Bible through an interface designed to visually and

procedurally emphasise sharing. The ‘Verse of the Day’ feature frames Bible communication as

a central Christian practice, implicitly supporting a theology of the Bible as an active agent.

YouVersion’s influence beyond its support base operates here through the voluntary actions of

users, who must be persuaded to choose to participate in order for YouVersion’s Bible texts to

circulate through their networks. When we look at the actual choice of texts to share, another

level of influence becomes apparent: in the context of brief online messages, very specific

categories of Bible text flourish while others attract less attention.

Conclusion

The chapter has assessed suggestions that digital Bibles could be used to support

individual reading practices separate from the oversight of Christian authorities, to attack

Christian faith directly, or to segregate Christian communities around idiosyncratic new

translations. As my case study has shown, however, the Bible App is actually designed to

encourage and teach users to read the Bible in particular ways. The material form of a text

conveys its own messages about the status and intended use of that text, and both the Bible App

and the Bible App for Kids seek to use technology persuasively. These apps are attempting to

train users into habits of regular Bible engagement through systems of easy access, planned

routines, frequent prompts, pleasant rewards and opportunities to invest, personalise and share.

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 Tim Hutchings, Religion, Media and Social Change

This technological innovation is driven by much older Christian understandings of the

agency of the text of Scripture. For YouVersion, as for the British and Foreign Bible Society in

1804 and The Gideons in 1908, reading the Bible generates an opportunity for the reader to be

transformed by the power of God through the text. Analysis and interpretation may be valuable,

but they are ultimately secondary to the force of the plain text. YouVersion’s ‘Bible App for

Kids’ complicates this perspective by encouraging very young readers to engage with selected

Bible stories as animations and interactive games, but here too the ultimate aim of the app is to

develop lifelong habits of engagement with the actual text of the Bible.

Viewed as a network, another level of YouVersion’s significance emerges. YouVersion

seeks to train and encourage users not only in how they engage with the Bible, but also how and

where they talk about it. YouVersion provides technology for organised Christian events, but

also views individual users as potential resources to be activated to promote the Bible and the

YouVersion brand. Users must be encouraged to share the text for themselves, through

campaigns, prompts and options built into the interface.

This chapter has relied on analysis of YouVersion products and YouVersion’s own

discourses, supported by quotations from my own survey research. Further research should be

conducted in at least two directions, both faced with considerable methodological difficulty.

Bible apps threaten a major disruption to the Christian publishing industry, offering cheaper,

more accessible, more interactive rivals to printed Bibles. YouVersion demonstrates one

response to this possibility, relying on collaboration and content-sharing with established

publishers. The viability and impact of this business model remains to be analysed in detail.

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 Tim Hutchings, Religion, Media and Social Change

Matthew Engelke has demonstrated the value of workplace ethnography in exploring aspirations,

tensions and failures within the Christian Bible industry,63 but expanding this kind of research to

YouVersion and other Bible apps would rely on generous and perhaps unlikely levels of support

and access to commercially-sensitive information. Alternatively, future research could focus on

expanding our understanding of users of Bible apps, through data analysis, content analysis of

online activity, and a much larger cross-cultural survey. Difficulties faced here include access,

again, but could be overcome by a multi-national, multi-disciplinary research team. These

proposals would not be straightforward to implement, but would offer fascinating insights into

the impact of digital media on religious brands, networks and practices.

1
Amy O’Leary, “In the Beginning Was the Word; Now the Word Is On an App,” New York Times, July 26, 2013, A1,
accessed March 1, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/technology/the-faithful-embrace-youversion-a-
bible-app.html.
2
“The Bible App Around the World: Over 600 Versions, 375 Languages,” blog.youversion.com, August 14, 2013,
http://blog.youversion.com/2013/08/the-bible-app-around-the-world/.
3
“Bible versions”, accessed March 26, 2014, www.bible.com/versions
4
Bobby Gruenewald, “The Engagement Economy,” in Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto. A Collection of Essays from the
Bleeding Edge of Publishing, eds. Hugh McGuire and Brian O’Leary (Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media, 2012),
PressBooks.com edition, chapter 21, http://book.pressbooks.com/chapter/youversion-bobby-gruenewald.
5
“YouVersion”, accessed March 1, 2014, www.bible.com.
6
Gruenewald, “Engagement Economy.”
7
“YouVersion”, www.bible.com.
8
“3 Ways To Make the Bible a Daily Focus This Year,” blog.youversion.com, January 1, 2014,
http://blog.youversion.com/2014/01/3-ways-to-make-the-bible-a-daily-focus-this-year/.
9
“Dove Award Nominees, Winners Offer Bible App Devotionals,” blog.youversion.com, October 21, 2013,
http://blog.youversion.com/2013/10/dove-award-nominees-winners-offer-bible-app-devotionals/.
10
“The 21-Day Challenge: A Fresh Start,” blog.youversion.com, January 21, 2014,
http://blog.youversion.com/2014/01/21-day-challenge/.
11
Gruenewald, “Engagement Economy.”
12
“Bringing 500 Years of Vision to the Digital Age,” Every Tribe Every Nation, accessed March 1, 2014,
http://www.everytribeeverynation.org/vision.
13
“The Bible App for Kids,” accessed March 1, 2014, https://www.bible.com/kids.
14
“Meet the Bible App for Kids,” blog.youversion.com, October 29, 2013,
http://blog.youversion.com/2013/10/meet-the-bible-app-for-kids/.

27
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15
“The Bible App for Kids.”
16
“The Bible App for Kids Is Coming This Thursday!,” blog.youversion.com, November 24, 2013,
http://blog.youversion.com/2013/11/the-bible-app-for-kids-is-coming-this-thursday/.
17
“Thank You for Helping Launch the Bible App for Kids,” blog.youversion.com, November 29, 2013,
http://blog.youversion.com/2013/11/thank-you-for-helping-launch-the-bible-app-for-kids/
18
“The Bible App for Kids Surpasses One Million Installs in First Week,” blog.youversion.com, December 5, 2013,
http://blog.youversion.com/2013/12/the-bible-app-for-kids-surpasses-one-million-installs/.
19
“Bible App for Kids: Get the New Story Now!,” blog.youversion.com, January 21, 2014,
http://blog.youversion.com/2014/01/bible-app-for-kids-get-the-new-story-now/.
20
“The Bible App for Kids Surpasses One Million Installs.”
21
“The Bible App for Kids Surpasses One Million Installs.”
22
Tom Beaudoin, Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997),
126.
23
Rachel Wagner, Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 22–23.
24
Wido van Peursen, “Is the Bible Losing its Covers? Conceptualization and Use of the Bible on the Threshold of the
Digital Order,” HIPHIL Novum 1/1 (2014), 51.
25
Van Peursen, “Losing its Covers”, 53.
26
Van Peursen, “Losing its Covers”, 55.
27
Kimberley Winston, “Atheists Use a Popular Bible App to Evangelize About Unbelief,” Religion News Service, 05
November 2013, accessed March 1, 2014, http://www.religionnews.com/2013/11/05/atheists-use-popular-bible-
app-evangelize-unbelief/.
28
Survey respondent 158: male, 21-29 years old, USA.
29
Survey respondent 123: male, 21-29 years old, UK.
30
Survey respondent 172: female, 50-59 years old, UK.
31
Survey respondent 256: female, 30-39 years old, UK.
32
Ted Olsen, “Hacking the Bible,” Christianity Today, March 6, 2014, accessed March 6, 2014,
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/march/bible-in-original-geek.html, 1.
33
Adaptive Bible, accessed 01 March 2014, www.adaptivebible.com
34
Olsen, “Hacking”, 2.
35
Charles Ess, “’Revolution? What Revolution?’ Successes and Limits of Computing Technologies in Philosophy and
Religion,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, eds. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 139.
36
Heidi Campbell, When Religion Meets New Media (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).
37
“Stories of Hope and Change: YouVersion,” LifeChurch.tv, accessed March 1, 2014,
http://www.lifechurch.tv/causes/story/13-youversion.
38
“History of Project Gutenberg,” Project Gutenberg, accessed March 1, 2014,
http://www.gutenbergnews.org/about/history-of-project-gutenberg/.
39
Matthew Engelke, God’s Agents: Biblical Publicity in Contemporary England (Oakland: University of California
Press, 2013), 2.
40
Engelke, God’s Agents, 5.
41
“The Gideons International,” The Gideons International, accessed March 1, 2014,
http://www.gideons.org.uk/about_the_gideons/international.
42
Engelke, “God’s Agents,” 7.
43
Gruenewald, “Engagement Economy.”
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44
“Now the Bible is an App – Infographic,” blog.youversion.com, July 9, 2013,
http://blog.youversion.com/2013/07/now-the-bible-is-an-app-infographic/.
45
Summarised in Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2010), 60.
46
Nir Eyal, “The App of God,” The Atlantic, July 24, 2013, accessed March 1, 2014,
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-app-of-god/278006/.
47
Eyal, “The App.”
48
“20+ Ways to Read Your Bible in 2010,” blog.youversion.com, December 29, 2009,
http://blog.youversion.com/2009/12/20-ways-to-read-the-bible-in-2010-pick-your-plan-personalize-it/.
49
Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 127.
50
Barry Wellman, “Physical Place and Cyberplace: The Rise of Personalized Networking,” International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research 25/2 (2001), 227.
51
“Welcome to YouVersion Live,” accessed March 1, 2014, http://www.a.youversion.com/live/all.
52
Eyal, “The App.”
53
Open, http://open.lifechurch.tv/.
54
Church Online Platform, accessed March 26, 2014, http://churchonlineplatform.com/.
55
Church Metrics, accessed March 26, 2014, https://churchmetrics.com/.
56
NetworkChurches.tv, accessed March 26, 2014, http://networkchurches.tv/.
57
Matthew Barrett, “Dear Pastor, Bring Your Bible to Church,” The Gospel Coalition: Voices, August 19, 2013,
accessed March 1, 2014, http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2013/08/19/dear-pastor-bring-your-bible-to-
church/.
58
“#Verse2014 & Bible Plans for the New Year,” blog.youversion.com, December 30, 2013,
http://blog.youversion.com/2013/12/verse2014-bible-plans-for-the-new-year/.
59
Amy O’Leary, “Christian Pastors Are Powerhouses on Twitter,” The New York Times, June 2, 2012, accessed
March 1, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/02/technology/christian-leaders-are-powerhouses-on-
twitter.html.
60
Survey respondent 73: female, 40-49 years old, USA.
61
“Our Year With the Bible – Infographic,” blog.youversion.com, December 29, 2013,
http://blog.youversion.com/2013/12/our-year-with-the-bible-infographic/.
62
Pauline Hope Cheong, “Faith Tweets: Ambient Religious Communication and Microblogging Rituals,” M/C
Journal 13/2 (2010), accessed March 1, 2014, http://journal.media-
culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/223.
63
Engelke, God’s Agents.

29