A NEW edition of the Bible Course, released by the Bible Society on Monday, features eight videos on how scripture “fits together as an overarching narrative”.
The course, first launched in 2018, has been translated into Welsh, French, Mandarin, Portuguese, Urdu, Spanish, and Bulgarian, and has been used by 140,000 people, the Bible Society says.
Its Bible engagement lead, Dr Andrew Ollerton, who contributed to the course, told the Church Times: “The decision to create a new version was largely triggered by the success of the previous one. . . The world has changed rapidly in the last seven years since we released the [previous] version.
“So, this time, we’ve started by changing the content and, perhaps more importantly, the delivery style in order to reach younger audiences. That means it’s a little more fast-paced, has more energy, and there are a lot more visual elements.”
In the Bible Society’s report The Quiet Revival, published last month (News 11 April), almost one third of the 18- to 24-year-old respondents said that they were curious to learn more about the Bible. Yet, of those who did, 35 per cent said that their faith was “undermined when they think/read about some parts” of it.
“Listening to those statistics suggests that we’re going to have an opportunity for the Bible course to have not just a discipleship role for existing Christians, but an evangelistic role — to share the message of the Bible with people outside the four walls of the church,” Dr Ollerton said.
Updates to the course include a digital-hub experience, that has an “additional layer of content and a pathway for the audience to explore”. Articles, discussion-prompts, and other videos can be viewed on the hub, and a course guidebook is available to purchase.
Eight “Bible experts”, including Claire Williams, the Revd Dr Helen Paynter, Nick Spencer, and David Harley, contribute to episodes “based on their academic specialism or scholarship”.
The course also contains testimonies from “people whose lives have been impacted by the Bible”, which, Dr Ollerton says, allows for more diversity of voices, and helps to prevent the course from being “too dry or academic”, since “every session has a personal story. . .
“I think the stories really help people inhabit the Bible story for themselves, rather than thinking it’s something distant and historic. If you can make the Bible accessible and relevant, people of any walk of life who want to find a message of truth and hope that could actually cause their lives to head in a better direction are going to be interested.”
Dr Ollerton said of the video content: “It’s so hard to represent the scope of scripture. . . We won’t satisfy everyone’s questions or answer all the detail or objections, but what we will have done is given people that big-picture view.
“We want people, by the end of the course, to feel like they know how the whole Bible fits together . . . that helped inform those content decisions all the way.
He concluded: “What excites me more than anything else is seeing how people who feel like there’s no meaning or hope in their life will discover how Jesus can really bring that hope and meaning through the Bible.”
