A good question, that in our case is easily answered: we had too much to do and not enough time to do it in. Well, not absolutely no time – but none for additional activities like blogging. And that’s not quite true either, because we continued to read other people’s feeds, which presumably is a less demanding thing than creating new material ourselves. A good month, though, with meeting lots of new people at conferences and seminars – and travelling an enormous number of miles (almost 2000, which doesn’t seem much if you’re in the US or Australia, but in the UK that’s a serious number of miles).
One piece that we did read is this report from George Barna in the US. It has some interesting statistics about different generations and how they read (or don’t read) the Bible, but we were surprised by his surprise that the younger you are the less likely your are to read the Bible. One thought that occurred to us was that it’s quite likely that if you’d asked the generations about reading (whether the Bible or any other book), you might have come to the same conclusion – that the younger you are, the less likely you are to read any sort of book that isn’t required for school or study. Then we also wondered what is meant by ‘Bible reading’. Does listening to it being read count, for instance? Since most people in the first century only encountered the Bible when they heard it read out in synagogue or church gathering, you could argue that reading it in private is a less authentic way of encountering it. It certainly owes a good deal to the Enlightenment emphasis on individualism. But what if you have a Bible app on your iphone? Or subscribe to one of the many messaging services that send ‘thoughts for the day’ direct to your phone or computer? Or watch a movie with Bible themes, or …. Well, you get the idea. And it’s not just an American issue, because in the UK publishers who produce daily reading guides have seen a huge fall in their subscriber numbers over recent years – so much so that some now make them available for free on their websites, because there’s a diminishing market for printed versions. And yes, the younger you are, the less likely you are to read those as well. A bit of lateral thinking might suggest that the perceived problem is not so much with the young who don’t read the Bible, but with the form in which the message is put out there. Remember that in the first century the letter form was innovative, that the early Christians more or less invented (and certainly were the first to use widely) the codex (sheets stitched up the side like a book), and that the Reformers made such rapid headway because they harnessed the power of the recently-invented printing press. If the medium really is the message, then maybe we should be asking different questions about people’s reading habits.
