Fox River Christian Church sits in a quiet, semi-rural community just west of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It looks like countless other churches across America, a simple, practical building that is both a place of worship and a community crossroads.
Fox River recently took the Willow Creek Association’s REVEAL survey. Of the metrics reflected in the church’s results, senior pastor Guy Conn was struck by the low engagement his congregation had with the Bible. His commitment to deepen Fox River’s engagement with Scripture has ushered in a new season of spiritual vitality.
When I saw our results from taking the REVEAL survey, I was disappointed, but not surprised. One of the numbers that immediately stood out was that 80-85 percent of our congregation wasn’t reading the Bible at all, let alone with regularity or depth.
A pastor has a sixth sense when it comes to the congregation’s spiritual habits. I suspected that Scripture engagement could be an area of weakness for us. Some of that was due to positive trends. We were a body privileged to witness many new people coming to faith in Christ. We also had a high number of attendees that had come from a background of nominal church attendance. That meant many had minimal familiarity with the Bible, let alone a commitment to regularly engage it in their personal lives. Lots of our new brothers and sisters did not know even the basic stories—David and Goliath, Jonah and the Whale, the miracles of Jesus …
Preaching alone wasn’t enough to close this gap. Our church was growing, but our depth in the Scriptures wasn’t, and something needed to give. We have a passionate, driven leadership team. When we saw ourselves in the lower 50 percent of those surveyed, you could almost hear a collective “NO!” rise from our team. We were faced with a sobering fact: we weren’t deepening people’s spiritual lives. So we took a deep breath, and decided to do something about it.
Tackling the Problem
The survey pointed out that simply teaching the Bible in church does not lead people to open the Bible for themselves throughout the week. Preaching itself isn’t enough to transform deeply. God wants to work with his people individually. Our role as church leaders is to facilitate that process, to free the Bible from the confines of the pulpit and put it in people’s hands.
We knew that addressing the problem required more than tweaking or introducing one new program. It had to be wide-ranging and synergistic. So we crafted a strategy that included our preaching, small groups, adult classes, and children’s and youth ministries. It could be simple, but it had to be widespread and unified. We centered our efforts on what we called a “New Testament Challenge,” one that would likely be difficult for us but attainable. We chose the word “challenge” specifically with our men in mind. Many men balk at reading plans. But their ears perked up when we began talking about this as if it were akin to running a marathon or climbing a mountain. We were very clear: “This won’t be easy. You’re going to need to commit, to work your butt off to see this thing through. But if you do, you will accomplish something big, something significant.”
We put together a plan that would take us through the entire New Testament in 10 weeks. We knew that most of our people had never even read the New Testament, let alone at this aggressive pace. We weren’t sure what kind of participation we’d get, but we felt that our goal was attainable. We made it clear that most people could complete their daily reading in around 15 minutes.
We were faced with a sobering problem: we weren’t deepening people’s spiritual lives. So we did something about it.
We provided Bibles at cost and in a variety of translations. We offered free audio downloads of the New Testament so that auditory learners could engage Scripture as well (about 30 percent chose to go this route). Many chose to both read and listen. For many people new to the Bible, (who might not know how to pronounce difficult names, etc.) this gave them confidence.
From the pulpit, we began teaching series on six big themes of the New Testament. This bridged the readings with our worship services. We presented our small groups as places to find “running partners” for this marathon and as the go-to place to ask questions raised by the week’s reading.
One of the most exciting initiatives was our beginning Bible reading class. We started it at the beginning of the challenge, and have continued it ever since. It’s very basic but crucial. Many of us in ministry suffer from “the curse of knowledge.” We expect others to know what we do, especially the “basics.” When we talk about Joseph, we know exactly what’s going on and assume they do as well. But the average Joe in the pew doesn’t know there’s more than one Joe in Scripture and gets confused very quickly.
We also tend to assume that people value the Word like we do, and that they have the tools and context to handle it. But these aren’t givens. In fact, folks frequently don’t believe that they’ll be able to understand the Bible even if they knew where to start, which (if they’re reading it like the other books on their shelves) is from the beginning. Genesis starts off easy, but by the time they get to Leviticus, they may be thinking, Kill me, please! I’m willing to be one of those sacrifices, just end my suffering.
So we tried to correct our assumptions of where people are at. They need us to help them get started in the Scriptures. We began with the basics—the types of Bibles, what a translation is, making recommendations based on where they are and what they are feeling at this stage in their spiritual lives.
Beyond these basics, our class dives into reading the Book of John three times in a row, one chapter per day. What we’ve found is that very few of the people in the class are already at the place where they can follow through with this commitment. Maybe one or two in a class of 40 get their reading schedule perfect.
So we joke upfront about the number of failures, but then point out that out of those 40 people, almost every one of them has cracked open their Bible at least five times during the past week and gotten something out of it. And this is a tremendous leap forward, a huge victory, and a rightful cause to celebrate as a class.
This shift in perspective provides a sense of accomplishment about reading the Scriptures and generates a warm sense of community. Our success and finish rate in the class is high, and the most common comment we receive when the class is over is “I wish this could go longer.”
Reading for a change
One direct byproduct of our increased focus on Scripture was a surprise at first. I think there’s an unspoken assumption among many in ministry that we have to downplay the centrality of Scripture in order to reach seekers. But we discovered that our new emphasis on getting open Bibles into our people’s hands was a major evangelistic win. In fact, people were bringing their friends to join us midstream and then going back to complete the part of the challenge that they’d missed. What we started as a much needed initiative to feed the church proved to be a means for the Lord to grow the church. It turned out to be both a time of sowing and a time of reaping.
We extended the same focus with different packaging to our children, to our youth. We had extremely high engagement with our junior and senior high groups. Altogether, the initiatives set in motion by the REVEAL survey have created a strong momentum for our church. We’re working to maintain this through continuations of Scripture classes and groups, and a second Bible reading themed sermon series this fall.
Together, these different initiatives form a synergistic, step-by-step strategy ensuring the average person in the pew is being challenged, encouraged, and is receiving support from a variety of places in the church. It creates positive peer pressure, an expectation of joining the community to encounter Scripture together. It challenges those of us in positions of leadership to continue to grow in our own engagement with the Bible and to model it to the church.
We’ve seen this commitment pay off in objective ways. We saw it when we retook our REVEAL survey the following year and saw significant improvement in our congregation’s results. We’ve seen it in our life together as a congregation. We’ve seen it in our youth and children’s ministries, our small groups, and our Sunday school classes.
I’ve seen it in the lives of individual members of our congregation who have matured dramatically, and in some cases even met Jesus for the first time. I’m seeing it in my own relationship with Jesus, as our increased collective commitment to Bible engagement spurs me to connect daily and intentionally with God.
We are growing in his Word together. It is a struggle and a challenge, but a wonderful one. Why? Because we get to meet Jesus every day, as we weave his Word into the pattern of our lives.
Guy Conn is pastor of Fox River Christian Church in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
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