by Matt Whitman
I was a pastor for a long time. Every week I went through the same cycle: Prep eagerly and earnestly, do my best in the pulpit, greet everyone after church, nap, and then immediately start thinking about next week’s sermon. It might sound like a slog to outsiders, but if you’ve had the privilege to lead a church, you know it’s a sincere and noble rhythm of life. Perhaps the greatest blessing for me was that I was writing for people I actually knew—not for the internet. I knew their problems, their aspirations, and the story beats of our community. I was writing for them in an incarnational way.
But in that season, I’m afraid I took for granted something I didn’t fully appreciate at the time: their attention spans. When I preached to that church, I had the room. Not because I was the best at talking, but because they were there for the Word of God and they came as thoughtful and undistracted as they knew how. They were good at listening, good at being present, and good at coming with an appetite for deep and challenging things. I’ve realized that capacity was more common back then.
It’s been a few years since I stepped down from my role on the best of terms, and the world’s changed quite a bit in the interim. We don’t live in an age of attention anymore. Maybe it’s the media, maybe it’s the education, or maybe it’s the phones (it’s probably the phones). I might not know exactly how it happened, but we’re different now. You see it. The simple act of locking in and being present is suddenly hard for us. Our personal technology makes us restless and anxious. Our impulse is to retreat from complexity or boredom. If we don’t understand something, we’re conditioned to swipe away until we find something reassuring and safe. This is true in the larger world, and this is true in the church.
To be clear, I don’t just see this in everyone else. I see it in me. When I talk with people whom I’m honest with and who are honest back, they admit they see it in themselves. We’re having trouble listening long enough to understand new and important things deeply.
One of the ways this problem affects the church is that it’s tougher for people to receive good Bible teaching. It’s harder to read the Bible, hold big swaths of it in your mind at once, and to understand it as one big thing. That’s a problem, because the Bible is the Word of God. It doesn’t return to Him void, it’s sharper than a double-edged sword—it’s God-breathed and useful for a whole bunch of important stuff. The Scriptures show us God’s character and His redemptive plan, and then the Bible shows us where we fit into it. We need what’s in that book. We need to know what it means and how all its parts fit together. God alone has revealed to us the words of life in the Scriptures, and we’ve got nowhere else to turn.
We can’t just shrug at diminishing attention spans, dumb it down, and call it good. As pastors, we’ve got to find a way to make it make sense to the people in our care. But if you’re pastoring a church in this fast-paced, low-attention-span, click-economy world, how are you supposed to do that?
I sat on and thought about that question for a long time. Out of that thinking came The Ten Minute Bible Hour podcast (a show where we carefully work through a little bit of the Bible each day), and out of the podcast came a resource I really think will help you with this problem, which I suspect you see as clearly and frequently as I do.
I wrote this book. It’s called The Lightning-Fast Field Guide to the Bible, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: a user-friendly quick reference built on deep-dive Bible study that makes each book of the Bible make sense to readers quickly. Your people can follow your references and grasp your nuance so much better when they have the baseline knowledge to do so. The Lightning-Fast Field Guide to the Bible provides mountains of context in understandable language so they can get there. This book was written by a pastor who loves to teach the Bible and written for pastors who love to teach the Bible but are painfully aware that people’s attention spans are dwindling along with their appetite for Scripture.
Here are five ways you can deploy this book in your church:
1. Hand it out like candy to new attendees and new believers. It’ll orient newcomers to the Bible fast. They can read each Testament in an afternoon. Slip a bookmark into the chapter that corresponds with whatever book of the Bible you’re currently teaching. They can read that chapter and quickly get up to speed on your sermon series.
2. Use it for multigenerational Bible study. It’s straightforward enough for a youth-group kid but deep enough for your church’s most advanced Bible readers. That makes it a natural touchpoint for groups that span a wide range of ages and Bible knowledge.
3. Give it as a graduation gift. Seniors are in this pivotal season when they’re forming habits that will determine whether they keep reading Scripture for the rest of their lives. Nothing builds that habit like the confidence that they can actually open the Bible and understand what they’re reading, and that’s exactly what this book is designed to give them.
4. Build a reading plan around it. Because each chapter homes in on the most important passage in any given book of the Bible, a pastor can quickly pull together any number of original, targeted reading plans for their congregation. Pastors can easily craft plans built around the covenants, the prayers, the prophecies, the hardest passages, the most encouraging passages, and a bunch more.
5. Run it as a Bible survey class. The chapters are short enough that a pastor or Bible study leader can easily divide them into a 10-week, 12-week, 24-week, one-year, or two-year survey of the entire Bible. There’s no elaborate curriculum to piece together, just straightforward math. Discussion questions and topics are baked into the book and easily extracted to generate tons of engagement from participants. This will get attendees up to speed on the whole Bible and reading the text for themselves, and planning this class won’t exhaust you or your staff.
The best way to get people in the Word and keep them there is to help them see why it matters and show them that they can understand it. When the memorable details start to pop and the big picture of the Bible begins to crystallize, then the scales of this age of inattention fall from people’s eyes, and zeal for the Scriptures appears in their place.
I wrote this book to help make that happen in your church.