By Beth Murphy
A new Barna study (November, 2025) reveals some wonderful news about the Bible reading habits of Americans. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to do so.
According to Barna, Bible reading has rebounded from historic lows, with Gen Z (born between 1999 and 2015) and Millennials (born between 1984 and 1998) leading the charge. I don't know about you, but that encourages me, and motivates me to take action.
Thankfully, the study gives us insights as to how we may best serve our young adults.
First and foremost, the study revealed that even though Bible engagement is on the increase, there’s a growing gap between engagement and conviction. That means, young adults are curious about the Bible’s content, but they’re skeptical about its accuracy, which means applying it can be a challenge for them.
So, how can we, as church leaders, help our young people not only get in the habit of reading the Bible more often and longer, but actually understand and apply to their lives what they are reading?
Here are some ideas may be of help to you:
1. Give them a physical Bible
- Bible Apps are amazing. I love having dozens of Bible translations in my pocket at any given time. I use BibleGateway all the time to look things up. But my experience of doing my daily reading with a physical Bible is much more focused and impactful than reading from an app. Inherent in my iPhone is the app-hopping, skim-reading, alert-checking behavior I adopt while holding it. It's very difficult for me to read deeply on my phone. And I'm not alone.
- In this excellent article, "Are Paper Bibles Better?" David Mathis had this to say: "Some today talk of our 'bi-literate' brains. For now, we have learned to develop two kinds of reading, paired with particular media. One is more linear, slower, deeper, deliberate, logical, coherent, sustained, and on paper. The other: more nonlinear, fast, scattered, disjointed, and shallower, as we browse and scan, eyes jumping or darting around the page, digital."
- If your church has the budget, consider gifting each of your youth with a physical, paper Bible this year. Encourage parents and grandparents to give their children and grandchildren a physical Bible. Make it a priority to ensure each of your kids has access to God's Word in physical form.
- If you’re looking for recommendations, The Telos Bible is one of our favorites for high school and college students. It's a fantastic resource on its own, but we've paired it with David Platt's book, How to Read the Bible, to make it even more of a helpful resource. Also included in this bundle is a free one-year reading plan.
2. Model it for them
- Encourage your congregations to bring their Bibles to church. Encourage parents to read their Bibles daily, bring their Bibles to church, and model this behavior.
- Youth pastors, what if you encouraged your youth group to read the Bible through in a year? What if you chose a reading plan, challenged your group do it together, and appointed group members to be “accountability partners” for others?
3. Help them understand how the Bible is structured
- This excellent free video series from Randy Frazee unpacks how we got the Bible, where the different books of the Bible came from, how it's structured, and how to read it. Use this as a basis for a six-week teaching series with your group, to help orient them to what they are reading and why it's organized the way it is.
4. Help them find their “why”
- In How to Read the Bible, David Platt shows you how to read, study, and understand the Bible in such a way that you fall deeper in love with its Author. His four-step guide to studying God's Word rightly is set up with the acrostic MAPS:
- Meditate on and memorize God's Word, storing it in your heart and mind so that you walk closer with Jesus each day.
- Apply the Bible's truths to every layer of your life, allowing the Holy Spirit to transform you and revolutionize your ultimate purpose for living.
- Pray boldly, confident that God will answer and align your heart with His Word.
- Share God's Word with others, letting it flow through you to your neighbor as well as to others around the world.
5. Help them understand and defend what they are reading
- Consider infusing your Bible studies and lists of recommended books with apologetics. If young adults are having trouble understanding and believing the Bible, perhaps they have specific questions about the Bible’s contents that books about apologetics could help answer.
- We are often told we can no longer assume that the Bible is trustworthy. From social media memes to popular scholarship, so many attacks have been launched on the believability of Scripture that many have serious questions about the Bible. In Why I Trust the Bible, eminent Bible scholar and translator William Mounce discusses and answers common challenges to the Bible in a reasoned, definitive, and winsome way.
- In How Not to Read the Bible, a six-session video study, Dan Kimball guides you step-by-step through making sense of the most misunderstood, difficult, and disturbing Bible passages, and teaches students how to read the Bible in context.
This is an exciting time to be believers! We have all the resources we need to come alongside out fellow believers and those curious enough to want to pick up a Bible, perhaps for the first time. Let’s meet them where they are and show them how to follow Jesus!