Spiritual Food

A 2025 report from the American Bible Society suggests that Bible use is rising—especially among young adults who, until recently, were among the least likely to open a Bible at all.

According to State of the Bible: USA 2025, the percentage of U.S. adults who read the Bible outside of church at least three times a year increased from 38% to 41% in the last year. That’s roughly 10 million more adults engaging with Scripture—marking the first increase in Bible use since 2021.

The sharpest rise appears among millennials, where reported Bible use jumped by 29% in a single year. Gen Z also showed noticeable movement. It’s a striking turnaround, especially considering that both groups have typically lagged behind older generations in religious activity. But the numbers may not be as clear-cut as they seem.

The study also found that Scripture engagement—a metric that factors in not just Bible reading, but how much Scripture influences someone’s choices, relationships, and worldview—rose from 11% to 15% among Gen Z, and from 12% to 17% among millennials.

The study defines Scripture engagement broadly, factoring in a range of self-reported behaviors and attitudes. It also relies on a survey sample of just 2,656 adults—a relatively small group to draw sweeping generational conclusions from, especially when measuring a spike as large as 29%.

Still, even if the numbers are more hopeful than definitive, they point to a growing spiritual curiosity among younger Americans. You can read the full report here.

When researchers for the American Bible Society’s annual State of the Bible report saw 2022’s survey statistics, they found it hard to believe the results. The data said roughly 26 million people had mostly or completely stopped reading the Bible in the last year.

“We reviewed our calculations. We double-checked our math and ran the numbers again … and again,” John Plake, lead researcher for the American Bible Society, wrote in the 2022 report. “What we discovered was startling, disheartening, and disruptive.”

In 2021, about 50 percent of Americans said they read the Bible on their own at least three or four times per year. That percentage had stayed more or less steady since 2011.

But in 2022, it dropped 11 points. Now only 39 percent say they read the Bible multiple times per year or more. It is the steepest, sharpest decline on record.

According to the 12th annual State of the Bible report, it wasn’t just the occasional Scripture readers who didn’t pick up their Bibles as much in 2022 either. More than 13 million of the most engaged Bible readers—measured by frequency, feelings of connection to God, and impact on day-to-day decisions—said they read God’s Word less.

Currently, only 10 percent of Americans report daily Bible reading.

Do you have a habit of picking up books that you never quite get around to reading? If this sounds like you, you might be unwittingly engaging in tsundoku - a Japanese term used to describe a person who owns a lot of unread literature.

Proffesor Andrew Gerstle of the University of London explains the term might be older than you think. It can be found in print as early as 1879. The word "doku" is a verb meaning "reading" and "tsun" means "to pile up.” So, when put together, "tsundoku" has the meaning of buying reading material and piling it up.

Does it only work for books? You might not be surprised to know some people have applied the term to other aspects of their lives. In a popular post on Reddit people discussed how this term could explain their relationship with films, television shows, and even clothing. One of the most popular interpretations concerned video games, with various people referencing their "vast, untouched software libraries" on game distribution platforms like Steam.

Possible Preaching Angle:

How many of us find ourselves with the tsundoku habit of buying Christian books or new versions of the Bibles but never reading them? Or going to Christian seminars, taking copious notes, but never referring to them again? Let’s be “doers of the Word and not hearers only!” (Jam. 1:22).

Bible reading dropped dramatically in 2022. It is unclear why. Roughly 50 percent of American adults reported opening Scripture at least three times a year every year from 2011 to 2021, according to American Bible Society surveys. Then, in 2022, that number declined to 39 percent.

That means that amid record inflation, threats of nuclear war in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and ongoing debates about the state of democracy, there were about 26 million Americans who stopped reading the Bible.

More than half of Americans say they wish they read the Bible or read it more, however, creating an opportunity for Christians to invite their neighbors to deeper engagement with God’s Word. Younger people, in particular, say they are drawn to Bible reading plans and Bible studies that look at whole chapters or complete stories.

Of the 39% of Bible readers:

27% Read the Bible in print

19% Read the Bible on an app

18% Read the Bible online

11% Listen to the Bible on a podcast

In his recent book, The Wisdom Pyramid, Brett McCracken shares the following story about his father:

I will always remember my dad's Bible. As a kid, it was a fixture in our house. Thick, black leather-bound, with gold leaf edges; stuffed full of church bulletins, Scripture, memory cards, and who knows what else. The well-worn pages were adorned with underlined verses, variously colored highlighted sections, and scribbled margins. I saw dad with it almost every day—studying during his quiet time, preparing a Sunday, school lesson, or maybe leading our family in a dinnertime devotional. The presence of dad's Bible nearby was a comfort. I think it made the Bible more credible to me that, for my dad, it wasn't just a prop to bring to church on Sundays. It was his beloved source of guidance for everyday life.

My life was full of the Bible: learning Old Testament stories on flannel graph in Sunday school; memorizing the order of the Bible's sixty-six books in Vacation Bible School; doing "sword drills" in Awana; memorizing the "Romans Road"; singing songs that went:

The B-I-B-L-E

Yes that's the book for me!

I stand alone on the Word of God: the B-I-B-L-E!

The Bible was the book that shaped my life more than anything else, which is odd looking back on it: an Oklahoma kid being profoundly shaped by an ancient collection of Jewish literature and two-thousand-year-old Mediterranean letters. But I was, and I am.

And my story isn't unique. The Bible has been a treasured source of truth and life all over the world, across countless generations. It manages to speak to the soccer mom in San Diego as much as the truck driver in Taipei; it guides the life of a skateboarding teenager in 2020 Buenos Aires as much as it did the blacksmith in 1520 Liverpool. Everywhere you go in the world, people who share almost nothing else in common can say in unison: "The B-I-B-L-E Yes, that's the book for me!" This can be said of no other book in the world. No other source of truth is as universally beloved and consistently cross-cultural as the Christian Bible.

The pleasure of taste starts with the taste buds and ends with electrical signals reaching the reward centers in the brain. This is not just true of people; it is true of animals as well. All animals have taste buds, including those that live under the water. The catfish, for example, has taste buds virtually all over its skin, earning it the nickname “the swimming tongue.” Flies, spiders, and fruit flies have taste buds on their feet.

Animals taste and enjoy their food as much as we do. Watch a squirrel closely next time you come across one squatting on the lawn holding an acorn with its two hands and nibbling the insides. You’ll see it nibbling away with its teeth quite rapidly. What you don’t see is the tongue inside the mouth that is busy manipulating the little bits of food and tasting the ingredients, swallowing what is delicious and even just acceptable.

Possible Preaching Angles:

Taste and see that the Lord and his Word are good (Psa. 34:8; Psa. 19:10). God invites us to experience him and his Word as a pleasurable experience which feeds our soul.

Many pastors challenge their hearers to meditate on Scripture. But a teenager in France took this idea in completely wrong direction.

An article in Live Science reports that 16-year-old Adrien Locatelli, a French high school student, transcribed parts of the Hebrew Book of Genesis and the Arabic-language Quran, into DNA and injected them into his body—one text into each thigh. DNA is just a long molecule that can store information. Mostly, it stores the information living things use to go about their business. But it can be used to store just about any kind of information that can be written down.

Locatelli explained, “I did this experiment for the symbol of peace between religions and science, I think that for a religious person it can be good to inject himself his religious text.”

Locatelli said he didn’t experience any significant health problems following the procedure, though he reported some “minor inflammation” around the injection site on his left thigh for a few days.

Possible Preaching Angles:

Love God’s Word. But the correct way to get the Bible deep within us is not through sequencing and injection but by reading and studying the Bible every day.

The last thing a police officer trying to chase down a suspect in a high-speed pursuit needs to see is a warning that their patrol car is running low on gas—or on battery juice. But that’s how it went down one night in Fremont, California. The police officer pursuing a suspect while driving the department’s Tesla Model S patrol car noticed it was running out of battery power.

The pursuit of a “felony vehicle” started in Fremont and reached peak speeds of about 120 miles per hour on the highway. The officer driving the Tesla radioed in to dispatch that he might not be able to continue the chase he was leading. Officer Jesse Hartman said, “I am down to six miles of battery on the Tesla so I may lose it here in a sec.”

However, shortly after Hartman called, the person the police were chasing began driving on the shoulder of the highway as traffic was thickening. This prompted police to call off the chase at that moment for safety. The vehicle being chased was found a short time later after it crashed into bushes, but the driver had fled the scene and was not found. Officer Hartman eventually found a charger in San Jose to juice up his car.

A police department spokesperson said, “We have no written policy regarding charging, but the general guideline is that it should at least be half full at the beginning of the shift.” Apparently, the Tesla had not been recharged after the previous shift before Hartman took it out, so the battery level was lower than it should have been. A spokesperson couldn’t provide details on why it wasn’t charged.

Possible Preaching Angles:

Endurance; Holy Spirit; Power; Spiritual Warfare: Christians may also be running on empty unless they connect daily to the power of the Spirit. Only then will they have endurance in the struggle against temptation and the ability to do God’s will.

William Falk, Editor-in-chief of The Week magazine, wrote the following short column:

A Yale study that tracked 3,635 people over 12 years found that book readers lived an average of two years longer than non-book readers; the more time spent reading books, the study found, the better. So, my friends, no matter what fresh madness the New Year brings, armor yourselves with a pile of good books. Our lives, and our sanity, may depend on it."

Possible Preaching Angles: When I read this, I thought of another book that extends life for all eternity and deepens life into abundance—the Bible. "Our lives and our sanity may depend on it—not just knowing it, but by trusting its Author and then living by it.

When a place has been besieged for years and hunger stalks the streets, you might think that people would have little interest in books. But enthusiasts have stocked an underground library in Syria with volumes rescued from bombed buildings—as users dodge shells and bullets to reach it. Buried beneath a bomb-damaged building, is a home to a secret library that provides learning, hope, and inspiration to many in the besieged Damascus suburb of Darayya. As one user says, "We saw that it was vital to create a new library so that we could continue our education."

Since the war, volunteers—many of them also former students whose studies were brought to a halt by the war—have collected more than 14,000 books on just about every subject imaginable. "In many cases we get books from … near the front line, so collecting them is very dangerous," says one of the collectors.

The idea of people risking life and limb to collect books for a library seems bizarre. But volunteers at the hospital use the books to advise them on how to treat patients, untrained teachers use them to help prepare classes, and aspiring dentists raid the shelves for advice on doing fillings and extracting teeth.

But in a besieged town wouldn't it make more sense for them to spend their time looking for food rather than books? One of the library users said, "In a sense the library gave me back my life. I would say that just like the body needs food, the soul needs books. Books motivate us to keep on going. We want to be a free nation. And hopefully, by reading, we can achieve this."

Possible Preaching Angles: Word of God; Bible; Do we as Christians hunger and thirst for God's Word like these endangered Syrians hunger for knowledge? Would we risk our lives to own and read the Bible in order to find hope and meaning for life?

In 1982, Reader's Digest published a condensed version of the world's most widely-read book—the Bible. The project, led by John E. Walsh, took seven editors three years to complete. In a 2015 obituary for Walsh, The New York Times reported,

In all its incarnations, the Bible may well have been the world's best-selling book, but not necessarily the best read. The original Revised Standard Version was 1,400 pages; the [Reader's Digest version], about 800. In the beginning, there were 850,000 words. Three years later, John E. Walsh and his team of editors had condensed the Bible by 40 percent, to 510,000.

The abridged version … did not skimp on any of the Ten Commandments and considered favorites like the 23rd Psalm and the Lord's Prayer to be sacrosanct. But in the end, it boiled down the Old Testament by 50 percent and the New Testament by 25 percent. None of Jesus' words were changed, but about 10 percent were deleted.

In 1982 Mr. Walsh asserted, "Our Bible is still the Word of God, but it's easier to get into and stay with and appreciate."

Possible Preaching Angles: This story shows that we may also be living with a "condensed version" of God's Word. In particular, we've most likely deleted the portions we find offensive or inconvenient. Unfortunately, a selective Bible leads to selective obedience.

To explain how Scripture meditation goes beyond hearing, reading, studying, and even memorizing as a means of taking in God's Word, author Donald Whitney provides the analogy of a cup of tea:

In this analogy your mind is the cup of hot water and the tea bag represents your intake of Scripture. Hearing God's Word is like one dip of the tea bag into the cup. Some of the tea's flavor is absorbed by the water, but not as much as would occur with a more thorough soaking of the bag. Reading, studying, and memorizing God's Word are like additional plunges of the tea bag into the cup. The more frequently the tea enters the water, the more permeating its effect. Meditation, however, is like immersing the bag completely and letting it steep until all the rich tea flavor has been extracted and the hot water is thoroughly tinctured reddish brown. Meditation on Scripture is letting the Bible brew in the brain. Thus we might say that as the tea colors the water, meditation likewise "colors" our thinking. When we meditate on Scripture it colors our thinking about God, about God's ways and his world, and about ourselves.

Editor's Note: You could also try this with a simple prop—a real tea bag placed in hot water. Use a glass mug so your people can see the tea permeate and change the color of the water.

If you're like most Westerners, you take chocolate for granted. While always a treat, the delicious brown gold is everywhere, relatively cheap and ready to give you a sugar buzz. It's easy to assume that that's the case everywhere—particularly for the workers who grow the cocoa beans. After all, if you lived in a place where chocolate "grew on trees," wouldn't you be sick of the flavor?

But that's not the case. The journey from cocoa pod to Wonka-style chocolate bars is a very long one, and the product is unrecognizable to the workers who harvest the raw materials for chocolate. But a recent viral video shows cocoa farmers in Africa tasting chocolate for the first time. They weren't even sure what their hard-earned crops were even being made into. The look on their faces—pleasure and surprise and "this is so yummy"—is priceless as they taste the fruit of their labor.

Possible Preaching Angle:

It's a sweet illustration of how we can be so close to something wonderful—like the gospel—handling it all the time, but never tasting or benefitting from its end result—salvation, spiritual health, and joy. We can produce without tasting, or feed others without being nourished ourselves.

An estimated sixty six percent of Americans watch TV while eating dinner. Sixty five percent eat lunch at their desk. Twenty percent of meals are eaten in the car. What other things do people do while eating? Walking, riding the subway, talking on the phone, reading a magazine or book, putting on makeup, and walking the dog are common pursuits of those who eat while juggling other tasks.

What's the price tag for our insane busyness and constant multitasking? At least two dozen research studies have shown that eating while distracted leads to overindulgence. But according to a study (2014) published in a journal called Psychological Science, eating while multitasking also dampens our perception of taste. Food tastes blander, we crave stronger flavors (like salt and sugar), and we end up eating more.

The bottom line: when it's time to eat, it's time to eat. Turn off the computer, the iPhone, and the TV. Enjoy the meal, savor every bite, family and friends. Light a candle, put some flowers in a vase and use cloth napkins. Not only will it taste better, you'll eat less.

Possible Preaching Angles: Obviously, this applies to meals, but this same principle could apply to how we celebrate the Lord's Supper. Do we come distracted? Is our celebration of the Lord's Supper a bland experience because we're trying to multitask while we worship?

Cornelius Plantinga Jr. writes in “Reading for Preaching”:

I was visiting on death row in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. I asked one man if he would like to talk, and he said he would. He was a smallish man whose wire-rimmed glasses and intelligent expression made him look a little professorial. I asked him how he spends his days. He picked up his NIV Bible, hefted it, and said, "I spend a lot of time reading our book. I'm glad it's so big. I'll never get to the bottom of it." Then he said something I'll never forget. "You know," he said, "there are 2 billion of us Christians in the world, and everything today that any of us does that's any good has something to do with our book. And I have a copy of it right here in my cell!"

Editor's Note: Eleanor Turnbull, a veteran missionary to Haiti, collected and translated the simple but powerful prayers of the Christians who live in the Haitian mountains. Here are four prayers focusing on the power of God's Word in our lives.

Our Great Physician,
Your word is like alcohol.
When poured on an infected wound, it burns and stings,
but only then can it kill germs.
If it doesn't burn, it doesn't do any good.

Father,
We are all hungry baby birds this morning.
Our heart-mouths are gaping wide, waiting for you to fill us.

Father,
A cold wind seems to have chilled us.
Wrap us in the blanket of your Word and warm us up.

Lord,
We find your Word like cabbage.
As we pull down the leaves, we get closer to the heart.
And as we get closer to the heart, it is sweeter.

Author Frederica Mathewes-Green addresses people who hunger for God's presence but rarely feel it—at least not in dramatic ways. She writes:

My hunch is that you are already sensing something of God's presence, or you wouldn't care. Picture yourself walking around a shopping mall, looking at people and the window displays. Suddenly, you get a whiff of cinnamon. You weren't even hungry, but now you really crave a cinnamon roll. This craving isn't something you made up. There you were, minding your own business, when some drifting molecules of sugar, butter, and spice collided with a susceptible patch inside your nose. You had a real encounter with cinnamon—not a mental delusion, not an emotional projection, but the real thing.

And what was the effect? You want more, now. And if you hunger to know the presence of God, it's because … you have already begun to scent [God's] compelling delight.

In her book Amazing Grace, the writer and poet Kathleen Norris shares what she calls "the scariest story" she's ever heard about the Bible. Norris and her husband were visiting a man named Arlo, a rugged, self-made man who was facing terminal cancer. During their visit, Arlo started talking about his grandfather, a sincere Christian. The grandfather gave Arlo and his bride a wedding present: an expensive leather Bible with their names printed in gold lettering. Arlo left it in the box and never opened it. But for months afterwards his grandfather kept asking if he liked the Bible. Arlo told Norris, "The wife had written a nice thank-you note, and we'd thanked him in person, but somehow he couldn't let it lie, he always had to ask about it."

Finally, Arlo grew curious enough to open the Bible. "The joke was on me," Arlo said. "I finally took that Bible out of the closet and I found that granddad had placed a twenty-dollar bill at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, and at the beginning of every book … over thirteen hundred dollars in all. And he knew I'd never find it."