Woodrow Kroll is the president and primary Bible teacher of Back to the Bible, where he has been for the last 19 years. 52% of the world’s population can hear back to the Bible in their primary language. (www.backtothebible.org)
He is a Bible college graduate and former professor. From 1980-1990, he was the president of Davis College in New York. (http://www.backtothebible.org/index.php/About-Woodrow-Kroll.html)
My notes on his message entitled Bible Illiteracy.
He has been a part of ABHE for many years and follows with great interest the work of this organization. We can make mistakes with the information about how fast things are changing. We can hold dear our connection with God’s word and never connect with the society that is changing quickly. Or, we can hold to that society and present a measley message to them. This is the mistake he wants to address tonight.
Human beings cannot find our way without some outside reference point to show us where to go. We call that outside reference point “true north.” A lot of people have been trying to find it over the last few years. With a magnetic compass, you won’t make it to true north. Magnetic north is 600 miles off of true north. Plus, a compass is not all that accurate at certain places on earth. Solar-magnetic activity can affect it, as can your elevation. While the world is trying to find true north with its own compass, they can’t do it. Your internal compass won’t take you to true north, and the external influences will affect what little you have internally.
So we have to take people to true north, and the only way we can do it is connect with them and connect a Message with them. We live in an evangelical world that has made some progress in trying to connect with a culture. Unfortunately, we have prepared for them “Gospel Lite,” “more taste, less filling.”
Listen to the late night theologians: Leno and Letterman. Leno goes to people on the street and asks them questions. We hear the dumbest answers they can find. When he asks Bible questions, the answers are horrible. Barna says the most recognizable verse in the Bible to Americans is “God helps those who help themselves.”
Can you name the gospel writers? No. Can you name the Beatles? Yes, all four of them.
Who was swallowed by a great fish? The answer given is Pinnochio.
The culture around us has a greater effect on the people around us than the Bible does. We need to think about how we can get people to engage God’s word.
The Gallup people have been doing the Gallup Bible Knowledge quiz for 40 years. One question is: what is the first book of the Bible. 49% of the people in America know that it is Genesis, so 51% don’t.
(http://www.centerforbibleengagement.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=15&Itemid=7)
We live in a country where Bible illiteracy is growing and we don’t even see it happen. It’s happening in the church, too. When Dr. Gary Burge, Chairman of the New Testament department tested incoming Freshmen to Wheaton, students from fine Evangelical homes and Christian schools, alarmingly he discovered: one-third of freshmen could not sequence in order Abraham, the OT prophets, the death of Christ, and Pentecost. Half could not sequence Moses in Egypt, Isaac’s birth, Saul’s death, Judah’s exile. One third could not find Paul’s travels in Acts. And one-half didn’t know the Christmas story was in Matthew.
This doesn’t reflect on Wheaton, it reflects on the plague of Bible illiteracy to the children of our churches.
When Kroll was the chairman of the division of religion at Liberty University in 1975, he started a Bible department. His responsibility was to give a Bible comprehensive exam to incoming freshmen. He used the AABC test. Using 75 out of 150 they would consider to be passing. In 1980, they gave it to 1100 incoming freshmen, most from the South and Christian school graduates. Only 45 students out of 1100 made at least a 75.
If we connect to our culture and have nothing to give them, that’s still a mistake. What is Bible illiteracy doing to us? What can we do about it?
Gallup said Bible illiteracy is not only a religious and spiritual problem, but it’s a cultural problem as well. One reason we are not the salt and light in the world we want to be is that we don’t know the Word well enough. Seven dramatic ways in which Bible illiteracy is impacting the evangelical community right now:
1. It has caused moral apathy among Christians today. We don’t know what is moral and what is immoral. We don’t know enough about how God views things to stand up and say it. The evangelical community in Massachusetts was quiet on the issue of gay marriage. We don’t know our position well enough to explain it to the world. The Bible is clear, but you have to know it.
2. It has robbed us of the answers to life’s key questions. We allow every answer to be equally important, equally valid, equally well thought-out. We let Oprah settle questions about the family. We let a rabbi answer questions about evil. In the issues of forgiveness, relationships, sanctity of life, we listen to polls and pundits instead of the Word. The church is oblivious to those answers because we are oblivious to the only book God ever wrote. We don’t have better answers than anyone else unless we give them God’s answers. He gets negative mail every day from people who don’t like him, and the most negative, frequent criticism is this: you speak too authoritatively. But he doesn’t try to say anything that doesn’t come out of God’s book. But if we tell what comes out of God’s book on the basis of the authority of God, we have nothing to be ashamed of.
3. It has hastened the dumbing down of the church. In 1999, Don Jacobson (Multnomah) asked Kroll to write a book on the dumbing down of the church. Kroll didn’t want to do it because he would have to take on the Christian publishing industry. The industry is part of the problem, not part of the solution. You have to wade through rooms of holy hardware before you get to anything that will advance the Christian life. The industry publishes what they publish because the public wants it. Don’t blame the bookstore or the publishers. They only give the customers what they want. He would also have to take on Christian radio, because of what it provides. It used to be that you could turn on Christian radio and learn something. Now it’s an entertainment medium instead of an informative medium. We have met the enemy, and it is us. Albert Mohler says Bible illiteracy is not someone else’s problem. It’s our problem in the church. We have to face it and admit it and do something about it.
4. It has caused a lack of intimacy with God. One of the worst things that can happen to a Christian is become less intimate with God. The less time I spend with God and His word, the less intimate I am with Him. When he started at Back to the Bible, he held up the job description for President and Bible Teacher and said “what do you want me to do.” One person on the board said, “We want you to spend enough time in God’s word every time that when you come to the microphone, you have something to say.” The more time I spend in his book, the more intimate I become with the author of the book. God only wrote one book and he would be pleased to have us spend more time with it. We crave intimacy and we can have it, but we have to get into the book to get it.
5. It has decreased the value of Christianity among other religions. We live in a world where people make up their own religion. That is ok in this world, because they say all religions lead to God. That is the dumbest idea ever. Yet, Bible illiteracy saps our understanding that Christianity has the road that leads to God. We encounter people who know their position better than we know it. We will encounter people who know our position better than we know it.
6. It has diminished the urgency for evangelism. We are far less evangelistic if we aren’t convinced there is a real hell, that there is only one God, only one mediator between God and man. If we don’t truly believe these things, our urgency for evangelism will be back burnered. We will do everything under the sun that is good except take the message of the good news.
7. It has hampered our ability to find true north. The influences that come against us cause us to believe we are on the right road, when we truly are not. We don’t understand how we are being hampered.
All the news isn’t bad, but you can’t understand good news until you understand bad news. You can’t appreciate heaven without knowing about hell. We can’t appreciate how important the bible college movement is until we see what the major problem we face in America is. Bible illiteracy is not a problem in the church. Bible illiteracy is THE problem in the church. Someone on Sunday will know exactly how much money was given. Someone can tell you exactly how much space is in your auditorium. Someone can tell you exactly how many people came to each of your services. But no one can tell you whether the crowd is more mature than they were last week. We have a measuring tool for almost everything in church except the thing that really matters. For 2000 years, we haven’t addressed this issue. Isn’t that odd? Christian radio is concerned about radio stations, donor audiences, and time slots. It’s not enough to bless people. We need to change them. We need to take the only book God ever wrote to people.
The importance of our schools will ultimately depend on how we address the issue of Bible illiteracy among our students. If you talk about charting spiritual maturity and growth, people will get embarrassed. How many ministers would sign up to have the spiritual growth of their people monitored? There are some things that we must do, but we must first be willing to take the blame within the church for this.
George Barna has come to the belief that he has to bypass the church in order to get his message to the people of the church. Most of the information he has had to present in the last few years hasn’t been that positive. It isn’t easy to present non-positive messages. Ask the OT prophets like Joel, Amos, etc. The world likes positivity so much. While we talk about possibility, we get dumber every year about God’s word. You can’t blame your church or the Bible college. By the time they get to Bible college they are so far behind, they will never catch up. Kroll suggested to Barna that the plan is to take the message to 12-14 year olds. Barna says you’re too late. By age 8, a person will learn almost everything they will know about the Bible the rest of their lives. But there are a couple of things you can do.
* Start with yourself: president, dean, faculty, etc. Your students will never grow deeper than you grow. We know that we’re busy. It’s difficult to find that time to spend with the Word. But if you don’t start with yourself, all your plans will look outward and they won’t matter anyway. Transformation is the name of the game. When you read the Bible, read it to be transformed, not just informed. Most of us have read through the Bible several times. When we come to the book, we are often looking for information for the next message. John Wesley wrote about the night when he was “strangely warmed.” He was used to reading the bible and grew up in a Christian home. He came to America as a missionary. Then he went back and discovered he had read the Bible for information, not transformation. For those of us who are professionals, it’s easy to read for information. But every day, we need to be transformed. He reads the Bible every year from a new version. People used to say if we just had a Bible in readable language, we could understand it better. But we have 35 readable versions now! The problem is not with King James, it is with me. My notes are not enough. I need to start with myself and get back into the word.
* Read the word of God in order to metabolize it. Metabolism has to do with how the body processes food. When you metabolize something, it becomes part of you. You don’t just take it and spit it out. It forms what you are. We need to metabolize the word of God, eat the word and let it form who we are. God commanded Ezekiel to eat the book. I can’t give out every day if I’m not eating every day. He knows what dealing with students and papers is like. He doesn’t have to deal with that, but he does have to prepare a study every day that will be heard by millions of people. What you hear on radio is not what he eats. What you hear on radio is what is left over. If you want to make a difference in the lives of your students, you need to learn how to eat and take in a lot more of God’s word than you are. Jeremiah said, “You words were found and I ate them and they became a joy and delight of my heart, for I am called by your name.” It’s easy to find things in the bookstores about blessings. But there’s more to it than that: Rev 10:9-10, “Take and eat it. It will make your stomach bitter, but in your mouth it will be sweet as honey.” If there aren’t some things I am taking in from God’s word that upsets me, then I’m probably missing some important parts. The whole book is God’s word, not just the selected portions that bless you. One of the reasons we aren’t getting ahead is that we read selectively.
Some years ago, he started the Center for Bible Engagement (http://www.centerforbibleengagement.org/). Bible illiteracy is the negative side, Bible engagement is the positive solution side. Everybody always has a story about this. But look at the data. Doing over 40,000 surveys among Christians, they found hurdles and incentives. One of the key hurdles is that people say they don’t have time. Every person has made that same excuse. “Read your Bible one book at a time.” He timed how long it took to read each book of the Bible. You can read the entire Bible in 72 hours. There are 26 books that can be read in less than 30 minutes. Most of those can be read in less than 15 minutes. If you want to lead other people as a Christian, but you don’t have time for God, that’s a problem. You have 1440 minutes in every day. If you tithed your time, that would be 144 minutes a day to give to God. Even if you take off your 8 hours for sleeping and 8 hours for working, you could tithe 480 minutes a day and that would leave you with 48 minutes a day to read God’s word. You could read the Bible 2.5 times in a year. You would have to give up a television show.
You and I have to find a way to tap the new generation with technologies that don’t exist yet and still have something to give to them while we are doing it. Going to church isn’t really an adequate measure of religiosity, so Back to the Bible asked how often a week do you engage the Word. They discovered that if you are a 0-1 time per week engager of God’s word, there is no difference in your lifestyle than from a non-believer. You are just as likely to gamble, abuse drugs and alcohol, be hooked on Internet pornography, or have an affair. You can’t be salt and light. The reason we aren’t making a dent in this world is that we don’t know enough about God’s word to be salt and light and if we never go to God’s word or only once, we don’t know enough. If you are a 2-3 times a week engager, there is a slight decline in the non-Christian behavior. But if you engage God’s word 4 or more times a week, there is a dramatic change in the way you live your life. You are far less likely to get drunk, gamble, and behave in other non-Christian behavior.
Bible illiteracy is a plague. Reading the word is alone is not the answer to the plague, but it’s better than anything else we’ve answered. Check out www.411god.net. Teenagers get a phone call every day with the Word. One minute a day won’t make a spiritual giant out of kids. But kids don’t understand that when you hear the Word of God, God speaks to you. This is using technology to do ministry, but don’t let technology get in the way of ministry. Bible literacy can be stamped out. It starts with you and me. Maybe it starts right here.
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