Most of the time when you think of Research and Development (R&D), you think of think tanks with too much money on their hands. So is there a role for R&D in the Church? Perhaps it has to be at the general Church level, where it can result in improvements Church wide. Or perhaps it should be in the services that provide technology for the Church to use – e.g. software that specializes in Church Administration. Either way, the R&D needs to address the unique needs of the Church.

Christians are blessed with knowledge about the Bible. In a sense, we have never known more about the Bible. We live in an unprecedented era of access to great Biblical research. Millions of books have been written about the Bible – which was the first major book printed on the Gutenberg press in 1455. There is more information available about the Bible than any other ancient book. In a sense, Biblical research has peeled back the darkness of the Middle Ages to take us to the earliest sources. We are blessed by this knowledge.

Also, we have remarkable Bible study tools available. Gone are the days when you had to depend on Crudens Concordance for study – useful though it was! Now you can have the Bible on your smart phone – i.e. in your favorite translation. (It works great for a sword drill!) And you can search the Biblical text for any word combination in any set of books that you can think of. It really makes the Bible a “lamp to my feet and a light for my path” (Psalm 119:105 NIV).

With all of this great Biblical research available to us, you would think that our knowledge of the Bible as individual Christians would be awesome. Yet there are studies that suggest that Biblical literacy is on the decline. Stephen Prothero even has a test for it, and finds most Americans sorely lacking in this day and age. I suspect that this reflects the shift away from talking about religion in the public arena. The Church needs to do a better job of teaching the Bible. How is your Church increasing Bible literacy in your community? Are you using all of the tools, both in print and software? Or are you just sticking with an emphasis on good preaching?