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What 23 Million Bible Readers Taught Me About Digital Discipleship

digital discipleship

Every month, roughly 23 million people open Bible Gateway to read Scripture. That’s more than attend every Southern Baptist Convention church on a given Sunday — the SBC’s own 2023 report counted 12.4 million in average weekly worship attendance.1

I lead product at HarperCollins Christian Publishing, where Bible Gateway is my primary focus. Before that, I spent years building SermonCentral — a platform serving 14,700+ subscribing pastors with access to 145,000+ sermon manuscripts — and co-built ORI, a youth discipleship app for mentoring teenagers. I’ve spent the last few years of my career watching how people actually behave when they engage with Scripture through technology. And what I’ve observed has changed the way I think about what “digital discipleship” means.

Content Distribution Is Not Discipleship

Most church tech conversations define digital discipleship as “putting Christian content online.” Upload a sermon. Publish a devotional. Build a Bible app.

That’s content distribution. Discipleship is something else.

From a product perspective, digital discipleship is designing technology that facilitates spiritual formation — helping people move from curiosity to commitment to transformation. The difference matters because it changes what you build. If you’re optimizing for content distribution, you chase volume: more translations, more devotionals, more features. If you’re optimizing for formation, you chase behavior change: consistency, depth, relationship.

Bible Gateway has given me a front-row seat to how millions of people actually engage with Scripture. Not how we hope they do, not how pastors assume they do — how they actually do. The patterns are humbling.

Commitment Structures Beat Content Volume

Bible Gateway offers hundreds of reading plans across dozens of categories. We have the content. What we’ve observed is that completion rates vary dramatically — and it’s not the “best” content that wins. It’s the best structure.

Short reading plans with clear daily commitments consistently outperform longer ones in completion rates. (I want to be precise: this is based on aggregate engagement data across our reading plan ecosystem, not a controlled A/B test. The pattern is strong, but I’m stating it as an observed trend.)

This makes sense if you think about it through a discipleship lens. The goal of a reading plan isn’t to get someone through the entire Bible in 365 days. The goal is to build a habit of daily engagement with Scripture. A 7-day plan someone finishes builds more spiritual momentum than a year-long plan abandoned in February. The research supports this — BJ Fogg’s work on Tiny Habits at Stanford demonstrates that small, completable commitments are the foundation of lasting behavior change.2

The product implication: when designing for digital discipleship, optimize for completion and consistency, not comprehensiveness. Finishable is better than thorough.

I saw the same thing at SermonCentral. Pastors didn’t need more sermon content — they needed the right content at the right time in their prep cycle. The value was relevance and timing, not volume.

The Gap Between Bible Search and Bible Study

Something surprised me when I first dug into Bible Gateway’s usage data: the overwhelming majority of sessions are what I’d call “Bible search” behavior, not “Bible study” behavior.

Most people come to look up a specific verse. They type “John 3:16” or “Philippians 4:13” into the search bar, read it, and leave. They’re using the platform as a reference tool. With over 2,000 Bible searches happening every minute on Bible Gateway, that’s a lot of single-verse visits.

This isn’t a criticism — it’s a behavioral insight with real implications for how we think about digital discipleship strategy.

If most users are in “lookup mode,” the discipleship opportunity isn’t in the content they came for. They already know that verse. The opportunity is in what comes next. Cross-references. Historical context. A reading plan that starts at that passage. A study note that opens the text up. The moment after someone finds what they came for is the moment a reference visit can become a formation experience.

(I should be transparent: I’m inferring the “lookup vs. study” distinction from session duration, page depth, and search query patterns in aggregate. We can see that a large portion of sessions are short and single-verse. But I can’t tell you what’s happening in someone’s heart during a 30-second visit — maybe that one verse is exactly what they needed. The data shows behavior, not transformation.)

The product principle applies broadly: meet people where they are, not where you wish they were. Design the next step from actual behavior, not from an ideal user journey.

The Day 7 Engagement Cliff

This is the most actionable pattern I’ve observed, and it’s consistent across every content platform I’ve worked on.

When someone starts a reading plan, engagement drops sharply after about Day 7. The first few days see strong completion. By the end of the first week, there’s a significant cliff. People who make it past Day 10 tend to finish — but a substantial number never get there.

(Evidence level: this is a pattern in aggregate reading plan data. Exact drop-off percentages vary by plan type and length, but the general shape — strong start, sharp drop around Day 7, stabilization for those who persist — is consistent enough that I’m confident calling it a pattern. This aligns with published habit formation research — Phillippa Lally’s 2009 study in the European Journal of Social Psychology found that early repetitions are the most fragile period for new habits.3)

For digital discipleship design, the implication is clear: Day 5 through Day 8 is where you need your best intervention design. Reminders. Encouragement. Community connection. A check-in from a real person. Whatever bridges the gap between initial motivation and formed habit.

This is where most digital discipleship tools fail. They’re good at onboarding. They’re good at content. They go quiet in the messy middle — the stretch where motivation fades and habit hasn’t locked in yet. That gap is where discipleship actually happens, and it’s where most apps have nothing to say.

At Bible Gateway’s scale, even small improvements in that Day 5-8 window could mean hundreds of thousands of people moving from casual lookup to sustained practice.

Why Features Rarely Solve Discipleship Problems

I’ve shipped a lot of features across my career. One thing I’ve learned — sometimes painfully — is that adding features to a discipleship tool almost never solves a discipleship problem.

The instinct is always to build more. More study tools. More social features. More gamification. But the digital discipleship tools that actually seem to work are the ones that reduce friction to spiritual practice, not the ones that add complexity to it.

Bible Gateway’s core value proposition is remarkably simple: read any Bible translation, for free, instantly. Over 200 versions in 70+ languages. That simplicity is the product. Every feature we consider needs to serve that core experience, not compete with it.

There’s a real tension here. Bible Gateway Plus offers 50+ study resources, ad-free reading, and deep study tools at $4.99/month. But even the premium tier works because it removes friction (ads, limited study tools) rather than adding cognitive load. The upgrade makes the simple thing simpler.

What ORI Taught Me About the Limits of Scale

All of this data-driven thinking needs a counterweight. For me, that counterweight is ORI.

ORI is a youth discipleship app I co-built, and its premise is different from a content platform like Bible Gateway. ORI facilitates the relationship between a mentor and a young person. The technology doesn’t do the discipleship — it supports the human who does.

That experience taught me something analytics can’t: the most effective digital discipleship tool is often the one that gets out of the way. The one that connects a young person with an adult who cares about them, gives them a shared framework for conversation, and then steps back. It echoes what Paul wrote to the Thessalonians — “We were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children” (1 Thessalonians 2:7, ESV). Discipleship has always been relational. Technology either serves that or distracts from it.

There’s a spectrum here. On one end, platforms like Bible Gateway serve millions with content at scale. On the other, tools like ORI serve hundreds by facilitating real human relationships. Both are valid. Both are needed. But they succeed for different reasons, and conflating them is a mistake I see church tech teams make often.

Friction Is the Enemy

If I had to compress everything I’ve learned into one principle: your job is to reduce friction between a person and their next spiritual step.

Not to create content. Not to build features. Not to gamify Scripture. To reduce friction.

At Bible Gateway’s scale, that means instant access to any translation, fast search, and reading plans designed around how people actually behave. At ORI’s scale, that means making it easy for a mentor to show up prepared for a fifteen-minute conversation with a teenager.

The 23 million people who use Bible Gateway each month aren’t a metric. They’re people in a spiritual practice — or trying to start one. The best thing a product team can do is figure out where the friction lives and get it out of the way.

I don’t have this figured out. The Day 7 cliff still exists. The gap between Bible search and Bible study is still wide. The question of whether a 30-second verse lookup counts as “discipleship” — I genuinely don’t know. But I think the question itself is worth sitting with, because how you answer it shapes everything you build.

Dr. Josh Read is Director of Product at HarperCollins Christian Publishing, where he leads Bible Gateway. He writes about the product side of digital discipleship at drjoshuaread.com. His other writing explores AI stewardship in ministry and what the Tower of Babel teaches us about technology.

1 Southern Baptist Convention, 2023 Annual Church Profile, reporting 12.4 million average weekly worship attendance across 47,000+ churches.

2 BJ Fogg, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). Fogg’s research at Stanford’s Behavior Design Lab demonstrates that starting small and building on success is more effective than ambitious commitment structures.

3 Phillippa Lally et al., “How Are Habits Formed: Modelling Habit Formation in the Real World,” European Journal of Social Psychology 40, no. 6 (2010): 998-1009.

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The Tower of Babel Was a Technology Problem, Not a Language Problem

Most pastors I’ve talked to use the Tower of Babel the same way. It’s a warning against ambition. Don’t reach too high. Stay in your lane.

That reading has legs. But I’ve spent the last several years building products for churches — first at SermonCentral, where we managed over 245,000 sermon manuscripts for 14,700+ subscribers, and now at Bible Gateway, which serves 23 million monthly visitors across 200+ Bible translations. When I read Genesis 11 through a product lens, I see something the ambition reading misses.

God didn’t judge the bricks.

“Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves.” — Genesis 11:4, NIV

The materials were fine. The engineering was fine. The goal — consolidating human fame — was the problem. And that distinction matters right now, because the church is having the wrong argument about AI.

AI Is Bricks and Mortar

The debate I keep hearing splits along predictable lines. One camp says AI threatens authentic ministry. The other says it’s the future of outreach. Both are fixated on the tool and ignoring the purpose behind it.

AI is a building material. Your spam filter runs on it. Your search results are shaped by it. Your congregation interacts with machine learning dozens of times a day without a second thought. The question of whether the church uses AI was settled years ago.

The question that matters: what are you building, and for whom?

A church that uses AI to transcribe sermons so a deaf congregant can read along on Monday morning — that’s building for the Kingdom. A church that uses AI-generated sermons so the pastor can spend less time in the text — that’s a tower with its own name on it.

Same bricks. The blueprint is what changed.

Augustine’s Framework (From 397 AD)

About 1,600 years before anyone worried about ChatGPT, Augustine drew a line I think about constantly in product work.

In De Doctrina Christiana (Book I, chapters 3-4), Augustine distinguished between two postures toward the things of this world: uti (to use) and frui (to enjoy as an end in itself). His argument: the things of creation are meant to be used as means toward loving God and neighbor. They become disordered when we treat them as destinations — when we frui the tool instead of the purpose the tool serves.

I’ve found this more useful than any AI ethics whitepaper.

Consider: a church uses AI to automate its weekly bulletin, freeing up a volunteer to spend those 3 hours visiting a homebound member. That’s uti. The tool serves a human end.

Now consider: a church uses AI to eliminate pastoral presence altogether. Their new chatbot handles prayer requests, the algorithm personalizes a sermon playlist, the system runs without a shepherd. That’s frui. The church has started delighting in efficiency as its own reward.

The technology didn’t change. The orientation did.

Three Questions Before Adopting Any AI Tool

I’ve spent enough time in product leadership to know that the best safeguard isn’t a policy document (I’ve written plenty of those — they collect dust). It’s a habit of asking the right questions before you build.

1. Who benefits?

If the honest answer is “the budget” and not “the congregation,” pause. Cost savings aren’t wrong — stewardship matters. But if the primary beneficiary is the institution rather than the people it serves, you’re building in the wrong direction. The best AI implementations I’ve seen at Bible Gateway started with a specific human need, not a line item.

2. What human activity does this replace, and should that activity stay human?

Administrative tasks — scheduling, data entry, email sorting, transcript formatting — automate freely. These are good uses of AI. They free up people for work that only people can do.

But pastoral care, spiritual formation, the ministry of presence — these resist automation for a reason. A hospital visit from a pastor matters because a person chose to show up. An AI can generate a thoughtful prayer. It cannot bear witness to suffering.

(This is the question I find hardest to answer cleanly, by the way. The line between “administrative” and “pastoral” blurs more than we’d like. Where does sermon research end and sermon preparation begin? I don’t have a tidy answer. I think the honest move is to keep asking.)

3. Does this build the church’s capacity or create dependency on a vendor?

This is the product leader in me talking. I’ve watched organizations — churches included — adopt tools that felt like empowerment but functioned as dependency. If your church can’t operate without a specific AI platform, you haven’t adopted a tool. You’ve adopted a landlord.

Look for AI that trains your people. Look for solutions where the value stays with the church if the vendor disappears tomorrow.

From Babel to Pentecost

The Bible doesn’t end the language story at Babel. It picks it back up in Acts 2.

“All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken.” — Acts 2:4-6, NIV

At Babel, human technology consolidated power and built a monument to self. God scattered and confused. At Pentecost, the Spirit moved — and people from every nation heard the gospel in their own mother tongue. Each person’s language, met where they were.

According to recent Barna research, 77% of pastors believe AI can have a positive impact. I think that’s right — but only if we’re asking the Babel question each time we adopt something new.

Here’s what that looks like in practice: a small church in rural Guatemala using AI translation to access theological training that was previously locked behind an English-language paywall. That points toward Pentecost.

A megachurch using AI to scale content production so it can dominate more digital market share. That points back toward Babel.

What We Build Next

I don’t think the church needs to fear AI. I also don’t think it needs to be infatuated with it (and having built products in this space since 2018, I’ve watched both reactions play out in real time).

The bricks and mortar are here. They’re powerful. They’re going to keep getting more powerful. The church’s job is to ask the Babel question every time: what are we building, and whose name is on it?

That question doesn’t have a permanent answer. It has to be asked again with every new tool, every new capability, every new vendor pitch. And I think the churches that will get this right are the ones willing to sit with the discomfort of asking it honestly — even when the answer means building slower.

Sermon Illustration: The Tower of Babel and AI

When the people of Babel built their tower, God didn’t judge the bricks. He didn’t condemn the mortar or the engineering. The materials were fine. The problem was the purpose: “let us make a name for ourselves” (Genesis 11:4, NIV).

Today, AI is the new brick and mortar. Churches face the same question Babel faced: what are we building, and for whom? AI that frees a pastor to sit at a hospital bedside — that’s technology in service of presence. AI that replaces the pastor at the bedside — that’s a tower with our own name on it.

But the story doesn’t end at Babel. At Pentecost, God took language itself — the very thing He confused at Babel — and used it to carry the gospel across every barrier (Acts 2:4-6). The bricks are in our hands. The blueprint is the question.

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Karpathy’s Autoresearch and the Parable of the Talents: What AI Stewardship Looks Like in Practice

A few weeks ago, Andrej Karpathy — former AI director at Tesla, co-founder of OpenAI — released a project that made me think about ministry.

I didn’t expect that either.

Karpathy built a framework called autoresearch. It runs autonomous ML experiments on a single GPU while the researcher sleeps. The AI agent modifies training code, runs a 5-minute experiment, evaluates the result, keeps improvements, discards failures, and loops. About 12 experiments per hour. Roughly 100 overnight. He woke up to measurable performance gains — with zero human intervention during the run.

The part that got me: Karpathy doesn’t write the training code anymore. He writes a Markdown file — plain English instructions — that tells the AI what to research, what constraints to follow, and when to stop. His words: “you are programming the `program.md` Markdown files that provide context to the AI agents.” He calls this “programming in Markdown.”

The human moved up one level of abstraction. Define the methodology, set the guardrails, let the system execute. Not less involved — involved differently, at the level of direction instead of mechanics.

39,800 GitHub stars in the first two weeks. The tech world noticed.

I think the church should too.

The Parable We Keep Skimming

In Matthew 25:14-30 (ESV), Jesus tells the story of a master who entrusts his servants with talents — significant sums of money — before leaving on a journey. One receives five talents, another two, another one. The first two invest and double their resources. The third buries his in the ground.

When the master returns, the investors are praised: “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much” (Matthew 25:21, ESV). The one who buried his talent gets rebuked. Not for losing money — he hadn’t lost anything. He was rebuked for doing nothing with what he’d been given.

We tend to read this as a general principle about using your gifts. It is that. But I think there’s something more pointed here for 2026.

AI is a talent in the Matthew 25 sense. It’s a resource placed in front of this generation, and we have a choice. Invest it toward the mission, or bury it because the risk feels too high.

What This Looks Like at My Desk

I want to be specific, because the abstract conversation about “AI and the church” doesn’t move anyone forward.

I’m Director of Product at HarperCollins Christian Publishing, where I lead Bible Gateway — a platform serving over 75 million monthly visitors engaging with Scripture. Before this role, I led product for SermonCentral, which grew to 14,700+ paying subscribers with access to more than 145,000 sermon manuscripts.

Over the past year, I’ve built a system of 18 AI agents that handle competitive analysis, research synthesis, meeting intelligence, content drafting, and task management. Several run overnight — not unlike Karpathy’s loop. The architecture is different (mine orchestrate across business functions, his optimizes a neural network), but the pattern is identical: define methodology, set constraints, let the system execute, review results in the morning.

Every hour I used to spend pulling competitor data or formatting reports is now an hour I spend thinking about how 75 million people experience Scripture online. Or how to make Bible Gateway better for the person opening it at 2 AM because they can’t sleep and need something solid to hold onto.

Karpathy programs research methodology in Markdown now instead of writing Python. I program strategic priorities and agent instructions instead of pulling spreadsheets. The abstraction layer moved up. The work got more human, not less.

The Fear Is Understandable — and Partly Right

I hear the concerns from church leaders, and I take them seriously.

AI will replace authentic ministry. AI will make pastors lazy. AI will simulate relational presence that only a human body in a room can provide. These aren’t irrational. Some are already happening in small ways.

If a pastor uses AI to generate a sermon they never wrestle with, that’s a problem. If a church deploys a chatbot as a substitute for pastoral counseling, that’s a problem. If we treat AI-generated prayers as equivalent to the honest, stumbling prayers of a person before God — we’ve lost something that matters more than efficiency.

But Karpathy’s work shows the other path. The tool doesn’t replace the human. It moves the human to where they’re most needed.

The pastor doesn’t stop preaching — they stop spending 4 hours hunting for the right illustration and spend that time with the family walking through a divorce. The administrator doesn’t stop managing — they stop updating attendance spreadsheets and spend that time training volunteers. The ministry leader doesn’t stop leading — they stop drowning in email and spend that time on the phone with a donor questioning their faith.

I’ve lived this tradeoff. When my agents took over competitive analysis (something that used to eat 3-4 hours a week), I didn’t fill that time with more busywork. I spent it in 1-on-1s with my team and in deeper product strategy. The output quality went up because I was operating at the right level of abstraction.

Where the Line Is (and Where I’m Still Figuring It Out)

I want to be honest — I don’t think anyone has this mapped perfectly yet. I certainly don’t.

Here’s where I’d draw it today:

AI should handle the administrative. Scheduling, data analysis, report generation, email triage, content formatting. These consume enormous amounts of ministry time, and they don’t require pastoral presence. Automate them aggressively.

AI should accelerate the research. Sermon prep research, theological cross-referencing, community demographic analysis. These benefit from AI’s speed and scope. The pastor still does the synthesis — the “what does this mean for my people on Sunday” work. But raw material gathering? Let the machine run overnight, like Karpathy’s experiments.

AI should never simulate the relational. It should not write your prayers. It should not be the voice your congregation hears when they need a shepherd. It should not replace the hospital visit, the awkward conversation in the parking lot, the moment after the service where someone says what they’ve been carrying for months.

The servant in Matthew 25 who was praised put the resource to work — but in service of the master’s purpose, not his own convenience (Matthew 25:20-23, ESV).

Here’s the tension I haven’t resolved: where does “accelerating research” end and “simulating thinking” begin? When an AI summarizes 30 commentaries on a passage, is the pastor still doing exegesis, or are they just picking from a menu? I don’t have a clean answer. I think it depends on whether the pastor is engaging the summaries critically or just grabbing the first one that sounds good. But that’s a discipline question, not a technology question — and discipline questions are harder to solve with guardrails.

If You’re a Church Leader Starting from Zero

You don’t need 18 agents. You need one tool that saves you 3 hours a week.

Pick the task that eats the most time with the least relational value. For most pastors I’ve talked to, it’s sermon illustration research, email management, or meeting notes. Start there. Learn one tool well. Measure the hours you get back.

Then — and this is the part most people skip — reinvest that time in something only a human can do. A visit. A phone call. An hour of prayer you’ve been meaning to protect but kept losing to administrative drift.

Set your guardrails before you need them. Write down what AI will not do in your ministry context. Revisit it quarterly. Technology expands into unintended spaces when boundaries aren’t explicit — I’ve watched this happen in product development for 15 years.

The Talent in Front of Us

Karpathy’s autoresearch is an engineering achievement. But the deeper pattern is almost theological: the human was never meant to stay at the level of mechanical execution. We’re built to operate at the level of purpose, direction, and relationship. Genesis 1:28 gives humanity dominion and stewardship — a mandate to cultivate, not just maintain (Genesis 1:28, ESV).

The master in the parable didn’t give talents so the servants could admire them or lock them away. He gave them to be invested — put to work — in ways that generated return.

For those of us building technology that serves the church, the return isn’t financial. It’s pastors freed from busywork to do the work they were called to. It’s 75 million monthly visitors encountering Scripture through a platform that keeps getting better because the product team has time to think. It’s churches stewarding every tool available — including AI — in service of the mission they’ve been given.

The talent is in front of us. What we do with it is a stewardship question.

Josh Read is Director of Product at HarperCollins Christian Publishing (Bible Gateway) and holds a doctorate in Strategic Organizational Leadership. He writes about AI, product leadership, and digital discipleship at drjoshuaread.com.

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