L.A. company produces Bible aimed at millennials
Books include moody photography and minimalistic design
start-up, called Alabaster, places the full text of each biblical book, including twp from the Old Testament, inside publications that resemble chic, indie lifestyle and design magazines – like those you might find on your most fashionable friend’s coffee table. Alabaster uses the New Living Translation of the Bible.
Negative space is plentiful, and the text is a stylish Sans Serif font, dwarfed by the kind of moody, still-life images that proliferate on Instagram.
For inspiration, the partners didn’t look to contemporary Christian artists or the Catholic Church, but urbane magazines like Cereal, Kinfolk and Drift. They also studied hip, era-defining brands like Warby Parker, Harry’s, Shinola and Swedish watchmaker Daniel Wellington. Those companies, they say, understand something that the discerning millennial mind treats as, well, Gospel: the quality of a product’s visual packaging is just as important as the quality of the product itself.
The Bible may be a holy book, Chung realized, but it’s also a “content-rich lifestyle brand” – one in desperate need of a modern upgrade.
“Visual culture is everything for millennials,” Alabaster co-founder Bryan Ye-chung said. “That’s what is important to us, too, so we wondered why can’t a faith-based product take advantage of that space as well?”
The start-up is not without competition. Absorbing Christian teachings without opening a Bible or stepping inside a church has never been easier. Instagram has helped turn megachurch pastors like Carl Lentz and Steven Furtick into fashion-forward “influencers” with millions of followers. The number of people who have downloaded mobile apps offering thousands of biblical translations, texts and access to podcasts is now in the hundreds of millions. Ancient manuscripts like the Dead Sea Scrolls have been digitized for online consumption, and now anyone with Internet access can listen to Bible readings in the book’s original languages – Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.
Why read about the Holy Land when you can strap on a virtual reality headset that offers 3-D tours of sacred Christian sites? If VR isn’t your thing, you can download apps that pair smartphone photos with Bible verses, creating shareable content for social media. If you don’t want to read the Bible, then Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant, can do it for you. As faith-based organizations seek to share their message in new ways, even their job postings have begun to resemble those from Silicon Valley tech firms, with organizations recruiting product designers and software engineers.
“We’ll do anything short of sin to reach people who don’t know Christ,” according to the Life.church website. “For us, that means leveraging the latest technology, pursuing new ideas, and staying close to God’s Word.”