OH APP-Y DAY!
Life.Church’s Bible app spreads Scripture in the digital age
Summer Lashley created a Bible plan for the YouVersion Bible App intending to connect the collegiate community of Oklahoma Christian University together.
That was five years ago, but to this day, Lashley continues to receive emails and Facebook messages from people around the globe thanking her for creating the Scripture-based plan.
“I ended up connected to people all over the world, people I’ve never met, from Europe, South America and other places,” Lashley said recently. “We ended up being able to touch people that we would never have been able to otherwise and that’s been a real blessing for us.”
Such is the global impact of the YouVersion Bible App launched in Oklahoma a decade ago.
The popular app, developed by Edmond-based Life. Church, marks its 10th anniversary in July.
The app has made the Bible widely accessible on smartphones and other devices, connecting people worldwide to the Word of God. It was launched as one of the first 200 apps featured in the Apple App Store which debuted on July10, 2008.
Bobby Gruenewald, Life. Church pastor-innovation leader and founder of the YouVersion Bible App, said the app was a surprise hit, with more than 83,000 installs in its first three days.
“That blew our mind. We had no expectation that that would happen in such a short period of time,” he said.
Since then, the app has been downloaded on more than 330 million devices and in every country of the world. Launched with 15 versions of the Bible in two languages — English and Spanish — the app now offers more than 1,7000 different versions of the Bible, including Bible text in more than 1,200 languages.
Life. Church, led by Craig Groeschel, its founder and senior pastor, had already begun making headlines for its multisite format and technologically savvy-minded approach to spreading the Gospel.
The app, however, was heralded as the next big thing, garnering widespread attention due to stories by national news outlets and online publications like The New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, Business Insider and Huffington Post.
The Bible app essentially put them on the map.
“We look back and feel like it’s something that God has orchestrated from the very beginning. We wish that we were that smart, but we’re really not when it comes to knowing how these things are going to turn out,” Gruenewald said.
“We really feel like God had placed us in the right place at the right time.”
If at first you don’t succeed ...
Gruenewald and other Life.Church leaders see the real beauty of the app is its appeal to everyday people around the world. They appreciate the headlines and accolades but they still maintain their focus on sharing Scripture one download at time.
“We don’t view it as ours. We believe it’s something God has done. I guess that kind of helps us keep perspective on it and not gain a sense of pride about it, the wrong kind of pride,” Gruenewald.
He said church leaders do love to hear people share stories about how the app has effected their lives. Gruenewald said a woman in New Jersey said she and her mother repaired their broken relationship through a Bible study featured on the Bible app. And he said recently, his server at a local restaurant told him how the app has changed her life for the better.
Such stories of transformation make Gruenewald see the hand of providence in the app’s development, particularly because it’s creation didn’t happen overnight.
Over the years, he has told the story of the app’s creation countless times — how he was in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport waiting for a flight when he hatched the idea of using technology to help him and others engage more with Scripture.
Gruenewald said he initially created YouVersion as a website in 2006 but he found that it wasn’t the solution he’d hoped for. Eventually, he thought of making the Bible accessible on smartphones, which everyone seemed to have in their hands. When Apple announced its intent to open an online store for mobile applications for the iPhone, Gruenewald and Life. Church’s tech team submitted their app and the rest is technological history.
“We went through one idea that didn’t work that led us to one idea that did,” he said.
A big part of the app’s concept was its ready availability as a free product.
Gruenewald said Life. Church had already made the decision to offer many of its resources free to churches around the world and the app was no exception. He said he felt that charging people money to download the app would potentially be a barrier for many of the individuals the church was trying to reach, particularly those living in other countries where
an amount as nominal as a dollar might be insurmountable.
Some people have suggested that the church would have a moneymaker on its hands if it had charged at least 99 cents per installation but Gruenewald doesn’t see it that way.
“They think its easy math to think you would have had $330 million dollars and I say ‘No, it would be a lot less than that because a dollar would have been a barrier,’ ” he said.
“I’ve always been a firm believer that God brings His resources to His vision so we stepped with confidence and faith into the vision, believing that His provision has been there and it has been, every step of the way.”
Just the beginning
While this month’s milestone celebration is worthy of note, Gruenewald predicted that Life.Church will continue to search for ways to harness technology to spread the Good News.
It’s not that 10 years and 330 millions downloads isn’t significant, it’s just that he doesn’t want to put limits on God.
“What’s happened in these 10 years is our faith has really exploded for what we think could be possible. For us, we still feel like it’s just the very beginning of what He wants to do,” Gruenewald said.
Already, the church’s innovation leaders are at work on a soon-to-be launched YouVersion project called Bible Lens, a new app that analyzes the objects in a photo and detects biblical themes to suggest the Bible verse that best fits the photo. The app will then automatically design a highquality “Verse Image” that can be shared with friends. In addition, the app will have the ability to create “Verse Images” from photos saved in a person’s camera roll to help them rediscover every moment of their life through the lens of a Bible.
“We’re not comfortable staying put with the app just existing the way it is today. With the number of languages, obviously we’re going to keep pressing forward but even in terms of the future and how we leverage technology, whether it’s in an app or in a different format, we really feel like there will continue to be more opportunities for us to use the tools that we have today and tomorrow to help God’s people integrate God’s Word more effectively into their daily lives,” Gruenewald said.
“We are celebrating a milestone. We are recognizing what God has done over the last 10 years but, for us, it’s a beginning of a story that we see as much bigger and has a much bigger future to it — and that’s exciting.”