How to Preach to People Who Don't Read the Bible

A survey of regular church attendees found that fewer than half read the Bible on their own outside of church services. Among people who attend church occasionally or irregularly, the number is significantly lower. Among those you are trying to reach who do not yet attend at all, biblical illiteracy is close to total.

This is the context in which most contemporary preachers are working: an audience that does not share the basic biblical literacy that was assumed by every preacher in every generation before the late twentieth century. The question is not whether this has changed your task. It has. The question is how to preach faithfully and accessibly in a context of widespread biblical illiteracy without either dumbing down the text or abandoning the people who don't know it yet.

The Error in Both Directions

One error is to assume biblical literacy and preach accordingly — to reference texts without explanation, to assume the congregation knows who the Pharisees were or why Galatians matters or what the exile meant for Israel's theology. This produces excellent preaching for people who already know the Bible and gradually alienating preaching for everyone else.

The opposite error is to strip the preaching of biblical substance in an attempt to be accessible — to use the text as a launching pad for what is essentially a motivational talk, referencing Scripture selectively for emotional or rhetorical effect without actually teaching it. This may attract people in the short term but fails at the church's most basic formational task: making disciples who are formed by Scripture.

The Third Way: Teaching and Accessibility Together

The best contemporary preachers for biblically illiterate audiences teach the text carefully while making it accessible through context, narrative, and connection to ordinary experience. They explain what they are about to read before they read it. They provide historical context not as academic footnote but as story. They assume that the people listening want to understand and are capable of understanding — they just need the scaffolding.

This approach treats the congregation as intelligent adults who are capable of receiving complex material when it is well presented. It does not condescend. It contextualizes.

Practical Techniques

Summarize the surrounding narrative before reading the text. "You are about to hear a story from a moment when the church was new, when the first generation of followers of Jesus was trying to figure out what they believed and how to live. One of their hardest questions was whether non-Jewish people could join them — and what it would require of those people. Here is what happened."

Define terms as you use them, without making the definitions feel like interruptions. "The Pharisees — the religious leaders Jesus is engaging here — were deeply committed to the law of Moses. They believed that national faithfulness to the law would bring God's promised restoration to Israel. That matters for understanding why they responded to Jesus the way they did."

Connect the ancient world to the present without collapsing the distance between them. The gap between their world and ours is real. Acknowledging it honestly makes the connections you draw across the gap more credible, not less.

The Long-Term Formation Goal

Preaching to people who don't read the Bible is not just a communication challenge. It is a formation opportunity. Every sermon can be an invitation to engage the text further — not through guilt or obligation, but through genuine curiosity. When preaching succeeds at this, people who came in not knowing the Bible leave wanting to. That is one of the deepest measures of effective preaching in the current cultural moment.

The Foundation Beneath the Practice

Every sustainable practice is built on a theological foundation — a set of convictions about what is real and what matters that makes sense of the effort the practice requires. Without that foundation, the practice becomes an arbitrary discipline, held together by willpower alone and abandoned when willpower runs thin.

For the practices described in this article, the theological foundation is the conviction that God is at work in the ordinary — in regular disciplines of attention, in honest conversation, in the slow formation of character, in the faithful repetition of small acts of love and leadership. The God of Scripture is not absent from the mundane. He is present in it. The ordinary is the primary site of spiritual formation.

This means that the most important things a pastor, a spouse, a leader, or a disciple does are usually not the most dramatic things. They are the daily practices that no one observes — the prayer before the staff meeting, the honest conversation after the service, the hour of solitary study, the protected evening with your family when the ministry is calling. These are the investments that compound.

What the Research Shows

The science of human flourishing converges with the biblical wisdom tradition in a striking way: the factors that predict long-term wellbeing, effective leadership, and enduring relationships are almost uniformly relational, behavioral, and habitual rather than circumstantial, technical, or strategic.

People who have stable, close relationships with at least two or three people who know their actual lives — not their performance of their lives — live longer, lead better, and recover faster from adversity. People who have regular practices of physical rest, contemplative attention, and honest self-reflection make better decisions, sustain their work longer, and experience less burnout. People in marriages who maintain regular, uninterrupted time for genuine connection with each other report higher satisfaction even during seasons of high external stress.

None of this is surprising in light of what Scripture says about human beings. We are creatures who need community, rest, and the grounding presence of God. When we structure our lives to give us those things, we function as designed. When we deprive ourselves of them in pursuit of productivity or accomplishment, we pay the predictable price.

Implementation: Starting Smaller Than You Think You Should

The single most common failure mode in attempts at meaningful change is beginning with too ambitious a commitment. The person who resolves to pray for an hour each morning after years of neglected prayer almost never maintains that hour. But the person who commits to ten uninterrupted minutes and actually does it tends to find those ten minutes growing over months into something more substantial.

Start with the minimum effective dose. What is the smallest version of this practice that would still be genuinely valuable? Begin there. Sustain it. Let it grow organically from consistency rather than trying to manufacture consistency through sheer force of will.

Then build accountability into the structure. Tell one person what you are doing and ask them to check in. Put it in your calendar as a recurring appointment that can only be moved, not deleted. Build in a weekly five-minute review of whether you actually did it. Accountability is not self-punishment — it is structural support for the things you've decided matter.

The Long Horizon

The most important reason to take this seriously is not productivity or professional development. It is the person you are becoming over the long arc of a life and a ministry.

Every pastor, every leader, every spouse is becoming someone over time. The question is not whether you are being formed — you are always being formed, by everything you give your attention to. The question is whether you are being formed intentionally, in the direction you have decided matters, or whether you are being formed by default, by the pressures and habits and cultural currents that will shape you whether or not you choose them.

Intentional formation requires intention. It requires the regular, honest, sometimes difficult question: who am I becoming, and is that who I want to be? The answer to that question, returned to consistently over years, is the most important navigational tool available to any human being trying to live and lead well.

The practices are the instruments of that formation. They are not the destination. But they are, reliably, how the destination is reached.