Overcoming Roadblocks to Studying the Bible w Amanda Williams of She Reads Truth- Podcast Episode 72

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Welcome to the God Questions Podcast. Occasionally on our podcast, we like to spotlight another ministry that we believe provides a beneficial service to the body of Christ.

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So that will be the focus of today's episode. And so today I have with me Amanda Williams of She Reads Truth.

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So Amanda, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks so much for having me. So this kind of is a brief intro.

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So Amanda Bible Williams is co -founder and chief content officer of She Reads Truth.

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A lover of words and the word, Amanda spends her days reading and leading, writing and editing, and explaining that her maiden name really is

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Bible. She is a general editor of the She Reads Truth Bible and He Reads Truth Bible.

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Amanda lives with their husband and their four children in a loud and lively farmhouse just south of Nashville, Tennessee.

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So again, Amanda, welcome to the show. And for our listeners who may not be real familiar with She Reads Truth, give us the essential breakdown.

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What's God's calling on She Reads Truth and how exactly do you seek to accomplish that calling?

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Yeah, thanks for asking. So it's a very specific calling. Our mission at She Reads Truth is women in the word of God every day.

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And so what we seek to do is to come alongside women of all ages, all backgrounds, anyone who desires to read their

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Bible. And we just, we come alongside and we provide tools for them to do exactly that.

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And so we are always in a, we accomplish this through reading plans.

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And so we're always in the Bible reading every day. And we want to just be door holders and invite everyone to join us.

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That's what we do. Awesome. So I noticed you also have He Reads Truth and Kids Read Truth.

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Were those launched at the same time or do they come along later? And how are those maybe different than She Reads Truth?

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Yeah. So they are, they are different. It is, it's kind of a family of brands.

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They did not all start at the same time. I mean, the story of She Reads Truth really, the, what is now the ministry and business that is

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She Reads Truth grew out of the personal need of myself and the other women who are present there at that beginning.

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And my, my friend and partner, Rachel Myers, she is the, she and I, and these other women just had a need for, we wanted to read the

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Bible more. But we kept feeling stuck in that and not really knowing how to do that.

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And so She Reads Truth began, we're in our 10th year now. So it began about 10 years ago, just as a group of women who were reading the

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Bible together. And that was back when hashtags were kind of new on Twitter, and they were actually very useful at the time.

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And so, and so we, you know, started hashtag She Reads Truth to just read alongside one another.

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And then that grew and, and grew. And so He Reads Truth came along about three years later.

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I mean, we created She Reads Truth because we were women and we knew we had other women who were joining us alongside to read.

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And so, and soon they started saying, do you have this for men? And, and so He Reads Truth was launched about three years later.

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And, and it's the same mission. It's men in the Word of God every day. And He and She Reads Truth, those communities read in tandem with one another.

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So we are always in the same reading plan, which is, is helpful for households who want to read together, for friend groups, for small groups.

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And it's just a powerful, it's just, it's a really powerful thing to know that what

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I am reading in the Bible today, there are men and women around the country, around the world who are reading the same thing with me today.

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And so there is that, you know, we believe really strongly in local community, the ministry of the local church, and we don't seek to be a replacement for that at all.

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In fact, we actually do the opposite and encourage that as the primary connection.

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But the truth is that, you know, sometimes between Sundays, we, as those who follow

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Jesus are just kind of like, what do I do with this very large collection of books called the

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Bible? And where do I start? And how do I, should

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I wait and read with my pastor? Should, is it okay if I read this on my own?

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And so, so yeah, so that's how He Reads Truth came along. And then, and it essentially is the same model.

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And then Kids Read Truth, kind of the same thing. It's like, do you have anything for kids? And when, you know,

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Rachel and I both have children, and, and we were, we had young children at the time, 10 years ago, and our children are, we both have freshmen in high school now, those are our oldest kids.

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And so, and so we wanted something for our kids. And so the mission for Kids Read Truth is a little different.

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Kids in the Word of God every day would be pretty ambitious. And not really, you know, not even really what we're after.

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Like, what we're after with kids, the mission there is to equip kids with biblical literacy, and instill in them a love for God and His Word.

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And so, just recognizing that that familiarity with the Bible, the learning, just some of the basics, like all the stories that if you grew up in the church, you may have grown up hearing, like, just to begin to introduce them to the

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Bible and to teach them that they can open their Bibles and read, just like their moms and dads can.

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And, and also to, we love to help families gather around God's Word. So that's really, that's really the heartbeat behind Kids Read Truth.

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Fantastic. Thank you for breaking that down for us. It's a ministry that's focused on helping, encouraging people to get into the

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Word, similar to GotQuestions. I can very much relate to you about how we don't want to be viewed as a replacement for the local church, or a replacement for sending

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God's Word on your own. But at the same time, we provide a service that tries to point people back to the Word. But several times we've gotten people who are like,

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I don't even need to go to church. I'll just read GotQuestions articles as a replacement for the sermons.

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Like, well, okay. No, no, no. Please don't. Yeah. Even if from the teaching aspect, okay,

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I can get that, but the church is not just about sitting there and listening to a sermon. So that's right.

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I very much admire She Reads Truth and your emphasis on just getting people into the Word. So my first ministry -related question for you would be, what are some of the common roadblocks that you experience in why people aren't in the

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Word? And even maybe take a step further, since you have She Reads Truth, He Reads Truth, and Kids Read Truth, maybe break down what are some of the different barriers between women, men, and children?

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Sure, sure. Well, we're pretty fluent in this because we ourselves found—we were facing roadblocks.

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And they're different for every person, of course, but I think the common theme that we were seeing and that we still see among believers—because our community is open to anyone.

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Most of the men and women who read with us are men and women who consider themselves

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Christians. They would say that they are in a church family. And so it does beg the question, well, then, if they're not new to the

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Bible, then what is keeping us from reading it? And so what we found to be true back 10 years ago and still find to be true is that very often we just simply don't know where to begin.

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It's a big book. It can be intimidating. That's a word that we would hear a lot, especially from women, because that's where our primary ministry has been over the years.

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And it's a word that we've even used in the past. It's like, man, it's intimidating. It's a big book.

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It was written in a different time, right? So we struggled to see, where do

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I start? And I think a lot of times we want to jump to, what does this mean for my everyday life?

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And so I think there's an importance in recognizing that the reason that we have the

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Bible is so that we might know God. And yes, of course that applies to our everyday life.

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It applies to everything, right? But I think that the impasse often comes in knowing that we should read it because we may say,

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I believe that the Bible is true. And yet we may not really know the story of the

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Bible or what the Bible says or the life ministry of Jesus, because there's a lot to learn.

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And reading the Bible is a lifelong journey, and it's just meant to be that way.

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And it's that way, whether you've been studying the Bible professionally, like if you're a seminarian who goes on to be a seminary professor, you cannot learn all there is to learn, right?

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God is infinite. And so when you're taking something like that and you're trying to just, as an individual, encounter it on your own and read, it can feel a lot.

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It can just feel really overwhelming. And then we also hear that people just don't even know if it's okay for them to do that.

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Is it okay that I'm reading the Bible other than on Sundays?

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Or is it okay if I read the Bible outside of my small group or having a

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Bible study teacher, a Bible teacher teaching it to me? And when

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I began reading the Bible regularly and I'd grown up in the church, it felt a little scandalous for me as a woman.

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I grew up in the South, and there's a lot of baked -in cultural things that we maybe don't learn or we catch.

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Nobody taught us, but we caught it, right? And so it felt overwhelming, a little bit risqué, just like, is this okay for me to do?

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And then I think just the logistics of what does it look like? Where do I start? How much do I read?

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What do I read? Do I start? In so many firsts of the year, here we just celebrated a new year, started

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Genesis, try to work their way through, and you can get bogged down really quickly. And so something that we have found that is really helpful is that our reading plans are actually, we love to read through books of the

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Bible. But if we're reading through Genesis, for example, we're going to also have alongside

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Genesis chapter one, we'll also read some from John chapter one.

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We'll read some from the Psalms. And so helping connect those dots and begin to illuminate the whole story of Scripture, I think is something that is super helpful and helps us go from being those who want to read our

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Bibles to those who have an ongoing active relationship with our Bibles.

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Yeah, exactly. What you just said a second ago about people starting off a new year.

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So every year in January, we get so many, so many questions about stuff in the book of Genesis.

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And the first few times it started happening, we're like, why is this article suddenly so popular?

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And something about why was Jacob wrestling with God? Or why did something about the flood? And then started, wait a minute, that's what

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I typically go through a one -year Bible. And it's like, oh, so all the people, but then by the time you're in the later chapters of Exodus and definitely by Leviticus, I mean, the vast majority of people have already given up on that particular

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New Year's resolution. So how do you keep people both engaged and encouraged to keep on when you start hitting some of those passages that aren't quite as uplifting to take a little bit more even processing to figure out what you're talking about?

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Yeah. I mean, we're about to embark on the book of Ezekiel as a community for the season of Lent.

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And it's a tough book. We've never read it together as a She Reads Truth community all the way through.

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And so it's a big one. It's long and it's difficult and it's dark in a lot of places.

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But it's part of the story, right? And so what we have found is that every person is different.

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And so we try to offer kind of a suite of tools so that wherever you are in your

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Bible reading journey, you have an on -ramp. You have a way in to this ongoing daily reading, this being a woman in the

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Word of God every day or a man in the Word of God every day. We try to give you ways to do that that are accessible.

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So we have an app where, well, first of all, let me back that up. The building block of our method of reading the

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Bible is reading plans. And so some reading plans will be reading through books of the Bible. Sometimes we will explore a topic.

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We're about to begin a reading plan called Do Not Fear. And so we're looking at what the

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Bible has to say about fear. And so how Scripture teaches us that we can actually, as Christ followers, we can respond differently to circumstances that provoke fear in us, not because of some secret formula we know, but because of who

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God is and because of His faithfulness. That's what Scripture teaches through Old and New Testaments.

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And so we will take these reading plans. We're reading through books of the Bible. We're reading about a topic or sometimes they're structured around a season of the church calendar.

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We really like the regular rhythms of Lent every year where we're leading up to Resurrection Sunday, to Easter and Advent.

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We usually will do about a month -long reading plan that reads up to Christmas. Not usually, every year we do that.

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And so we take these reading plans and we provide them. They're accessible on our website or our

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She Reads Truth app so that any day where you're like, I want to read the Word today, where do I go?

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You can just join us. And we are in the Word somewhere reading together. And we have a devotional that's written by a writer or a series of thoughtful questions where it gives you kind of a handhold.

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If you're like, I'm really new to this, I'd love to see how someone else is engaging this passage. Then we don't want to replace

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Scripture with a devotional, but we offer that. It's really helpful sometimes to see someone else go first and engage with the

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Scripture. And then both of those platforms, the app and the website, there's a comment section where people can say what they're learning, what they see, what's confusing to them.

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And so that community. So we found that that format is really welcoming.

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But the thing that we love the most is that we have study books where we just get each reading plan.

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We offer an analog printed paper in your hand book that actually curates.

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It has all the Scripture. It has space to write notes. We give other study tools to help you understand different concepts or where it falls in the

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Bible. And so we just try to, the short answer to your question of how do we accomplish this?

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How do we get past these roadblocks is that we just do everything we can to equip.

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To equip, not even with the focus of understanding.

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Let me back that up. Not even with the focus of knowing all there is to know, but rather with the focus of how can

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I know God through His word? We believe that the Bible is the true word of God.

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And so we want to know what it says. And it is a journey. We have to start somewhere.

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And so in the community aspect of it all, just the power of having other people encouraging you to keep going and inviting you back in day after day, it's just really impactful.

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Sure. So you mentioned community, and that's something that got questions we've struggled with over the years and that we've never really had a comment section because in a sense we don't want to have to police it.

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And not that we want to control everything that everyone says, but we have to draw the line somewhere.

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We can't have people being led astray by what's going on in the comment section. So how do you at She Reads Truth handle that, especially if you're going to approach a passage or a verse that's controversial where there's different interpretations in various parts of the body of Christ?

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How do you guys handle that? That's a really good question. And honestly, there are kind of a couple answers to this question.

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One is that I really believe that God has just preserved this community in the comment section.

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I've been in some comment section on the internet where it's not necessarily reflective of the church and of Christ.

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And there is something about this community of women, I think, because there is the understanding that we're all coming from different backgrounds, different denominations, different levels of familiarity with God's word.

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And I think that there is a difference, too, where they're coming for a specific purpose.

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They want to open their Bibles and they want to be men and women who read their

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Bibles daily. And so I think there is a lot of kindness that's extended and an understanding that someone else's interpretation of a passage or issue, to use that word, with a passage is going to be very different than mine, because the

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Holy Spirit is doing very different things in my heart and in my life circumstances are different than yours.

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And I also think that there is just a real desire, an individual and a collective desire to know

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God through His word. And so there is a lot of encouragement and there's a lot of, well, that's a great question.

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Here's what I got out of it. And then someone else might say, well, I didn't even consider that.

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And I don't even know that it's honestly, I think that our devotional writers do set the tone.

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We don't, we really seek to not come in heavy handed and say, this is what this passage means.

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That's not the point of our devotionals on our site. The point of our devotionals is to just engage with God's word and look back into scripture.

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We just want our devotionals to point back to God, back into the word and to acknowledge that we are, we're just, we're never going to mind the depth of this.

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Right. And so, so I think they really do a good job of setting the tone. And I hope that we as, as a community and in the resources that we provide,

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I hope that's the tone that we set where we're going to marvel at scripture together. I mean, our podcast, which we also offer weekly just to go along with the readings that we're doing.

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We spend a lot of time delighting in God's word together and asking questions that, that we may not have the answers to.

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We may have to go, we may come to you, Shay, and say, what is the answer to this? Because the focus, when the focus becomes on having the right answer, as opposed to just what does this teach me about God?

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It's just a different posture, I think. Yeah, for sure. This is the Got Questions podcast with Amanda Williams of She Reads Truth.

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So there'll be links to where you can learn more about She Reads Truth and He Reads Truth and Kids Reads Truth in the show notes on the description on YouTube and also at podcast .gotquestions

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.org. So Amanda, in closing, what would you say to someone who wants to get involved in studying the word, but has never really been able to do it, has never been motivated to do it?

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What are some words of encouragement you would say to someone about why they need to get into God's word? I think that the best thing that I can say is to just start and to allow yourself to to learn.

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It's funny because Bible reading sometimes is the thing that we think because, well,

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I'm a Christian, right? So I should be able to read the Bible. No problem. I should be able to understand this. And we don't allow ourselves a learning curve.

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We expect to feel comfortable. We expect the habit to come naturally.

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And I remember I used to keep waiting to one day be a morning person like my mom because I thought, well,

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I guess that's something that happens when you're older. And Bible reading is just like anything else that's worth doing.

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You have to just keep going. And so my encouragement to you, as simple as it is, is to just keep going.

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And no one does this perfectly. We even have what we call grace days built into our reading calendar because we all miss days and need to catch up.

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Sometimes we miss weeks. And it's just God is the same yesterday, today, forever.

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And His word is living and active. So just start again every day. And we would love for you to read with us.

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You are always welcome to join us. You can find us where SheReadsTruth on all the social platforms.

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HeReadsTruth as well. And then the site is just SheReadsTruth .com, HeReadsTruth .com.

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Whether you're a digital person or an analog person, whatever suits you best, we want to walk alongside you and help you become a man or woman in the

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Word of God every day. And this has been the Got Questions podcast with Amanda Williams. Again, Amanda, thank you for being on the show.