When I speak with people about MMM, some people ask about Bible and religious-based applications. What’s always neat is when after offering their opinion about what it is they are/aren’t using, I ask them what would be their ideal application. Interestingly enough, the answer to this always sounds like some aspect of faith digitally applied rather than faith-knkowledge retreived from somewhere (the paradigm of Bible apps).

What are some of those apps? Here are a few:

• An application (service) that would help people connect church announcements with their device’s calednar
• An app that would facilitate the sharing of prayers with a small group
• An app that would invite financial and psychological support to missionaries whom are abroad
• An applicaiton that would help you investigate events and locations in the Scriptures interactively
• (And my personal favorite) A notepad that when I write a Scripture verse to my notes that it automatically links to BibleGateway or the (preferred) app on my device

Look again at these. There’s not a throwing away of the Scripture, but an asking of digital tools to enhance behaviors that are already happening, and in some cases would happen better if mobile/web was in the midst of the behavior.

We see something like this happening with the popularity of reading plans with YouVersion. Why is a reading plan effective? It doesn’t try to give you the entire Bible at once. There’s a flow to the use (each day/week/month you open it, you see some progress). There’s an invitation to connect your progress to an online community (catering to encouragement and esteem). Note the mix – literally Joshua 1:8 and Deuteronomy 6:6-9 happening in practice. Reading plans, as YouVersion has enabled them, allows the believer to keep enough of the contents of the Bible in front of their routine that it is almost a compulsion to live what you are reading and meditating on.

What does this look like then beyond reading plans? Look at the applicaitions mentioned above (I know, lots of looking back), engage with a piece of Scripture and then persuade the person engaged to go “heads-up” (to steal a page from Microsoft’s Windows Phone marketing message).

Something interesting happened when I updated my iPad to iOS5 – I didn’t reload any Bible applications. Not a one. And not because I don’t like them (ok, I have my moments), but because I’ve found the use of this iPad to be such a blank canvas for creation and computing that I’ve modeled my use of it to consume and produce that which looks like the text that my immediate communities are already familiar with. That means I’m drawing, I’m creating tools to teach, I’m coding, etc. I’m developing a behavior of digital living where the Bible has to be applied in order for the tool to demonstrate appropriate use. That doesn’t mean that my use of ESPN Scorecenter will always look like any of the characteristics of the church, crucifixion/resurrection, or even judgement. But, it does mean that even in that app, I’m subjugating the entire digital experience under the same mandate that was given to the rest of creation (Genesis 1:28-30).

When we move to that paradigm – this idea of the Bible as applied to digital spaces – what then are the more notable effects to those things online and offline can we see? Well, when your small groups start talking about their prayer chains and the testimonies from them, let me know 😉