BibleDojo, an interactive online platform, merges faith and technology in an effort to increase biblical literacy and fluency among Christians.

Launched this past January, the program features click-through, dojo-themed lessons that aim to strengthen Christians’ reading skills for different genres of the Bible. 

Each section helps participants advance from white belt to black belt while offering prompts on how to “examine closely” and “wrestle hard” with successively more challenging Bible passages. 

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Sang Tian, BibleDojo’s Project Lead, told Religion Unplugged how the project grew out of his own desire to comprehend the Bible.

“I realized that I grew up in the church for almost 20 years and still didn’t know how to read and understand the first page,” he said.

He likens the Bible education most Christians receive to broad weekly lectures without homework, exams or practice.

“Some more interactive ways to learn, such as Bible study groups, are unfortunately very loose and opinion-based, and seldom do Bible study leaders have enough training or guts to provide the constructive feedback needed to improve Bible literacy and fluency,” he said.

A software engineer who created the daily Bible-verse guessing game, Lordle, Tian and his team first built a prototype of the platform. Later, two Bible professors joined the project to help refine the theological aspects of the product. 

One of those professors, Dru Johnson, noted that BibleDojo’s team have “found a way to digitally ritualize many of the best classroom learning techniques into an app.”

Johnson, founder of the Center for Hebraic Thought, is currently a visiting professor at Hope College. He told Religion Unplugged that biblical literacy is a “fairly easy goal to attain” by “reading a bunch of Scripture over time and becoming familiar with what Scripture says and how it says it.”

However, as a prompt within the program’s interface explains, “fluency is far more important than literacy,” he added.  

Both Tian and Johnson both say BibleDojo aims to teach Christians how to use the Bible in everyday life.  

Johnson pointed to a variety of topics that are not addressed literally in the Bible: Policing, cattle feedlots, modern American homelessness or the American idea of a nuclear family. However, working toward biblical fluency “means understanding the concepts and the grammar of how the prophets think so that we can critique our own thinking and actions,” he said.

Currently, BibleDojo has 12 trainings available for practice in the genre of Biblical law. Tian said groups could work through one training session a week followed by discussion for a three-month series. He said BibleDojo’s analytics indicate each training takes around 90 minutes, though “this likely includes the user taking breaks in between.”

Both Tian and Johnson recommend BibleDojo to pastors for use by their congregations. 

Biblical literacy should not only be for those who are seminary-trained, Tian said.

“This defeatist attitude leads many to believe that … as long as you read the Bible from time to time, you’d be fine,” he added. “With all the resources available today [in the English language], God’s beautiful, powerful message to humanity is accessible like never before.”

However, pastors “need to be prepared for new adventures and helping their congregations understand Scripture once people acquire the skills,” Johnson noted. 

Alongside Kevin Kim and Matt Chan, Tian is a co-founder of Basil Tech, a “Christian faith-based technology nonprofit made up of people who want to use our skills in tech for Jesus.”  

Named after Bezalel, the creator of the Israelites’ Tabernacle in Exodus 35:30-35, the nonprofit offers technology consulting, design sprints and product development. One such product is BibleDojo, funded mainly through individual donors.

After working at a tech company in San Franscisco for several years, Tian eventually left to work full-time as a “digital missionary” with Basil Tech. Tian said that “just as the Tabernacle is reminiscent of Eden, we also wish to build Edenic technology and to help others do so with wisdom as well.”

Creating BibleDojo, however, presented a unique challenge for the BibleDojo team as well as for scholars.

For Tian, the unique genre of the program amongst other digital media led to difficulty training “workers to create content in this medium.” Additionally, because no one technique for reading Scripture is correct, he added that “one of the hardest things [was] to sift through many possible techniques to teach and know what would work and what wouldn’t.”

Currently, a new version of Bible Dojo is in the works, which will likely be mobile only. 

While Tian is saddened that “younger generations are less willing to read long-form content,” he said he hopes BibleDojo will make “Bible education more accessible to younger generations.”

Johnson added that the excitement of discovering something new in Scripture for the first time.

“It's one thing to think that you are learning the skills, but it's another thing when you check it out with other people … and you realize that you're both seeing something you've never been able to see before,” he said. “That is how I got excited about reading Scripture. And we hear from users that it's exciting for them as well.”

Isabella Meibaurer is a seasoned writer and adaptable communications strategist with a passion for nuanced, contextualized storytelling.