The Drawbacks of Scripture-Listening Apps and How to Remedy Them - UPDATED

By Robin G. Jordan

In his post, “Don’t Just Read Your Bible,” on The Gospel Coalition website, Jonathan R. Bailey initially appears to be championing the spiritual practice of listening to Scripture. But if one reads the entire article, it becomes apparent that he is also promoting a new Scripture-listening app for i-Phones.

In the article Bailey makes this argument:

“One of the most important values of Scripture-listening is that we can listen while we’re doing something else—driving, lifting weights, folding laundry, or taking a walk. Our heart dwells on a passage while our body processes a routine. We’re hearing from God and living our lives simultaneously.”

Sounds great doesn’t it – listening while doing. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.

If someone wants to benefit fully from listening or reading God’s Word, he must give his full attention to God’s Word. Research that I have read concludes that the human brain is not wired for doing multiple tasks simultaneously. What it actually does is switch rapidly between tasks, creating the illusion of multitasking. One or more tasks will not receive our full attention.

Before I retired, I played an audio cassette of the Bible on my long commute to work. However, I was not able to give my full attention to the tape because I also had to focus on driving. If road conditions required that I give my full attention to my driving, the tape became background noise. I received some benefit from listening to the tape but not as much as I might have received if I had given it my full attention.

I am a Japanese language student at my local university. As a Japanese language student I have been exploring various methods of memorizing Japanese vocabulary and grammar. This includes studying how the human brain assimilates new information. While foreign language students generally benefit from immersion in the foreign language that they are learning, this immersion involves interaction with native speakers of that language. It involves more than saturation in the language. The human brain can absorb only so much new information at a time after which will block any further new information. Listening to a Scripture app while engaging in other activities will have a similar affect on the human brain. The various methods of memorizing the vocabulary and grammar of a foreign language often involves methods of tricking the human brain so that it will not block new information but will continue to assimilate it.

While the listener may gain some benefit from listening to the app from the times his brain tunes into what is being read, the heart of the listener will not be dwelling on a passage as Bailey suggests. If a Christian wants to do that, he needs to learn and master the ancient spiritual discipline of choosing a verse or passage of Scripture and meditating upon it.

One reflects upon the words of the verse or passage as one might look the different facets of a multi-faceted jewel, held up to the light and then turned so that each facet catches the light. Bible mediation is something that one can do as one goes about one’s daily activities, pausing to mediate upon the verse or passage at regular intervals throughout the day and concluding the day with prayer that flows out of one’s mediation upon the verse or passage.

The Anglican Church has historically placed a strong emphasis upon the public reading of Scripture. I served in the past as a licensed lay reader in the Episcopal Church for seventeen odd years. I am presently serving as a licensed lay reader in the Episcopal Missionary Church, a Continuing Anglican jurisdiction. I have acquired a measure of expertise in the public reading of Scripture and have trained others lay readers and lectors to read the Scriptures in services of public worship.

The minds of the congregation tend to wander during the reading of Scripture as they do during the preaching of the sermon. Some Anglican and Episcopal churches print the texts of the Scripture lessons in a service bulletin insert. Rather than helping to focus the congregation’s attention on what the minister reading the lesson is saying, the service bulletin insert may actually divert the attention of the congregants away from what the minister is saying as the congregants read the lesson silently to themselves. The minister’s voice becomes background noise which they tune out.

If a congregation is to receive the most benefit from the public reading of Scripture, those who are reading the lessons must not only learn to read well but also the congregation itself must learn to prayerfully listen to the reading of the lessons and to give the reader their full attention. God himself speaks through His Word and for that reason and that reason alone listening to Scripture warrants our fullest attention.

Headphones and ear buds can block out sounds in our environment, sounds which we may need to be attentive to. Whatever we are listening to can also mask these sounds. Those who have listened to i-Pods and the older Walkmans while cycling, jogging, running, or walking have been injured, often seriously because they did not hear an approaching motor vehicle, bicyclist, or skater boarder.

When we listen to music or the spoken word for extended periods on a portable electronic device, our brains are also apt to tune out what we are hearing, treating it as background noise. Indeed, some people will choose to listen to music or the spoken word on such a device because they have become accustomed to a high level of artificial background noise as opposed to silence or to the natural background noise of their environment.

I often encounter students in the library of my university who are listening to music while they are studying. The music is so loud that those around them can hear it even though they are wearing earphones or ear buds. If you ask these students why they need to listen to loud music while they are studying, they are likely to tell you that it helps them to concentrate. They become distracted by the slightest noise in a quiet room. For such individuals listening to a Scripture app has a high likelihood of ending up serving the same purpose – a buffer between them and the natural sounds in their environment.

A practice that I recommend to Christians who wish to obtain the benefits of listening to Scripture outside a service of public worship is to read Scripture aloud to themselves rather than silently to themselves. They not only gain the benefits of listening to Scripture but also of reading it at the same time. When we read silently to ourselves, we are apt to read at a rapid pace and not to give our full attention to what we are reading. When we read aloud, we are apt to read at a slower pace and to give more attention to what we are reading. We also hear what we are reading. Both the part of our brain that learns from reading and the part that learns from hearing are operative. While we may be engaging in two activities at the same time, the focus of these activities is the same—God’s Word. God speaks to us through both the written word and the spoken word.

This practice is an ancient one. The early monks when they read Scripture privately read it aloud. If they memorized a verse or passage of Scripture, they recited the passage aloud when they recalled it. When a group of monks went on a journey together, they would recite Scripture to each other when they stopped to pray or to rest.

This practice is admittedly very low-tech. But it has helped generations of Christians who adopted it to grow in the Christian faith and life.

To gain the most benefit from a Scripture app like the one Bailey is promoting, I would NOT recommend listening to it continuously. Rather I would suggest listening to it for short intervals – one or more verses at a time – and concentrating on what is being read and then pausing or stopping the app and mediating on what was said. This will not only give the brain time to assimilate what was read but also for the Holy Spirit to speak to the heart of the listener.

For Bible meditation a more useful app would be one which those wishing to meditate on a particular verse or passage of Scripture could set to remind them when it was time to mediate on the verse or passage and then show the verse or passage on the screen of the smart phone and play an audio recording of the verse or passage for them to listen to. Until some one develops such an app, what Christians can do is save a verse or passage on their Bible-reading app and set their smart phone alarm to beep at regular intervals throughout the day. They can then read the verse or passage aloud to themselves and mediate upon it. Christians who do not have a Bible-reading app on their phone can still use the alarm to remind them when it is time to read aloud to themselves a verse or passage from their pocket Bible and mediate upon it.

Christians who do not have a smart phone and who live in the bush - rural, undeveloped, country areas - can make a simple sundial, using a stick and stones. It does not have to accurately tell the time, only divide the day into regular intervals for Bible reading and mediation. If a small Christian community has only one or two Bibles, its members might gather at these times to hear a Scripture verse or passage read to mediate upon  that verse or passage until the next time. It is very low tech but we do not need high tech to contemplate the riches of God's Word - as the early monks knew.