Falling With Style

Romanian Underground church leader during the Communist era, Richard Wurmbrand, writes of the desperate need of access to the bible. It's an historic account, but true in many parts of the world today. 'Two very dirty villagers came to my home one day to buy a bible. They had come from their village to take the job of shovelling the frozen earth all winter long to earn money in the slight hope that they might be able to buy an old tattered bible with it and take it back to their village. Because I had received bibles from America, I was able to hand them a new bible, not an old tattered one. They could not believe their eyes! They tried to pay me with the money they had earned. I refused their money. They rushed back to their village with the bible. A few days later I received a letter of unrestrained, ecstatic joy, thanking me for the scriptures. It was signed by thirty villagers! They had carefully cut the bible into thirty parts and exchanged the parts with one another!...

One of the more surprising stats to follow the flood of press coverage over Darren Aronofsky’s epic Noah film is the direct correlation to an increase in bible reading. Over last weekend, visits to the Flood account in Genesis 6-9 at online bible app Bible Gateway saw a 223% increase over the previous weekend. What we don't know from these headline numbers is who these readers are, and why they are reading. It's fair to assume that many will have gone home to check the story they've just watched at the cinema against the plot they remember from their Sunday school bible class. We all do that with any story we see which has been adapted from a book. Often we are disappointed at the disparity, witness the latest Hobbit film! However, it's also entirely possible in this post Christian, secular age, that large numbers of people are reading the bible for the first time after viewing the Noah movie. Never before in history has it been possible to generate these kind of...