Jason Stone
What you’ll see in this Logos Live episode
Jason Stone interviews Amanda Bible Williams of She Reads Truth about Bible study and biblical literacy. Hear about She Reads Truth, advice on how to read the Bible, where to start when studying Scripture, and more.
Amanda Bible Williams is crazy about words. True words are her favorite—one of many reasons she adores her role as chief content officer of She Reads Truth. Amanda first met Jesus in an East Tennessee church pew as a little girl, and now she finds him daily in the pages of God’s Word and in a loud, old farmhouse east of Nashville where she lives with her husband and three young children. She has degrees in English and psychology and nearly a master’s in religion. Amanda enjoys dancing with her kids, reading herself to sleep, and explaining that her maiden name really is Bible.
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Books by Amanda Bible Williams and others
She Reads Truth: Holding Tight to Permanent in a World That’s Passing Away (audio)
Regular price: $12.98
She Reads Truth: Holding Tight to Permanent in a World That’s Passing Away
Regular price: $12.98
Interview transcript
This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.
Jason Stone (00:21):
All right, we are here for another episode of Logos Live and I’ll be your host today. My name’s Jason Stone. I’m the senior community manager here at Faithlife, the makers of Logos Bible Software. And today, this has actually been an episode I’ve been excited for, for some time, as an average. I’m a He Reads Truth reader, but have also shared and gifted the She Reads Truth Bible as well. But, yeah, so I’ve got Amanda Bible Williams with me today. And Amanda, thank you so much for being here.
Amanda Bible Williams (00:51):
Yeah, hello. Oh, I’m so happy that I’m already encouraged. Thank you for having me on. I’m happy to be here.
Jason Stone (00:56):
All I did is say hello and you’re already encouraged.
Amanda Bible Williams (00:59):
No, I didn’t realize you were an avid He Reads Truth reader. That makes me so happy.
Jason Stone (01:09):
Too busy talking about Nashville restaurants. Which will be one of the first questions, but first, for those of you who don’t know, Amanda, I’m going to read a quick bio, even if she has to sit awkwardly for a second while I read all about her to the folks who are watching live and watching the replay. So, Amanda Bible Williams is co-founder of She Reads Truth. They’re beautiful, accessible Bible reading plans and resources that help women read God’s Word every day. Amanda is also co-founder of He Reads Truth in Kids Read Truth, and a general editor of the She Reads Truth Bible and He Reads Truth Bible. It’s kind of a mouthful. She does a lot. She and her husband David and their four children live just outside of Nashville, Tennessee.
And you can connect with her @BibleWilliams on Instagram, and I’ll drop that in the comments to make sure that you can connect with her on Instagram there. But yeah, so that’s a little bit about Amanda. My first question, I’ve got a few questions just to get off here. Really easy ones. All right. When you aren’t writing and editing, what do you and your loud and lively family doing?
Amanda Bible Williams (04:36):
We really are loud. I kind of say that as a disclaimer in case anyone is gonna meet my family. We enjoy being together, like just at our house and we just had spring break and was not spring-like at all. It was very cold. But, we like to do projects around the house and currently, we just acquired some baby chicks and ducks and we’ve had chickens before, but we’ve never had ducks. And it is the best thing. They are so fun. So we love to watch movies together. We love to, we have like a little bit of land, not a ton, but a little bit. And so there’s usually something under construction on our land. Like my husband, currently is working on a full-size batting cage for my 13-year-old twin boys. And so, you know, casual just full size batting cage.
Jason Stone (05:37):
I was just thinking, you already have a big family and you already are self-proclaimed loud, and then there’s chickens and ducks that are getting added and a batting cage, which is like not super a batting cage.
Amanda Bible Williams (05:48):
No. Which is going to just attract other loud teenage boys. Yeah. Which is great. That’s what we’re excited about for them to come hang out with us. That’s right. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, truly it’s like we love music, movies and food are like, Those are our, our family loves. We like to do those things together. We like to go to shows together and movies together and yeah.
Jason Stone (06:16):
Yeah. Cool. One more question. Is your name really Amanda?
Amanda Bible Williams (06:23):
It is.
Jason Stone (06:24):
No, I’m kidding. Okay. Sorry. No, I mean I had to throw that out there, but, I know I love it. There’s so many people. I even put, you know, of course I’ve said, what, what questions do you have for Amanda? And someone said, really? Is that really her name? It is. I won’t even have you get into it. It’s, you don’t even have to, it’s, there’s so much more to discuss. So your name is Bible?
Amanda Bible Williams (06:42):
I will say that there are people who think it’s a self, a self-proclaimed nickname. It is my actual maiden name, so I don’t just call myself Bible.
Jason Stone (06:54):
Yeah. So I just had to make sure that it was addressed. It was like the elephant in the room. It was addressed.
Amanda Bible Williams (07:00):
Thank you.
Jason Stone (07:00):
Let’s get into a few different things you’ve got. okay. I wanna start, I guess, was She Reads Truth, co-founder? Yeah. She Reads Truth. So I wanna start there. Just tell listeners or watchers a little bit about your day job. So what is She Reads Truth? What’s He Reads Truth, Kids Reads Truth, how are they different? Yeah. How are they the same? Could you just help unpack that and paint that picture a little?
Amanda Bible Williams (07:27):
Yeah, yeah. Great question. So, our heartbeat is biblical literacy. Like we want to help the church read and, and understand the Bible and develop a daily habit of reading Scripture. And so She Reads Truth is, it’s our mission is women in the Word of God every day. So that’s what we seek to do. She Reads Truth is how it began. That was the original community of women of Bible readers. And so the company that I have the honor of leading this team here and the Nashville area—what we do is that we seek to inspire and equip women to grow in biblical literacy and in knowledge and love of God in his Word. And so He Reads Truth kind of developed alongside that because we had, you know, women in the community who were like, I have guys in my life that I want to serve. So rather than kind of dilute what we were doing that was working so well for the women that we serve, we, there’s sort of a brother brand called He Reads Truth. And then similarly that’s how Kids Read Truth Started is when, when She Reads Truth began, my co-founder Raechel and I had small children and we were like, you know, we also, like how do we, we’ve got women opening their Bibles. How do we get families to gather around Scripture? And so that’s where those resources came from. And so they, She Reads Truth brand really is kind of the driver. We do Bible reading plans, so we kind of just do one right after the other, and we create resources, printed resources to go with those mm-hmm. And so He and She Reads Truth are in the same reading, kind of, you know, in tandem with each other. Mm-hmm.
Jason Stone (09:37):
So you’ll focus on the same book, that’s right alongside one another, but they’re actually separate reading readings.
Amanda Bible Williams (09:44):
Yeah. So, well, the readings are usually identical. It’s just that the communities are distinct. So the women are in a conversation, you know, a community with other women reading those passages, men are in conversation with other men. We just found that the dynamic was very different. And there’s something really freeing about, giving women that space. And, and then the resources, the printed resources, I just happen to have sitting next to me, our next upcoming book. And so the He Reads Truth version of this is just different in design, essentially. It’s a little smaller cuz the guys tend to like it kind of like Bible size. But the women have really enjoyed the kind of magazine size where we can really go for it with the writing and the drawing, whatever.
Jason Stone (10:36):
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So I wanna dig into the mission a little bit. yeah. And you, I think the mission uses one specific word that I’d like to better understand, like why you dropped it in there and then maybe yeah. Encourage some folks who are watching. So your mission could simply be for readers to be in touch, to be in the Word, but you specified the Word every day. So why do you think a daily rhythm is so important?
Amanda Bible Williams (11:02):
Well, I mean, it’s a pretty lofty aspiration, right? To do anything every day is a challenge and it requires discipline and habit forming. And, but the reason that that matters so much to us is because it, first of all, it, it’s, it is our desire, the desire of a lot of our hearts, right? Just to know the Bible that we say we believe [we have] to read it, and that we know that the Lord meets with us there. And so we believe that the Bible is true. And so I daily know how often I need to be reminded of what is true and so even though it is lofty and can sometimes feel, make us feel immediately kind of defeated, right? It’s like, well, how do I go from maybe, you know, only reading, opening my Bible on Sundays, in a church service, which is also great, to reading my Bible every day.
And so what we do is we just seek to be door openers and to welcome people in and to say, you know what? You, this is a rhythm that you can develop. and it’s important because it’s, it’s important, you know, for similar reasons for every other thing that we do every day is important. Like, we have a daily diet of food that we eat and water that we drink, and people that we love, that we communicate with and spend time with. And so, in the same way that daily diet of Scripture and of truth, it really forms who we are and how we live our Christian life. And it is the opportunity to engage with God daily. and so that is our rhythm. We are not big on perfection at She Reads Truth. We even build in what we call Grace Days because we’re just like, life happens, right? And schedules get crazy seasons of life change. but we believe that it is something that is important to do daily and have a regular rhythm, even if what that looks like changes from day-to-day or overtime.
Jason Stone (13:19):
Yeah. I was going to ask what if somebody thinks it’s impossible or near impossible to jump into a daily routine like that, but like, what advice would you give or how would you encourage them? But you did start to answer, you know, grace stays is, is a small step in that direction, right? But what if someone has four kids, chickens and ducks and are building a batting cage, and they’re just trying to build that rhythm? How would you encourage them?
Amanda Bible Williams (13:46):
You know, the first thing that comes to mind, and it’s probably because I’ve been doing some reading like in my spare time on habits lately, and kind of a regular thing that we hear with habits is to start small, like reading a chapter of Scripture every day is just too much to start out with. We’ll start out by just making sure your Bible’s open every day, and then start with a verse and then start with, but we are big on not staying with a verse of Scripture a day. You know, like a verse is better than no Scripture a day, but part of the beauty of God’s Word is the full story that it tells. And so, something that we’re passionate about, about the work that we do, and something that I’ve become passionate about personally through the work that we do is how reading Scripture and context and actually reading kind of chunks of Scripture and, you know, full books of the Bible, not necessarily in one sitting, although some of them are pretty short, and you can, but that that is part of how we really come to understand, the redemption story and understand who God is in that kind of increasing our reading so that we can start to glean those rewards of reading Scripture over time.
And that’s the other thing that I would say is that, just like anything else that matters, it takes time. And it’s not, the goal is not to go from zero to, you know, the whole Bible in 60 seconds. Like the goal is to meet with God and to know him. And this is one of the primary ways that he’s given to us to know him.
Jason Stone (15:35):
Yeah. Yeah. I was just thinking of going from zero to writing commentary or something. It’s like, just, just open it every day. Yeah. Just dig into a verse and then a chapter and then maybe. Keep reading. Go ahead.
Amanda Bible Williams (15:51):
I was just gonna say know that you, that you can, that you’re allowed to read Scripture. Like, for women and for myself specifically, and I’ve found this to resonate with other women, is that, a lot of times we feel like we, can only read Scripture when we are sitting in, you know, church on Sunday or when we’re in a formal Bible study, with a Bible study leader. Those things are good, but also if you’re a believer, if you’re a follower of Jesus, you have the Holy Spirit in you. The Holy Spirit wrote this book, and so you have what you need to read it, and it’s not scandalous to open it and read it by yourself on a Tuesday instead of in church on a Sunday. Or in addition to, I should say real big fans of the local church.
Jason Stone (16:42):
Yeah. That’s a good encouragement too. Thanks. What about, in your own role as She Reads Truth, what’s the most challenging or what’s the most exciting or life giving to what you do?
Amanda Bible Williams (16:57):
I mean, I think the most life-giving thing that we get to experience is just watching the dots connect for people who are reading Scripture in earnest, maybe for the first time. We have a lot of people, we hear from a lot of people in our community who have been believers for a long time, or maybe they’ve grown up in the church, but they’ve never really read the Bible, or had a regular rhythm of reading the Bible. And so to hear from those, to hear from those people and to, to hear the excitement in their, in their words, or to see the excitement on their face when they say, it’s, I’m starting to connect the dots. Like I’m starting to read something in the New Testament and, and remember something that I read in the Old Testament, you know, that, kind of where those, those lights start coming on all around.
And honestly, when that happens, for me, that’s also something that drives me because I know that if it can happen for me, it can happen for anyone who’s just reading Scripture for themselves. And it does not get old to hear those stories. And the thing that I think is the most challenging, which I hope that this is, this honesty is liberating instead of discouraging , to those of you who are listening or watching, I think that the most challenging thing is to keep my personal rhythm of daily Bible reading, because it is what I do for work. and it is because a thing that I talk about a lot during my day, my day to day, that in the quiet of my own space and my own home and in my own day and in my own heart, is to, to seek the Lord in those quiet places. and not just in the out loud places.
Jason Stone (19:13):
Yeah, absolutely. No, I’m sure that that would be something that I don’t wanna say you wrestle with, but you have to navigate yourself is if you’re doing this day in and day out. I hope that’s also encouraging for anybody who’s tuning in is even She Reads Truth or the editor, writers that She Reads Truth, you know, they’re just like, man, this is just something that when life is coming at you in all these different directions that you’ve gotta prioritize and, and build that discipline yourself. So yeah. That’s great. Thanks for—
Amanda Bible Williams (19:42):
I mean, it’s probably similar to how it, I mean, I don’t know if it’s right, but maybe similar to how you feel about it. Logos is like the reason that She Reads Truth, you know, started, or the reason that I work in it is because I need it. Like, it’s not because I figured it out, it’s because it’s a need that I have. And so, you know, we are, you know, we have learned a lot along the way, but we don’t need to be experts. We just wanna be students of the Bible. We just wanna keep learning.
Jason Stone (20:16):
Right. And it, I mean, it is some, I won’t, I won’t say this, but I’m gonna say this, sometimes it’s nice as I’ll just pull out a paper Bible and read that, and, you know, there’s something to it, to just simplifying it and just being in that state too. So that’s, no, I think that’s, that’s right. Great. You’ve also published at least two books that to my knowledge—are there more? There’s She Reads Truth and Faithful.
Amanda Bible Williams (20:45):
So yeah. Yeah, those, okay. She Reads Truth and then Faithful, I got to write a chapter in. and then yeah, the Bibles that we got the privilege of working on—not translations mind you, but you know, with ancillary tools and stuff in the Bible. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Jason Stone (21:07):
On, yeah. I wanted to camp out on Faithful for a second if we could. Yeah. I, can you, can you frame the book, the project as a whole and then, why you landed on the chapter with Rahab, or how you chose it if you got to choose it?
Amanda Bible Williams (21:21):
Yeah. So I didn’t choose it—it chose me. But it was a really good fit for me because her story is just really meaningful to me. And I love the way that her story is, kind of a test case in the gospel, you know, that, that the gospel is for everyone. And, I love her story so much. So the way that that came about I was invited to be part of this project, which if, if you’re new to the Faithful Project, it is just a community of women who are musicians, writers, speakers, just in kind of the Christian creative space. And we were given Scripture to study together and meditate on together and discuss together. And then we wrote songs inspired by those passages of Scripture.
And then there’s also a book to go along with that. And it’s actually an ongoing project that was the first sort of project. There’s an album and a book that go together, and then we’re working on a second one right now. And everyone, it’s a really sweet project because lots of people kind of come and go and it’s a really neat community. But, so I was given Rahab’s story in the women that I got to, to write with. And I hope that I never forget that experience of us sitting together, reading the story aloud, asking questions of each other and the text. And, we started to realize, first of all, it was one of those light bulb moments where we realized that Rahab is the mother of Boaz, who is the great-grandfather of David.
We’ll have to count, we’ll have to go to the Matthew genealogy and count. But that, you know, that Rahab, you know, not only was she brought into the family of faith as a, for, as an outsider, and even a mar even in her culture, marginalized, right? So she’s like double marginalized, brought into the family of faith. And we see her really powerful profession of faith, but then to imagine her to go on to be, one of the mothers of the faith, and actually in the line of David in the lineage of Jesus and so it just kind of blew our mind that that kind of legacy started from a just a straightforward– I’m sure it was very complex and layered and difficult—but proclamation of faith in the God that she saw. She’s like, I know that God, I’ve seen him. Yeah. And, and she professed faith, and it’s just, it’s a remarkable story.
Jason Stone (24:40):
Yeah. That’s cool. I mean, it’s encouraging. I was like, think I was like, what was I gonna ask next? Because I started thinking about what you were sharing. Yeah. but yeah, so I want to, I wanna read a line from your book if I can—
Amanda Bible Williams (24:55):
Oh, from Faithful. Okay. Yeah. I’ll play, I’ll claim part of it.
Jason Stone (25:00):
You can claim part of it. This chapter, I’ll read a line from your chapter. “So Rahab has a part in the grand story of redemption was not a product of her planning or striving. She did not determine to work her way into the history book of God’s people. She simply made a statement of faith and then acted on it. The power of Rahab’s profession of faith was not found in herself, but in the God whose power she proclaimed into whose sovereign will she surrendered her life.” So, and then you went on to reflect, kind of, on your own life in applying her story—or at least the not mundane, but it’s humanized. It’s just very, like, it’s just something that a lot of people can relate to anyway, so you were studying Rahab and then you’re reflecting on your own day-to-day life. So how would you encourage our listeners to be faithful when they feel like their life could be or should be more, and I was thinking like, more epic or more exciting or more something like more fill-in-the-blank.
Amanda Bible Williams (26:00):
Yeah. Or bigger or, yeah and especially right now, I mean, just the time that we live in, just that feeling that like, I should be reinventing myself, you know, like, I should be something or like in a public space, in a public way, Rahab’s story. I mean, I was just thinking about it and reading, when listening to you read those words, brought tears to my eyes. Not because of the writing, but because of how that story, how it resonates with me, and like it still does. You know that she was not a powerful woman in her day-to-day existence, right? Like she wasn’t, and yet the power of God in her and as my friend Jess Connolly says often, that Jesus is mighty in you, when she’s talking to, to me or to any of her sisters in the faith that Jesus is mighty in us. And I think like we see God mighty in Rahab. And there are just so many ways that I think this relates to us today is that we feel so much pressure to be mighty in ourselves, to be mighty in whatever way. Like as, you know, in professionally, in whatever space we are in, like our day job, if we’re parents to be, I mean, I have three teenagers, and a younger kiddo now, and I just didn’t realize what a joy teenagers were. But also, I don’t know that I’ve ever felt more powerless in my life than mothering a teenager. And just how I, you know, our, our instinct, our desire, we want to take control of a situation and like fix it or make it better, or make it what we think it should be.
And that’s the Christian life, right? The Christian life is to surrender to Jesus and his Lordship into, into, to live in step with the Spirit. And the Spirit is the one who’s mighty. And it can sound like semantics, but the more I read Scripture, the more I see that it’s not just like a saying or like a concept that Jesus—that God is mighty in the very people who are very weak and very broken. And so I love Rahab’s story because it shows me, it reminds me that my faith in the Lord is my first responsibility. Like that proclamation of faith is kind of the gateway through which I have the freedom to then really live my life. And it’s not about it being big.
It can be small because we know how, we know how God works, right? And we’ve, we saw that through the life of Jesus on Earth is that he did huge things with small things, loaves and fishes even, right? Like, like that’s just how, and mustard seed faith, like, that’s just how God operates. And so, I think that Rahab’s story is such a call to remember being faithful where we are and with what we have is not the least we can do. Like, that is our calling. And if where we are and what we have is something big, great, be faithful there too. But even then, I really think it’s the little, the unseen faithfulness is where God does his work. I can’t wait to find out one day, how he does what he does.
Jason Stone (30:11):
Man, I keep thinking of just the, like, the Word simple as in like bold and underlining. And I know that you kind of like joked, not joked about it, but you were like, it’s not simple. Kind of like earlier when you were saying it’s easy, right?
Amanda Bible Williams (30:21):
It’s not easy, it’s not easy, but it’s simple. But I really do think, yeah, I mean, the gospel–children can understand the gospel. So, yeah. I, I think simple is the right word, but it’s one of those times where you wish you’re like, can the English language give us more words to choose from?
Jason Stone (30:42):
They’re probably out the right words there, but—
Amanda Bible Williams (30:45):
Pull up with the source later. I’m not the person.
Jason Stone (30:47):
So yeah, thank you for, for sharing that. There are a few questions. I know I want to be respectful of time. There’s a few questions from the audience as well. Cool. I kind of just threw, I said, “Hey, we’re gonna be talking with She Reads Truth, and what questions do you have?” And so there’s a few from the Logos user base as well. So many of our listeners in Logos users are not only readers and students of Scripture, but also teachers and preachers. Can you talk about the current state of biblical literacy in what we, pastors, group leaders, parents, etc., can do to effectively communicate the gospel to this generation?
Amanda Bible Williams (31:25):
Yeah. I don’t know if you saw my shoulders sink a little when you asked the first part of that question. I was just reading recently, the American Bible Society, you know, they do their state of the Bible research every year. And it’s so disheartening in a lot of ways, and also I know that fewer people are you know— people are walking away from faith, walking away from their Bibles, and maybe those who are reading or not engaging in the same way that they did. But I think that, well, first of all, I mean, we know that the Lord is moving through the capital-C Church because he’s promised that he would, and that’s how, you know, brings his kingdom to bear on earth, right? That’s what we’re doing here.
And so it helps to remember that. But also what I’m seeing in, we call, we have a joke in our office that there’s, there’s data, right? Like, which is what the American Bible Society toils to give us, and we’re so grateful. And then we have what we call a-data, which is like anecdotal evidence or like stories that we’re hearing from people who are reading their Bibles. And at the same time that it feels like there is a famine for God’s Word, right, in the church? It also seems like there is such a hunger for not God’s Word plus a bunch of stuff, but like people who are just wanting to really read God’s Word and know what it says. I mean, my 15-year-old two nights ago sat across from me and her dad and was just asking some really hard questions about, well, where’s this in Scripture? And why do we believe this? She wants to know. She, of course, wants to hear from us, but she wants more than that. She wants to know for herself, like she wants to dig in and read. And so I think my encouragement to all of you who have such vital, important roles in holding out the Word of life right as Scripture describes it, is that I think that we’re hungry for it as a church, and as a culture, even if we don’t know what we’re hungry for—I think there is a hunger that only God’s Word can quench. And, you know, reading God’s Word is not the end. Like, that is not the ultimate goal—knowing God and relationship with God is the goal.
By and large are neglecting a primary means to that relationship. And so, I think that, I think that we are, I mean, teenagers are just really on the brain. I don’t know if you can tell, but I think a lot about teenagers right now. And, you know, the CDC study that came out just with an epidemic of depression among teenage girls right now. I think that we are called to not apologize for, and not neglect, but unashamedly hold out God’s Word to them because we know that there’s hope in it. We know that there is. And so my encouragement is just to keep going. I wish I knew the solution. But I think to keep going is part of it, whatever the solution looks.
Jason Stone (35:39):
Yeah. I think you mentioning the pandemic, we don’t need to go down that route. That’s a whole ‘nother hour. But the next question actually—there’s a connection mentally there, at least the next question is. What is it about reading the Bible together that builds community? And I think that it. A little bit of a response, to what you were just saying. I think there’s a disconnectedness, but if there is something that pastors, group leaders, etc., can be doing. It’s facilitating that, like communal discussion, or reading of Scripture. So anyways, the question is what it is about reading the Bible together that builds community. Do you have any thoughts on that, Amanda?
Amanda Bible Williams (36:24):
I mean, I’ve seen so much evidence of that, and the work that we get to do at She Reads Truth. It’s actually how She Reads Truth started—it wasn’t a formalized idea. It was just women who wanted to read God’s Word. And so what they did was they read, you know, we were reading the same passages together in our various lives, different parts of the country, whatever. And in that movement, it just sort of, we just saw a swell of women who also wanted to read. And so they wanted a little direction. They wanted to know, where do I start? Whatever. But once we gave that to them, they just took off because the kinship they found in reading God’s Word, they didn’t have to be from the same denomination. They didn’t have to be from the same life circumstance or background, or even the same like part of their faith journey.
But there was something about reading Scripture together. There still is something about reading Scripture together that was bonding women together. And so, and we see that, I mean, that’s, that’s the viewpoint, the vantage point that I get where I am and She Reads Truth. But I mean, I think we see that in our churches. We see that in community groups. I think it’s the Holy Spirit. I think that’s why, I think that’s why reading Scripture, I mean, that’s a little bit of like a, feels like a little bit of a Jesus juke answer, but I think it’s the right answer because something, I think that there may be something heretical about what I’m about to say. I don’t mean it that way, but I think of it as almost like giving the Holy Spirit like a playground. Like when you give, when you have, let’s say a thousand women around the world reading the same chapter of Scripture in a given day. I mean, I just imagine the Holy Spirit just going to town. The Holy Spirit, he is doing a work. And, and it’s just so powerful, it’s so inherently powerful. Scripture is inviting the work of the Spirit.
Jason Stone (38:42):
Yeah.
Amanda Bible Williams (38:43):
So I don’t know if we can say that the Holy Spirit gets a playground, but we did.
Jason Stone (38:47):
It’s okay. And it, in inviting the Spirit and then do, yeah, what only the Spirit can do. I mean, yeah. There’s no other way to say it. Yeah. Solid. So, there’s one more thing I gotta ask before we close off. Okay. and that’s because you hinted at it before we went live. I’ve heard that you and or your team leverage Logos in some way. So can you tell me a bit about your experience or about how you use Logos and, yeah, if you do, I hope you do.
Amanda Bible Williams (39:19):
So, yeah, I would love to tell you that, because let me tell you, Jason, if I didn’t tell you, my team would immediately be like, why did you not tell them how much we love Logos? So we, and when I say we, I’m talking about the She Reads Truth team. So this team that we have and the work that we’re doing, it has grown over time. Our team has grown over time. And, and so the way that we create our Scripture reading plans has developed over time. It is still, the core of it, the essence of it is the same. It’s all about curating reading plans to help people be in the Word every day. And, and to develop that habit of Bible reading and to begin to understand the whole story of Scripture. But the way that we do that, is we start with Scripture.
So if we’re reading through the book of the Bible, that may be straightforward enough, but even then, we want to give them tools to, to, to help them as they read, to, to help them read and interpret Scripture for themselves or see how Scripture interprets Scripture. and then when we’re doing, like, talking about a topic. We’re venturing in, right after Easter into a plan called a Living Hope. And so the subtitle that plan is, it’s a biblical study of our resurrected life in Christ. So we’re gonna read about Jesus’s resurrection, which is, you know, fairly straightforward in terms of like the passages of Scripture. But then we want to say to Scripture, what does this mean? What is life in Christ? Right? And so, we don’t want to come up with our own answer and then find Scripture to fit it. We wanna see what Scripture says.
So all of that to say Logos has been kind of transformative. I don’t think that that’s an exaggeration to say that it has not just equipped our team to do that work, but to do it the way that we are convicted to do it, like starting with Scripture. And so, I don’t hands-on use Logos as much as the team does. In fact, I’m just learning. I’m just starting. And I, to me, they’re the Logos experts in my mind because they use it every day. But the resources that it makes available to us and the way that it allows them to merge those and connect those with studies of the Scripture text, I mean, it’s, it’s pretty remarkable. They love it so much, so much and awesome. So that’s when I told you, Jason, that like this to come on and talk with you today is such an easy yes for me, because it just feels like, well, this is the least I can do because you have given my team, your, your team has given my team an invaluable resource and a way to better do what we feel called to do, for the church.
Jason Stone (42:34):
Thanks. Yeah, thanks Amanda. Yeah, thanks for sharing that, and I’m glad your team is making use of it. That’s encouraging for me and everybody at Logos for sure.
Amanda Bible Williams (42:43):
I hope so. It’s so important.
Jason Stone (42:46):
I want to thank you. I wanna wrap up with, of course the She Reads Truth link is in the comments, but if there’s anywhere else that folks can follow along for the, you know, the work that you’re doing or maybe your Instagram, where can they check out more of what you’re doing, Amanda?
Amanda Bible Williams (43:14):
Yeah, so we are She Reads Truth on all the various platforms that we’re on and shereadstruth.com on the internet. And I am @BibleWilliams as we’ve already discussed on Instagram. I’m not on it as much—I’m not as fun to follow or as avid an Instagramer as we are at She Reads Truth. But yeah, we would love for you to come along, but honestly, the best way is to go to the site. There’s a place where you can put in your email and join the community and can know what we’re doing and follow along and read with us. If you, if you wanna read the Bible, you wanna read the Bible more for the first time or the hundredth time and just need a plan, that’s what we’re here to do: to set you up for success, to be a woman or man in the Word of God. That’s what we want for you.
Jason Stone (44:15):
Yeah. Thank you so much and thanks for your time. Yeah. And encouraging words. I loved being able to unpack Faithful with you a little bit and then hear more about She Reads Truth. So thanks for your time. It’s been wonderful.
Amanda Bible Williams (44:27):
Oh, thank you. It’s been a joy. Thanks so much. Of course.
Kirk E. Miller
Chauncey Allmond
