The Bible can be beautifully clear in some places but dense and thorny in others. It can be daunting to bushwhack through complex passages, seeking the right path to understanding scripture and living by its wisdom. Enter Bible study guides, one of the categories, along with Bibles and devotionals, that religion publishers credit with driving up their revenue in recent quarters. Rising demand has prompted editors to reexamine and redesign their Bible studies. Several are expanding how many they publish and juicing up their offerings with video links, reflection points for individual study, and discussion prompts for small groups.
Tara-Leigh Cobble, author of The Bible Recap: A One-Year Guide to Reading and Understanding the Entire Bible, the top-selling book in all of Baker Publishing Group for three years running, moved into book-by-book Bible studies this spring with her Knowing Jesus series for Bethany. She began with Knowing Jesus as King: A 10-Session Study on the Gospel of Matthew (Apr.), published a volume on Mark in June, and will add books on Luke in September and John in December. In 2025, Cobble takes on New Testament books starting with Acts: The Spirit and the Bride—A 10-Week Bible Study on God and His Church (Apr. 2025).
Keying off Cobble’s success, Andy McGuire, editorial director for Bethany House, says it’s planning to increase the amount of Bible studies it publishes by 10%–20% in 2025. Often the guides are companions to a book; McGuire points to Bible teacher Amy Seiffert’s Your Name Is Daughter: What the Unsung Women of the Bible Teach Us About Our Worth (Feb. 2025), which will be followed by a study guide in spring. Pastor and PowerPoint Ministries broadcaster Jack Graham’s The Jesus Book (Nov.) aims to teach readers how to study the Bible for themselves, “because active study is more effective than passive study,” McGuire says. “People don’t want excessive mediation, being told what to think. In these books, you don’t take some other authority at their word. Instead, it’s ‘read this passage, answer this question, and do your own analysis.’ It’s trusting God to lead you to the proper understanding.”
Reviving and revitalizing guides
Guideposts, which last published a Bible study in 1985, has returned to the category now because “our customers tell us they are looking to deepen their faith, and we try to reach them where they are,” says VP of content Ansley Roan. A new Living with Purpose Bible Study series, written by the editors at Guideposts, will begin publishing in January 2025 with Living with Purpose Bible Study: Revelation and Living with Purpose Bible Study: Psalms. It will be followed in April by studies on Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs, and a study on John publishing in June. “Rather than taking a sermon-focused or professorial approach,” Roan says, “it’s accessible and relevant, with multiple ways for the reader to connect with the biblical text.”
While Intervarsity Press’s 150-book line of LifeGuide Bible Studies has sold more than 15 million copies since 1985, according to the publisher, IVP this year launched a new run of Bible studies, LifeExperience Guides, aimed at “people who don’t usually engage with Bibles,” says IVP executive editor Elissa Schauer. “There are people who may be feeling frustrated or discouraged by the church who are still earnestly seeking God. And they want to do it with others, just not necessarily in a church structure.”
The guides offer six to eight weeks of content and related videos designed for both group study and individual study, but “not an hour of homework every night,” Schauer says. “We wanted them to be welcoming and accessible. These are called ‘experience’ guides because readers would be exploring the ways a text applies to their lives.” For example, author Dorina Lazo Gilmore-Young, who has written about dealing with grief surrounding the death of her first husband, details the ways God cares for the vulnerable in Redeemer: God’s Lovingkindness in the Book of Ruth (Feb. 2025). IVP is also partnering with PAX, a nonprofit serving young Christians of color, to publish four Bible studies in 2025, bearing “Made for PAX” logos and examining the Bible with social issues, peace, justice, migration, and mental health in mind.
NavPress, a publishing partner of Tyndale House, has always published Bible studies, “but we didn’t really invest in the category for a couple decades,” says senior editor Caitlyn Carlson. She and her team set out to “bring that part of the line back to life, and it’s been really stunning to see the reception. Bible studies are a gathering place today.”
Carlson highlights NavPress’s eight-title Storyline Bible Studies series by Bible teacher Kat Armstrong, in which the author examines recurring images and settings in scripture, prompting readers to consider the question, “What is God doing here?” Coming up in this series of five-week guides are Gardens and Deserts, paired for release in July 2025. “These are places where we see people facing rejection, resentment, harm, and loss, and they also see God meeting them there,” Carlson says. “The guide asks readers to consider: Where is the desert in your life right now? Where is God meeting you?”
What people are actually craving
NavPress has another new study series, LifeChange Bible Studies, with forthcoming books including Joyce Koo Dalrymple’s Jesus’ Parables of Grace (July 2025). “LifeChange topical books are hitting a felt need among consumers,” Carlson says, adding that they’re written by authors “with their fingers on the pulse of what people are actually craving.”
To meet this hunger, Tyndale associate publisher Jon Farrar says, Tyndale established a website where consumers can find current and forthcoming titles, such as Sweeter Than Honey: A Bible Study on Enjoying God in His Word (Jan. 2025). The book and companion video by Gretchen Saffles and Maggie Combs are intended to give readers tools for reading scripture to gather knowledge, digest big ideas, and grow in godliness.
Study guides have always been a catalog mainstay at Lifeway Christian Resources, established by the Southern Baptist Convention. Becky Loyd, Lifeway VP for marketing strategy and women’s leadership development, sees a clear reason why sales are so strong now. In stressful times like these, she says, “people want truth. We find truth in the Bible. And we provide the tools that equip them to find it.”
The lion’s share of Lifeway Bible study authors are, like most of their readers, women in a denomination that does not permit female senior pastors. “If you think about a woman on a Sunday morning,” Loyd says, “she gets to hear a male perspective on the Bible, which is a very important perspective. But when women study, they want to study with other women, because it’s their place to hear a woman share what she has learned from scripture and how she interprets it as an embodied woman.”
For example, Loyd cites Revelation: Eternal King, Eternal Kingdom (out now) by Bible teacher Jen Wilkin. “It had a ton of preorders,” she says. “Revelation is, to some women, a scary book to interpret on their own. They may not hear a pastor interpret it, but Jen brings an ability to help women learn that is very attractive.”
Men are not absent from the Lifeway listings, however. Indeed, one of the forthcoming six-session studies, Together for Teens: Community that Marked the Acts 2 Church (Jan. 2025), which examines how the first generation of believers developed what it meant to be a “church,” is written by Lifeway president Ben Mandrell.
Video content abounds
Most new and forthcoming Lifeway study guides include codes readers can use at a Lifeway site to access related videos. Loyd highlights Luke in the Land by Kristi McLelland (out now), who specializes in a historic and cultural perspective on the Bible. The access code in the book leads to a video of McLelland in Israel “teaching from the book of Luke while walking you through it, showing you where these Gospel events unfolded,” Loyd says.
Laura Barker, VP and publisher for WaterBrook and Multnomah, says the company’s successful study guide authors “clearly connect the dots between the relevance of the Bible and the particular pain points or questions an audience might be grappling with. If a book doesn’t speak directly to a reader’s needs, it’s unlikely they’ll want to spend time with it.”
Among forthcoming titles from Multnomah in November are pastor Mark Batterson’s A Million Little Miracles and a study guide companion book curated by Batterson. The latter will offer activities geared toward helping Bible readers to live out the book’s subtitle: Rediscover the God Who Is Bigger Than Big, Closer Than Close, and Gooder Than Good.
For Waterbrook, Manny Arango, a preacher and Bible teacher based in Dallas, explores the “monsters”—literal and figurative, from snakes to sea monsters to the leviathan—in the Bible with Crushing Chaos (May 2025). Publishing simultaneously will be the Crushing Chaos Study Guide, intended to show how Bible readers can quell the chaos in their lives and restore the order God intended for humankind. (For our q&a with Arango, see “A Bible Study with a Monster Twist,” p. 22.)
This trace-a-theme Genesis-to-Revelation approach is also found in books such as What If Jesus Was Serious About Justice? A Visual Guide to the Good News of God’s Judgment and Mercy (Brazos, Feb. 2025), written and illustrated by author and podcaster Skye Jethani. It is the fifth and final book in Jethani’s Serious About... series, which follows a theme to illuminate Jesus’s teachings on a topic, says Brazos editorial director Katelyn Beaty. In the Justice entry, Jethani examines what the Bible says about wrath, judgment, mercy, and the meaning of social justice.
For people who do prefer a path through the Bible they can follow without clearing the way themselves, Hodder Faith is releasing more titles this fall for what it describes as a “comprehensive, international 50-volume Bible commentary series.” The three titles releasing in November—Matthew, Joshua, and Psalms 42-89—address how the story of Joshua can apply to modern times, the lessons on a life of service found in Matthew, and how, according to the publisher, Psalms 42–89 echo “the voice of Christ.”
Read more from our Religion Department feature.
Baby Bible Boom
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Renewed Faith in Devotionals
Guideposts’ many devotionals are intended to “feel like a faith walk taken with family and friends,” says Ansley Roan, Guideposts VP for content.
The Good News
Publishers are incorporating commentary from global perspectives and contemporary presentations in forthcoming Bibles.
A Bible Study with a Monster Twist: PW Talks with Manny Arango
Manny Arango, a Dallas-based preacher, Bible teacher, and producer of online theology courses, posted on his personal website, “The Bible is crazier than what you watch on Netflix and Hulu.”
