BRENTWOOD, Tenn. — When all nine campuses of Brentwood Baptist Church committed to reading through the Bible together, the church experienced real life change that didn’t just affect one ministry or group of people in the church; it changed families.

Jay Strother, senior pastor of Brentwood Baptist, said, “We have a saying, ‘let the Word do the work.’ So, the plan for us was simply to let the lion out of the cage, so to speak, and let the Word do the work that it needed to do in the hearts and lives of our people.”

For Johnathan and Lacey Woodside, that’s exactly what happened. They saw their elementary school-aged son and daughter “drawn into” the Word in a way they hadn’t seen before. Not only were the Woodsides leading their children to read the Word at home, but when they went to church, attending their age-specific ministries, the kids were led to dig deeper into the same passages they were reading at home.

“The resources that were made available by the church as well as their interest to want to dig and do more was phenomenal,” Johnathan said. That continuity, he explained, is really what made the difference for their family. “If you [had told] me at the very beginning that the only thing we would have gotten out of it was that our kids would read the Bible more, then sold!”

Lacey agreed, “Because once it was over, they were like, ‘What’s next?’”

According to Strother, that shared experience was one of the keys to this initiative. “There’s something important that happens when we have a shared experience. And that shared experience everybody had of coming together to discuss what they were reading, what they were experiencing, and quite honestly, the questions they had, really drove a lot of deeper community experiences for our life groups, for our families, and for each of our campuses and our congregations as well.

“It brought us unity, it brought us clarity as God’s people, and, of course, it increased our depth and our knowledge and our hunger for the truth that only God can bring.”

Brentwood Baptist members who were longtime believers in the Word also saw the narrative of Scripture in a new light as they read alongside their church family.

Renee Blain, Brentwood Baptist’s preschool minister, noted that her church leaders choosing to lead the campuses through all of Scripture created a thread that “kept us going” as a church.

“I love the fact that as we read, I could see Jesus from Genesis to Revelation,” Blain said. “I didn’t have to wait until Jesus was born in Matthew. I could see the Gospel woven throughout every chapter of every book of the Bible.”

Tom McMinn, director of education for the Brentwood Baptist Certified Christian Coach Center, agreed with the idea of a common thread. “This brought the whole story together. And it was God’s story,” McMinn said. “It has a thread that starts with Genesis 1 and goes all the way through Revelation.”

Aaron Campbell, a deacon and teacher at Brentwood, shared that after all his years in church, this was one of the most eye-opening exercises a church has done together. It shaped the preaching from the pulpit, but it also shaped how he read the Scripture as an individual and studied and led as a small group leader.

“One of the biggest things it did for me was it established a storyline for me,” Campbell said. “Not that these are just stories. It’s the Word of God. It’s truth. But it established a continuity that brought everything together. When you read the Bible chronologically, you understand that there is a storyline there.”

Strother reflected on what this meant for the congregation. He expressed that he saw, “simply how the Word of God intersected the lives of our people at that critical time for them in a way that only God would know. So watching God’s Word work among our people by challenging them to simply focus on Scripture itself, rather than books about Scripture or websites about Scripture, but to actually read the words of God given to us, in His inspired Scriptures, made a huge difference in the lives of our people.”

Strother’s words reflect what Brentwood discovered firsthand: When people read the Bible together, transformation happens. Stories like theirs are what inspired the CSB Read & Remain campaign, a nationwide initiative designed to help churches build that same shared rhythm of Scripture reading. The CSB Read & Remain campaign is a resource associated with the Christian Standard Bible.

The campaign provides free downloadable toolkits, including 52 weeks of teaching outlines, social media graphics, presentation slides and printable reading plan bookmarks to give leaders the resources they need to unify their congregations around the Word. By offering both a Christ-centered plan and a chronological plan, Read & Remain creates a pathway for churches of all sizes to remain in Scripture together.

For more information about leading a church to read through the Bible together, visit ReadAndRemain.com.

(EDITOR’S NOTE — Myriah Snyder is a writer for Lifeway Christian Resources.)