MAP — Modular Aggregation of Principles for Bible Translation

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ADVERTISEMENT BUSINESS Pitching the Bible to millennials: It's a content-rich lifestyle brand

By PETER HOLLEY WASHINGTON POST MAR 19, 2019 | 4:00 AM

Alabaster co-founders Brian Chung and Bryan Ye-Chung are printing books of the Bible with moody photography and minimalist design. (Bryan Ye-Chung) Brian Chung remembers the first time he attempted to read the Bible. A 20-year-old college student at USC at the time, hed recently converted to Christianity and was eager to plunge into the scripture that hed heard so much about. ADVERTISEMENT There was just one problem, Chung recalls: I didnt want to read it. The text was small and serious-looking, each line corralled inside densely packed, numbered columns devoid of imagery like citations at the end of a biology textbook. Inside, the pages were toilet-paper thin. Outside, the cover was solid black and intimidating. For an artistic college student studying communications, design and advertising, the good book looked surprisingly bad. There were 20 pages before you actually got to Genesis, Chung said, recalling how impatient he felt. As an artist and designer and a reader, I was thinking, This is not good design. Over the past 2,000 years, scholars say, no other book has been reimagined and reinterpreted as many times in history as the Bible. Each iteration from early translations in Greek to the King James edition and beyond was created to reach a new audience. Five hundred years after the modern printing press spread biblical texts worldwide, the book is struggling to reach one of its toughest audiences yet: Millennials, a generation of expressive digital natives who are increasingly likely to read on a tablet than open a book. They are also far less likely to read or trust the Bible than older generations, surveys show, and their skepticism is at the forefront of Americans deteriorating relationship with the ancient text. Now Christian publishers are scrambling to repair that relationship by making the Bible more accessible and attractive to a generation shaped by an unending stream of visual content and social media stimulation. The efforts are a way of embracing the present but also a nod to the Churchs medieval past, when an illiterate populace relied on beautiful frescoes, sculptures and majestic cathedrals to understand the Christian message. A decade after his failed attempt at reading it, Chung has turned his early aversion to the Bible into a growing business. Hes one half of a duo attempting to make the Bible millennial-friendly. To do that, his Los Angeles start-up, Alabaster Co., places the full text of a biblical book, including two from the Old Testament, inside publications that resemble chic, indie lifestyle and design magazines like those you might find on your most fashionable friends coffee table. Alabaster uses the New Living Translation of the Bible. Negative space is plentiful, and the text is a stylish sans serif font, dwarfed by the kind of moody, still-life images that proliferate on Instagram.

Pages from Alabaster's printing of the book of Proverbs. (Bryan Ye-Chung) For inspiration, the partners looked not to contemporary Christian artists or the Catholic Church, but rather to urbane magazines such as Cereal, Kinfolk and Drift. They also studied hip, era-defining brands like eyeglasses seller Warby Parker, razor purveyor Harrys, luxury goods purveyor Shinola, and Swedish watchmaker Daniel Wellington. Those companies, they say, understand something that the discerning millennial mind treats as, well, gospel: that the quality of a products visual packaging is just as important as the quality of the product itself. The Bible may be a holy book, Chung realized, but its also a content-rich lifestyle brand one in desperate need of a modern upgrade. Visual culture is everything for millennials, Alabaster co-founder Bryan Ye-Chung said. Thats what is important to us, too, so we wondered: Why cant a faith-based product take advantage of that space as well? The start-up is not without competition. Absorbing Christian teachings without opening a Bible or stepping inside a church has never been easier. Instagram has helped turn megachurch pastors such as Hillsongs Carl Lentz and Elevations Steven Furtick into fashion-forward influencers with millions of followers. The number of people who have downloaded mobile apps offering thousands of biblical translations, texts and access to podcasts is now in the hundreds of millions. Ancient manuscripts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls have been digitized for online consumption, and now anyone with internet access can listen to Bible readings in the books original languages Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. ADVERTISEMENT Why read about the Holy Land when you can strap on a virtual reality headset that offers 3-D tours of sacred Christian sites? If VR isnt your thing, you can download apps that pair smartphone photos with Bible verses, creating shareable content for social media. If you dont want to read the Bible, then Alexa, Amazons virtual assistant, can do it for you. As faith-based organizations seek to share their message in new ways, even their job postings have begun to resemble those from Silicon Valley tech firms, with organizations recruiting product designers and software engineers. Well do anything short of sin to reach people who dont know Christ, says the Life.Church website. For us, that means leveraging the latest technology, pursuing new ideas, and staying close to Gods Word. The digital products may be new, but the sensibility is not, according to Matthew Engelke, a professor of religion at Columbia University. He said the Protestant impulse has always been to expand outward, finding new ways to engage new groups of people. The rise of digital culture over the past 20 years has heightened that impulse, he said. For todays evangelicals, Engelke said, a rising tide of secular atheism is no longer considered the greatest threat to the church. Its the stuck-in-the-mud old Christian who doesnt move with the times and refuses to recognize that you cant get people into church reading the King James version in the evenings on the radio anymore, Engelke said. Times have changed, and many Christians recognize they need to change with the times. As millions of Christians find new avenues to explore their faith online, companies like Thomas Nelson Bibles, the largest Christian publishing house in the world, say the appetite for physical copies of the Bible remains strong, but customer expectations are rapidly changing because of digital culture. No longer interested in their grandparents plain black Bibles, younger customers have begun requesting books with sewn binding, environmentally friendly paper, gold gilding and pricey goatskin covers. The Bible publisher Zondervan has introduced hand-painted covers inspired by Etsy artists, as well as shimmering images that change when the page is turned. Its a renaissance in craftsmanship, said Daniel Marrs, publisher of Thomas Nelson Bibles. Its amazing that we can sit down with a little app and see hundreds of different translations and then pick up a Bible bound in the old leather style with beautiful typography and engage with scripture that way as well. The company has also developed several proprietary typefaces designed to reduce eye fatigue for customers who spend their days staring at digital screens. If theyre not going to access scripture via a mobile app, publishers say, Bible readers want a customized product that makes them feel unique. ADVERTISEMENT Its all about the experience, said Doug Lockhart, senior vice president of Bible Marketing and Outreach at Harper Collins Christian Publishing. Even the packaging of the premier collection bibles, the unboxing experience is similar to an iPhone experience. Last year, their second on the market, Alabaster sold about 10,000 books, netting the company $318,000 in sales. It was enough for Chung and Ye-Chung to quit their jobs in recent weeks to focus on Alabaster full-time. This year, both men said, the company hopes to triple last years sales figures. Their customers, they said, are primarily women, 21 to 35 years old. Though they have customers as far away as Singapore and Australia, most are city-dwellers from places like Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Chicago and Atlanta. Both men said they believe their individually packaged biblical texts which start at $30 for single books but cost as much as $155 for packages of six books tap into millennials more casual approach to religion. Instead of letting the Book of Romans collect dust on a shelf, they said, the idea is to bring the words out into the open, turning them into an enticing work of art whose pages feel more interactive than intimidating. Weve become a culture that cares about beauty and visual stimulation, Chung said. We want to use that to create a dialogue and a fresh perspective of the scripture. Harvey Cox, Hollis Research Professor of Divinity at Harvard, said Chung and Ye-Chung have unearthed an age-old marketing tactic perfected by the church. Christianity, like many religions, has long relied on beautiful packaging to sell its ideas. That was especially true, he said, during the Middle Ages when the overwhelming majority of Christians couldnt read. Youd walk into any cathedral or church, he said, and the whole idea was to capture the meaning of the Gospel and the Bible visually with stained glass windows and frescoes, all kinds of paintings and just a lot of visual material. At a time in which many of his own students appear to respond more strongly to imagery than text, a period in which the written word arouses less passion than a likable photo online, Cox said he wasnt surprised that Bible publishers are doing what theyve always done: adapting to the times. Its a perfectly understandable evolution, he added. It has happened before.

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2 comments

PSPhilip StineMar 25, 2019, 5:15 PM

In the Middle Ages when most people were illiterate, churches used stained glass windows to tell biblical stories and truths. So now the Alabaster Company has come back to that as a way of communicating to our (biblically) illiterate millennials. How's that for full circle?

Related, years ago Harold Scanlin pointed out that Christianity has always been at the forefront of communicating through new media. For example, by using the codex instead of the scroll, the Apostles were able to spread their message far more efficiently and to larger audiences. Next came the printing press. It was no surprise that among the very first things Gutenberg printed was the Bible. The next big development, Scanlin said, was the CD and other electronic media. Today, people have gone all the way back to hieroglyphics called emojis and the Middle Ages pictures of Alabaster. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

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NLNicholas LamméApr 5, 2019, 1:25 PM

So, I'm not sure how I feel about this article. There are a a lot of presupposotions in this article that make me very uncomfortable. Before working with the Bible Society, I pastored a church in Costa Rica for almost 8 years and my experience with millennial is that they wanted to read and study the bible seriously, when they realized that religion (or could we say, Christianity) and the Bible were deep and real. I need to think about this article some more before really making up my mind.