NRB 2024 - Free Animated Bible - iBible For A Visual World

So we're here again on the floor of the National Religious Broadcasters' Convention.

I've got Steve Cleary with us. And Steve, tell us what brings you to the NRB? Well, we're promoting the launch of our big project we're working on called iBible. We're doing an animation of the entire Bible, breaking it apart into short seven-minute episodes, and offering it free on our iBible app that comes out Easter Sunday. This Easter Sunday? This Easter Sunday. I don't know when this broadcast is going to air. It's actually airing right this minute, so it's live.

So they can know the date. Easter Sunday actually comes early this year, March 31st. And we will be releasing our first 42 episodes covering the entire book of Genesis. Wow. So the entire thing's animated from a standpoint like something that you would watch like a video?

Yeah. So our current style of animation, if you think about it, it might be if Marvel did a Bible, what would it look like? So some people call it kind of a comic book artwork. We are moving to full 3D animation, like you might see something from Pixar or Disney. But the current animation is a motion comic style of animation. When we started it, that was what was most affordable.

Now, with technology, it's come a long ways, and now we can use 3D technology without increasing our cost. So why iBible? Why the name or why the project? Both?

Obviously, the name is obvious. I is for interactive. So we want people to engage in Scripture. And if you read reports from Marner, from American Bible Society, Bible engagement is on a decline, really for the first time.

And if you're looking at America for the first time in American history, it's a decline mostly among the youth. So the next generation is not engaging in Scripture like they used to. And so our focus is twofold. One is we want people to know the whole Bible.

So many times it gets drilled down to a gospel, to the life of Christ, which is great, but we believe the gospel starts in Genesis and goes all the way to the second coming in Revelation, where it fulfills. And so we feel people are more and more losing a love and engagement with all of Scripture. So our goal is to do animations of the entire Bible, and then make them available on vice's people already own, which is a phone, which we all have.

If your listeners have one, if you're driving, please don't use it. And so if we can deliver Bible episodes, that's authentic Scripture, on a phone, we believe we can reverse the trend and increase Bible engagement instead of continually watching it decrease. So when you say interactive, like I'm watching this video, am I interacting with that something, or just the idea is to get them to become more interested in Scripture, how does that work?

Interactive is such that on our app, obviously you're going through the episodes, so you may be swiping through to your next episode. We have quizzes, so if you watch the episode, we're going to give you ten questions, and you might earn a badge for answering those or taking that quiz. You get to see how much of the Bible you retain, Bible knowledge. So if you think about it, we'll have an estimated 280 episodes when we're done. We're releasing 42, but we have a long ways to go to get all through to Revelation. So you think 280 to 300 episodes, and even just the quiz, there's ten questions. So I'm going to ask the viewers, you know, 2800 questions, all specific to what the Bible says. Not theology, but I might ask you, you know, what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah, what Abraham negotiated with God, how many, you know, what did he say, how many men, righteous men, would God find in Sodom before he would spare of the city? So we teach the whole Bible and try to make it in an interesting format, so in that way, yes, we would consider it interactive.

Oh, I agree. I was just trying to understand the vehicle with which it became interactive. So you're asking these questions that are open-ended? We ask, okay, so I'm glad you asked that, because there are different types, there are two different types of questions we ask. The quiz questions have a correct answer, because we're teaching the narrative.

So if I say, how many days did it rain, you know, when Noah did the great flood, the correct answer is obviously 40 days, 40 nights. And so there is a correct answer to all our quiz questions. But then we have discussion questions. So a discussion question, you know, might be, why was the serpent in the garden to begin with?

We're not going to answer that question, that's an open-ended question. But these are things we feel that parents and teachers and pastors should be allowing these questions to be asked. So to kind of encourage the younger generation. We believe that the younger generation, if you want to reach them in a world of social media, then it's through discovery. It's not through telling somebody, here's the truth, here's what to believe.

Obviously the Bible teaches ultimate truth, but by inviting them into a discussion, they'll go much deeper. And it doesn't mean you compromise your position, but I've done it with my own son, so my son's 31 years old. When he was 15 years old, I really failed as a parent when it came to family devotions.

I had no good content, I had no curriculum, I didn't know how to lead family devotions. He had no idea, he had no interest in them whatsoever, and he's probably a typical 15 year old. Now he's 31, he watches the episodes, and every time he watches the episodes, he asks me a question. I will allow him to kind of go through the answer, like maybe he has a thought, maybe he has an opinion. I don't compromise my position, but I allow him to discuss it, and he will discuss the Bible with me for an hour. And somebody who would not have discussed the Bible with their parent at all.

Right, right, which is actually fulfilling what Deuteronomy 6 says, and a lot of things along those lines. You talk about them on your way and all that, and now as he becomes more engaged in it, the more interactive. And again, I get more why it's iBible, and a little bit more why iBible, but man, what a project, like we're talking huge. It's a big project, yeah. And so was this something you became part of the team, was it your idea? For me it started with, I know this is a short podcast so I won't go into the whole story, but for me it literally started with a dream, and I believed that God had a project he wanted me to do.

I wasn't looking for it, I wasn't asking for it. I had had a successful business and I was going to retire, partly retire, build a little house in Costa Rica, and that was my plan. So God interrupted my plan, and really with a dream that impressed me that there was a project that he was asking me to do. And some months later I realized that the importance of teaching the entire Bible. So I might have been called, you know, like, oh yeah, the Old Testament, we don't need to worry about that. And so God's calling me wasn't like a lifelong passion, it was like lightning or, okay, I get it. And over the course of five years we looked at animation styles, how we would do the script, and because I wasn't interested in doing a Bible story, I wanted to do Bible. But I also did not want to do word-for-word Bible because the Bible's not easy to understand.

You know, it's not in a story format, it's not always in chronological order, sometimes it repeats itself. And so I wanted to re-script it in a way that would be accurate and also storytelling. And some people said that's not possible, you can't do that, I'm not a theologian, I don't have the credentials.

So I said, well, I said I'm only doing it because I believe God asked me to, not because I'm pretending to be anybody special. But we have now given our scripts to the highest level of Bible translation consultants in the world, and they are authenticating, saying you are a legitimate translation of scripture. So now that we have that credential, that becomes our script. And so when we animate to that, we're teaching the Bible, we're sharing the Bible. So the idea was originally birthed to me and then we established a team, we have studios around the world, we have workers all pouring into this, because it's a very big project. Oh! And it's coming out this Easter, like, wow!

Yeah, like weeks or days away, right? And so it's ibible.com, ibible.org, how do people get there? No, you can find us, so our homepage is i.bible, we don't use the.com, we use.bible and i.bible. And we'll be available on the Apple iOS app store come Easter, not today, but on Easter we'll be live on there. And also if you go to ibible.app, you'll be able to go to an Android version and find us different ways.

Hopefully we'll mark it well enough that even if you go to Google, you will find us. Right, but as far as the app on iOS is i.bible? No, on iOS you can just go to the app store and type in ibible. There is another ibible there, it's a common, it's not unique to us, but our organization is Revelation Media, so it'll say ibible by Revelation Media, obviously it's Bible Animations, it sets us apart. And so you'll see our logo and you'll see our identity, if you download the wrong one, I'm sorry, ours is free. And so there's no cost, even we submitted it this week to Apple and they asked us all these questions where, what do you get if you pay? Where's the pay wall? Where's the pay content?

We're like, it's all free and they kind of don't believe we're delivering this much content for free. That's awesome, it absolutely is. Well Steve, thank you so much for what you're doing and God bless you and your continued pursuits. Thank you, Robbie, I appreciate it. Wow, what a project. Unbelievable.