THE QUESTION THAT CUTS THROUGH EVERYTHING

Why I came to Back to the Bible, and what this moment asks of us.

By Braden Pedersen

Before I ever worked at Back to the Bible, I had a picture of Arnie Cole in my mind. Researcher. Ministry leader. Man of the Word. Somebody who had spent decades building something significant and knew the Lord was behind it.

What I didn’t expect was the question.

It shows up in nearly every conversation I have with him. Different words, same thing underneath: what has actually become of the harvest? Not how many people heard a broadcast or read a devotional on their phone. Not how many Bibles went out the door. How many lives changed, and stayed changed?

I’ll be honest. The first few times, I found it uncomfortable. I came from a world where you report the numbers you can count and move on. Arnie kept asking about the number nobody counts.

That question is why the Harvest Project exists. For decades the Church has graded itself on

attendance, decisions, events, and digital reach. Those numbers have their place. But every one of them can go up while people’s lives stay exactly the same. So Arnie and the team at our Center for Scripture Absorption built the SALT (Scripture Absorption and Life Transformation) Index to measure the thing that is harder to see: whether God’s Word is actually changing how a person lives, and whether the people around them can tell. The 2025 survey of more than six thousand American adults gave us the first national benchmark of its kind, and we will run it every year. Arnie walks through what it found on page 6. I will tell you now that it is sobering.

Here is what the numbers cannot show you. This summer a reader named Ron wrote to tell us his business had dropped off and he had started to wonder whether he was a failure. Then he read an article in our July newsletter, and it reminded him that his identity is in Jesus Christ, not in his position. One man, one article, one morning. Multiply that by the number of people who open something from Back to the Bible every day, and you begin to see what the harvest looks like up close.

That is what drew me here. Not the research by itself. The willingness to ask the hard question, take the answer seriously, and then build something in response: daily content, podcasts, and resources designed to help a person close the distance between the faith they profess and the life they live.

Why does this moment matter more than the ones before it? Because the data says we are losing people faster than we are reaching them, and because we have never had more ways to reach them. That combination should not leave any of us comfortable.

You are the reason this work can respond. Through your partnership, the Harvest Project gives the Church a clearer view of where God’s Word is taking root and where people still need help. When you give, you help move someone from passive consumption toward daily engagement with Scripture that can change a real life. Ron’s life. Agnes’s life. Maybe someone at your own table.

Every year the SALT Index runs, we will see the harvest a little more clearly. Thank you for making sure we keep looking.