RTTB Summer 2025 Update

Ever wondered what goes into creating detailed Bible studies that reach across continents? Pull up a chair as we share a rare behind-the-scenes look at Reasoning Through the Bible.

After three and a half years of consistent teaching, we've produced over 550 episodes covering 22% of Scripture. That's thousands of verses examined and explained, all while maintaining our commitment to start where the average churchgoer is comfortable and gradually elevate understanding to deeper theological concepts. The goal has never changed: provide thorough Bible teaching that serves both casual learners and theology enthusiasts.

What began as two Bible teachers recording lessons has grown into a global ministry reaching 128 countries and over 1,900 cities worldwide. Our approach is distinctive—verse-by-verse study without skipping the challenging passages, offering theological insight without overwhelming detail, all while creating free resources churches can use. Every book study includes downloadable teacher guides and student materials designed for small groups and Bible classes.

Your support has allowed us to expand our reach while remaining focused on Scripture. Rather than spending 15+ hours weekly on editing, we now direct that time toward research and teaching. Soon, we'll establish a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and explore live streaming to connect more directly with listeners. 

Whether you're listening during your commute, teaching a Bible study using our materials, or simply seeking deeper understanding of Scripture, we invite you to partner with us. Share our resources with friends, consider supporting financially through options on our website, or simply pray for this ministry. Together, we can continue making comprehensive Bible teaching accessible to anyone seeking to understand God's Word more deeply.

Chapters

• 0:00 Ministry Update Introduction
• 1:21 Our Mission and Bible Study Approach
• 4:30 Resources and Materials on Website
• 9:05 Growth and Global Reach
• 14:32 Nonprofit Status and Support Options
• 21:55 Future Plans and Getting Involved

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Today on Reasoning Through the Bible, we're going to do a ministry update. We do these maybe once or twice a year, so a little bit of informal and just kind of opening up behind the scenes, letting you know what Steve and I are doing. We early on decided to save these and do them like once or twice a year, rather than having little bits of them scattered amongst all of our regular programs. But in doing so, I think it gives a good chance to just do regular Bible study and they don't have to listen to us talk about ourselves, which is really not the important part. The important part is the Word of God. So we're going to do a quite unscripted, off-the-cuff ministry update here. Usually we plan these, but we're just off-the-cuff. So, steve, how are things going?

Speaker 2: 0:49

Things are actually going pretty good, and I think one of the first things we want to do, we want to thank for the supporters that are providing support to our ministry in both viewership and listening, and also in monetary support. We appreciate it very much. It's allowed us to do some things that we haven't been able to do in the past, and so we're thankful for that and we want to acknowledge your support and thank you very much for it right off the bat.

Speaker 1: 1:19

Just a reminder of what we do. Our main goal we thought from the very beginning was that there's a lot of people in churches that want and desire deeper Bible study and there's also people out there that eat, sleep and breathe theology, that need some regular verse-by-verse Bible study. And we thought we'd sort of marry the two and start at the level of where the average church person is and then get you up to the point where you can really know what is in the passages and to know some things about theology, but without doing it with tedious detail. So we introduce some of the theological topics and then move on, but we also answer a few apologetic topics as we go along and in doing so we've managed to produce some quite detailed Bible studies. I think we're on somewhere in the neighborhood of 550 of them that we've done in the three and a half years we've been doing this. We still do at this point three a week, but we hope they're going to be daily at some point, maybe after we're dead, but they'll get there. But what we're doing is in that three and a half years and 550 or so programs, we've gotten 22% of the Bible done. 50 or so programs we've gotten 22% of the Bible done. So, steve, we still got our work cut out for us.

Speaker 1: 2:52

We do chapter one, verse one, down to the last chapter, last verse, and along the way we produce and again, this is really part of our ministry goals is to provide for churches and for small group Bible studies, free materials Free, and there'll be some things that we'll have that we may have to charge for simply because we have to pay for, but the things that we can, we provide either free or very low cost, and the general idea is that there's churches out there that need good teachers and we've taught in churches long enough to where we know how it works.

Speaker 1: 3:32

There's people that, oh, you're free this Sunday morning, you teach, and the person is sweaty palms and you know what do I do? How do I teach? Well, if someone can listen to our audio or watch our video and we have free teacher lesson plans that you can just follow along, the lesson plans that go along with the recorded ones that we teach then they can teach a pretty good class. And we're also going to end up with, for each of the books we do, student materials that we'll offer, and so that's really our goal is to be able to offer churches materials for teacher training and for lesson plans that teachers can follow along and have an example in our recorded sessions that they can teach the Bible in a detailed way.

Speaker 2: 4:26

So, glenn, can I show them real quick how they can go find our resources? By all means, all right. So I'm switching over here to our website and for the people that are listening to us at the website is reasoningthroughthebiblecom, and at the very top of the menu items there you will see resource page. When you click on that resource page you can scroll down and you will see the different books that we have done and you'll see the different leadership guides or study guides that we have or lesson plans for each of the books that we have done. And as we continue to work on these, then we're getting a little bit more organized as to them all being of the same type of format. We're also working on another format for curriculum. But, just as an example, if you do the James Leader Guide, it guides you through so that you can assist and teach the book of James to a class of people, and there is a corresponding student guide that a student can go on their own, or you as a leader can have them download the student guide and go through it, and it's based off of either watching or listening to our lessons. You don't have to do that, but it's based off of that to help be able to bring everybody together so that when you come into a small group you're able to know what's been taught in the lesson and et cetera.

Speaker 2: 6:03

And then one other area that I just want to show real quick if you go back out to our page here, you'll see on this drop down menu, where it says episode series, you have Bible book series, topical series and doctrinal, and this is where you can find at a simple click, all the books, for example, and topics and doctrinal series that we have done.

Speaker 2: 6:29

So if you want to go through any of the books that we've done, you just scroll down and we have them listed here as to what we're doing, and then you can just click on the book itself and, as you see at the very top, you can just listen to each one of the sessions on their own or you can go through the videos. We have them in a playlist if we have made a video for them and then we also have the various lessons individually that you can click on and that you can listen to those, and within that you have the audio and you have the video as well. So we encourage you to go out and go to our website, go to our resource page, look and see what we have and also, if you just want to study books in their completeness that we've already done there's a way that you can be able to do that.

Speaker 1: 7:25

The website ReasoningThroughTheBiblecom is really the best place to go to have our materials organized. The audio systems that play the audio versions are good, but they just tend to pile all 500, 600 of them in a row and it's really hard if you want to go find Genesis or find Matthew. It's really hard. They're just not organized well. Youtube for the video is organized a little better in the sense that there's a YouTube playlist for these things, but our website, reasoningthroughthebiblecom, is really the place where it's easier to find what we do and, again, what we're. Our goal is so that any church out there, for either zero money or very low cost, can watch all our materials, can download a teacher lesson plan for any of the books and hopefully a student guide as well to where, oh, we want to teach Colossians or we want to teach Galatians or we want to teach Matthew. Oh, I can find it on the website and here's the teacher materials and here's the lesson plan for next week. I can watch the audio or listen to the video. And watch the audio or listen to the video or the other way around, and we can learn. The teachers that need training can learn that. That's what we're really here for is to provide and we record our material, steve, where it's purposely doesn't mention a lot of like current issue things. So these things will be good. Hopefully, 300 years from now they'll still be able to to download these things and use them. From now they'll still be able to download these things and use them. So again, we're I forget how many books, but it's about 22% of the way through the Bible. When you hear this, we'll have just finished Mark and we're about to do Ezekiel and that'll be a lot of fun.

Speaker 1: 9:21

We thank those that have been giving us money. Just FYI, steve and I have not taken any money out of this. When we first started we said, hey, it'd be really cool to earn a salary on this thing, but so far it's never allowed that. There's nothing sinful about taking money out of a ministry. We've been working 40 or plus hours a week for three and a half years now and we've not taken not one cent out of this ministry, simply because there's just not that much coming in and everything that does come in goes out to four. We've gotten enough now to where we're able to hire an editor. The video editing was taking up quite a bit of time and there's actually to do three lessons a week, three roughly half-hour lessons a week.

Speaker 1: 10:08

To do justice to the Word of God takes quite a bit of time, and we still teach at our churches too. And so there's. I mean, we're spending many hours a week in the Word of God, not trying to toot our own horn. I'm just saying that's what it takes to produce this. So there's quite a lot of work going on in the background and we trust that it shows. We really would like to hear from people just kind of hey, we're out here listening, kind of, let us know what you get from it, because we tend to hear from the critics, the atheists and the skeptics tend to send us stuff. But it's really, really encouraging when somebody says, hey, we were able to use this and it helped me learn something about the word of God.

Speaker 2: 10:55

And it has seemed a little bit that whenever we get those encouragement from an individual, that it kind of comes at a time whenever we're not questioning ourselves but we might be a little bit dragging, and we get those responses back from the people that are listening or watching and they've just kind of picked us up and perked us up to know that God is using the material that's out there. So, glenn, what about our growth? Do you have some numbers on as far as our growth? What are we doing?

Speaker 1: 11:27

Well, I get past 10, I have to take off my shoes, but I'm not really a numbers guy. But I can tell you that typically in the summers the listenership tends to go down a little, simply because people are on the road with their families and kids are out of school and people take vacations. But this year it's been different. The last couple of months in the first part of the summer here the numbers have actually gone up, which is surprising. We've had on the audio side the greatest listenership we've ever had have been in the last couple of months, and the video side on YouTube's ticked up somewhat as well.

Speaker 1: 12:04

I can tell you from just an overall in the little over three years that we've been doing this, we've had people just again, the data we get is different from the audio side to the video side and it's not really apples and oranges kind of data so it's hard to add them together. But on the audio side we've gotten downloads from 128 countries. We've had over 1900 cities that download. That's as far as the data gets given to us. But we see people downloading these things overseas. We've had people in Asia and in Africa and we've had people all over Europe as regular listeners, and so we appreciate that. We'd love to hear from you. If you're out there, just shoot us a note and we also on the video side it's again it's, it's ticked up a bit. What other numbers can we tell them, steve?

Speaker 2: 13:04

Well, one thing I would like to say is what other numbers can we tell them, steve?

Speaker 2: 13:05

Well, one thing I would like to say is that the audio side is a good way if you're on your commute, your commute to work, if you're looking for something other than the radio that you're listening to every morning and you're looking for some way to listen to the word of God being taught, and maybe the station that you're listening to at that particular time of your commute you don't like the teacher that's on the radio.

Speaker 2: 13:34

If you listen to Christian radio or something, it's a good way to listen to our podcast on your either commute to work or coming home from work. And I say it this way is that that's a good way to share it with friends of yours, whenever you introduce it to them and say, hey, you might want to listen to a couple of teachers that I listened to. I listened to them on the way to work, and here's their website. And also you can find them on any podcast platform Apple or Spotify or any of the podcast platforms. Give them a listen, and it's a good way to listen to our podcast as you go back and forth to work.

Speaker 1: 14:17

I can tell you, on the video side, it's really YouTube. That's really the only main channel. That's really the only main channel and we've had, over the course of our YouTube life, over 9,300 hours of watch time. That's happened with our materials, so that's good. That adds up. You know, when people listen to part of it they can't always finish, but over 9,000 hours of people listening to the Word of God being taught. So praise God for that, a lot more than Steve and I in our class at church.

Speaker 2: 14:49

I was just fixing to say that that's where one way that we see the Lord blessing this ministry is that it's reaching out to these countries and these cities, and the watch hours that are there is a lot further than what we would have in just teaching our classes at our local churches. We enjoy doing that, but we see here what God has been able to do and take through this, and so whenever you support our ministry, just know that you're supporting the God's word going out to the world, the God's word going out to the world. And I should also say that the person that we have that's editing our videos and audio there. It's a ministry in itself. They only do other Christian editing. So whenever you support us to support them, you're supporting that Christian ministry as well.

Speaker 1: 15:44

So just a summary of the what we've done. I'm not sure I could, off the top of my head, list all the books we've done, but I know besides the Bible books and again 22% of the Bible's complete we've done topical sessions on slavery. We've got one coming out very soon here on several sessions on evaluation of reformed theology that's coming up. We had a quite well-received interview with a lady that had an exercise addiction that came out of that and came to Christ. We're about to have one with another person that had a heart transplant. That was really had. Their life changed when that happened.

Speaker 1: 16:28

So we do a few of those but that's always sort of. As far as numbers of our sessions, those are always always going to be a minority, but it's good to hear testimonies from people sometimes. We're always going to have the vast majority of what we do is going to be turned to chapter one, verse one, and then we'll do verse two and we're always going to have that as the main thrust of what we do, simply because that's the greatest need in the world.

Speaker 2: 16:54

We've also. We're always working on the set that we have here. We recently painted the background, which gives a little bit more of a contrast between us.

Speaker 1: 17:04

We're not blending into the wall that we had back there before Our skin color was the same color as the wall and if we sat real, still nobody could see us.

Speaker 2: 17:12

Yeah, so we're always trying to improve that. We're going to do live streams. That's something that we want to get into this year and we're investigating how to actually do that and what night or what day or what time of the day that we would want to do it, how often we would want to do it. But we're going to delve into those live streams and that will also be a way to be able to interact with us on a real-time basis through joining those live streams and through the chat.

Speaker 1: 17:47

We could use your donations. Again, thank you, thank you, thank you for those that have felt leading to give us money. It's quite needed. It's been able to free up hours of our time every week that we were spending editing and able to free up that time and we now pay someone to do the editing and that frees up our time for Bible study and that's not any kind of self-righteousness, it really was the case. We were spending 15 hours or more average every week editing and we can spend that now focused on the Word of God.

Speaker 1: 18:25

The other thing that's happened is reasoning through the Bible really started out as just Steve and I and we never were really focused on building an organization. I mean, our secular careers over the years was in management and we could build an organization. That's not a challenge. It just wasn't what we were trying to do. We're not trying to build a legacy to Glenn and Steve or build some sort of a fiefdom here of an organization. What we really wanted to do was spend our time getting out the things that we'd learned over our course of our Christian life and get that in the hands of other people, so that because we'd seen churches that just needed good teachers and we thought we could help with that. So that's where we spent the vast majority of our energy over the last three and a half years.

Speaker 1: 19:22

And we have people ask us why don't you do this and why don't you do that? And it says well, I'm kind of in the middle of chapter four here, and so we're spending our time studying and is the building an organization comes second, third, fourth. But that said, we have committed just in recent days to we're going to go ahead and move forward with forming a 501c3 nonprofit and we hope to have that in place. Depending on how long all the government paperwork has to happen, we'll have that in place by the end of the year. Hopefully, cross your fingers on that, at least pray to the Lord that that'll come through, because we have had some people ask. But again, it's not because of Steve and I, it's just because of the organization.

Speaker 2: 20:09

And we've had some people saying hey, we could give a little more if it was a nonprofit. Yes, and speaking of that, we now have several ways in order to support us. We initially just started off with PayPal, but now we have a way that you can get through Zelle. We have a way through. Buy Me a Coffee is another way. We're looking into Patreon to be able to start something there.

Speaker 2: 20:35

You can find out all these ways by on our website, just go to the donate button and click on it and you'll see all the different ways that you can be able to support us On the YouTube. We're available now to accept memberships and you can click on that membership and support us that way on YouTube, and we're looking for the ability to be able to give you a little bit more of a value by being a member of our community on YouTube. We're working with that as far as how we're going to be able to do it, but these are all ways that you'll be able to donate to us. We're really looking for individuals to give whatever you can so that we can sustain this going forward and moving forward, because it really has been able to a blessing to us to be able to afford somebody to do the video and audio editing. That's the major expense right now.

Speaker 1: 21:32

We don't have a big organization or a church behind us. There really is just listeners like you that have supported us and, again, every dime of the money that comes in has gone out in terms of services or equipment or fees that we have to pay. That's where all of it has gone up to now.

Speaker 2: 21:54

What else?

Speaker 1: 21:55

We did one, what else?

Speaker 2: 21:57

I just want to say. So the question is do you want to see God's word go out further and greater? That's really the question. If you like this ministry, then consider supporting that, because you can see by the evidence that it is going out worldwide and it is reaching people worldwide. And so, anyway, if you'd like to continue with that or become part of that family, then we would enjoy your monetary support. So like.

Speaker 1: 22:24

Like, for example, there's, there's, there's a software program that was started by Christians that has now gotten into most of the prisons, at least in America. I'm not sure about how many other countries, but there's hundreds of thousands of prisoners that now have electronic tablets in prison and ministries that have the resources can get on that and go out to prisoners. Well, the only ones that are on it now are, like large churches and very well-funded organizations and small organizations like ours. But imagine what would happen if we could get, verse by verse, detailed Bible teaching, little bit of theology and apologetics into the hands of every prisoner in and around the world. I just think that'd be tremendous, but we just don't have the resources to do it.

Speaker 1: 23:21

So with that, we did do one live session. We had a church we went to, spoke to the youth group, did a session where there was some theology and apologetics. That was pretty cool, well received. So we are available for giving live presentations if somebody wants to contact us. So what else? Steve Coming up, we're again about to do Ezekiel, there's a double handful, I guess by now, over the course of what we've done, of special topics, some answering questions, q&a things. If you do have questions. Everybody always has questions. Send them to us. Every so often we compile them together and have a Q&A session.

Speaker 2: 24:03

And you send that to info at reasoningthroughthebiblecom. That's the main email in order to communicate with us Right or any.

Speaker 1: 24:12

Just feedback for us good, bad. Otherwise, just be great to hear from you and kind of out there saying, hey, we're listening and we're praying for you. We would like to have prayer partners.

Speaker 2: 24:24

Again, send it to info I-N-F-O at reasoningthroughthebiblecom, and that's really the update, but we also have a newsletter that goes out once a week. So if you would like to be a member of that newsletter we don't spam people. The way that you get on it is if you do supply us with monetary support and we get your email address, then we will put you on that newsletter. Or if you request to be on the newsletter just to find out what we're doing. It's a very simple one that tells what we're doing that week and some of the few prayer requests that we might have as we go through. But it comes out once a week.

Speaker 1: 25:06

Same.

Speaker 2: 25:06

Thing write to info at Reasoning Through the Bible and say newsletter and we'll add your email to that.

Speaker 1: 25:12

I think there's a way to sign up on the website, is there not?

Speaker 2: 25:14

There is. There is a way to sign up on the website.

Speaker 1: 25:17

You just put in your email address it comes out once a week if I get around to putting it together and sending it out, but it really just has. Hey what's going on this week and a prayer request, and no more often than once a week this week and a prayer request and no more often than once a week.

Speaker 2: 25:35

You know, I guess the last thing would be is that we gave a challenge, at least a couple of years ago, for people that are enjoying the listening to the God's word, verse by verse, to just tell and commit to telling 10 other people during the course of the year about our ministry if you're enjoying it and so we're halfway through this year, but we'd like to give that challenge out again If you're enjoying this ministry, maybe commit to just telling 10 other people about our ministry and how much you enjoy it and ask them to listen. I would say ask them to listen to eight to 10 episodes to get a good feel as far as what we do. But that way we saw some increase from people doing that. We know that you did that in the past. We'd appreciate if you do it again. So anything else, I think that's it, any, dad jokes.

Speaker 1: 26:30

Yeah, as a matter of fact, why did the scarecrow win an award? I don't know. He was outstanding in his field. What kind of tea do you drink with the queen? I don't know, royal tea. Oh man, why couldn't the bicycle stand up on its own? It was too tired. I guess I better quit. I think we need more of that, but less of these jokes. So we'll let you go. Please pray for us and keep watching us as we continue to reason through the Bible.

Speaker 2: 27:05

As always, may the Lord bless you and keep you. Thank you so much for watching and listening.