Why memorize the Bible?
We think the best reason to do so is that Jesus did. When he battled with Satan, he defeated every temptation using words from the Bible. His teaching was full of quotations and allusions to the Old Testament. Even some of his dying words were from the Bible - "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Psalm 22:1).
Jesus lived and breathed the Bible — it shaped all his thinking and acting. The same should be true of all his followers. And at LearnScripture.net our aim is to help people do that.
How it works
You get started by choosing some verses to learn - either from verse sets that other people have created, or individual verses of your choice. You can choose from a selection of different Bible translations.
To help you get the verse into short term memory, you will be prompted to read and recall the verse several times. Some words or parts of words in the verse are hidden, forcing your brain to recall what you've just seen, and so strengthening the pathways that store memories.
You will then be tested to see how well it has gone in, and the verse is put away for your next visit. As you return (preferably each day), we calculate a set of verses to revise, so that you see recently learned verses very frequently at first, and then less and less as they move into long term memory. This is borrowed from the Charlotte Mason Scripture Memory System and the principle of spaced repetition. By using your test scores, we can adjust the programme for every verse so that we don't advance it too quickly.
Unique features
There are other Bible memory apps and systems out there, but these things set this one apart:
- Ease of use: You just choose the verses to learn (and our verse sets make that easy to do), and the learning interface and dashboard guides you through all the learning and revision you need. It's been used by young children from the beginning, which has helped keep things simple!
- Flexibility: Unlike other systems you may have tried (including the ones that we've gratefully borrowed ideas from!) ours won't punish you for missing a day, or even a week or a month. It won't get confused if it finds you've almost completely forgotten something — it will just adapt. You can spend as much or as little time as you like on it — although there is a recommended program.
- Testing: You have something external testing your progress in an objective way, so you can't fool yourself, and you won't have to keep track of where you are with each verse.
- Availability: Because this is an online service, you can make use of it anywhere that you have an internet connection, from any internet capable device you own (including most recent smart phones as well as desktops running modern browsers), without having to install anything, and you always have the latest updates and access to all our Bible versions.
- Fun social interaction: our points system, leaderboards and badges provide a fun social aspect that really helps with motivation. By joining groups you can compare yourself to people you know, and you can also create verse sets to help a group work on the same thing.
And you can see how your friends are getting on, and leave them comments. There is a huge amount going on!
- Passage learning: Unlike any other system we've seen, we have paid a lot of attention to features for learning extended passages, rather than just single verses.
Cost
LearnScripture.net is entirely free for users, and also runs without any ads or other means of generating revenue. It is run as a volunteer project, not a commercial business, and no-one is paid for working on it.
As such, it depends entirely on donations. Please consider donating if you find the service helpful. This will go towards the hosting costs and other business costs. A yearly donation of about £5 or $5 from a significant fraction of the users would go a long way!
Helping out
LearnScripture.net is in need of people to help maintain and further develop the site. If you have skills with programming or web design, and you are willing to work purely as a volunteer without payment, your contributions would be welcome! The place to start is the LearnScripture.net source code repository.