Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify | Watch the Video

Have you heard of The National Bible Bee? It’s not just a national competition - it’s also a great way to help kids learn to dig in deep as they study scripture. Bible Bee Director, Brian Mullins, joins us to share how this program benefits kids ages 5-18, whether they plan to compete or simply get involved in one of the many study groups happening around the world this summer.

Thinking of joining the fun? Veritas Press Self-Paced Bible will have a $100 off coupon next week – it is the perfect way to jumpstart your child’s Bible literacy before they join a Bible Bee study group in June!

*Coupon valid March 11-25, 2025 for $100 off all Veritas Press Self-Paced Courses.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again and welcome to another edition of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us Brian Mullins who is the director of the National Bible Bee. Brian, welcome.

Brian Mullins:
Thank you, Marlin. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you today.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, it's great to hear more about the National Bible Bee. I've been aware of it and I've seen videos of kids performing in your national competition, but I don't know a lot about it. Before we get into it, let's hear a little bit about you. What's your family situation, your education, and where has your career been that’s led you to this.

Brian Mullins:
Yeah. So, again, thanks for having me. I have been married to my wife for coming up on 22 years. We've got three boys that keep us busy. I've got one that's a freshman in college now and one in the fourth grade. So we've got a wide range of activities that keep us busy.

Yeah. So, like I said, we're married 22 years. We live in San Antonio, Texas. We've lived here for the past ten years. My background is in ministry. I grew up as a youth pastor's kid. So I've been around ministry my whole life. Went to Bible school.

Marlin Detweiler:
Where did you go to school?

Brian Mullins:
It's a small school called Texas Bible Institute. Just a small, little more of a ministry training center than on the seminary side. But I really got a taste for ministry and a love for ministry from my family and just carried that out. I've been working in full-time ministry since I was 17 years old when I first went to school.

I've done everything from camp coordinator for summer camp to being an assistant pastor, youth pastor, media pastor, technology pastor—all the different roles in local churches. Then I came to work with the Shelby Kennedy Foundation and the National Bible Bee back in 2015 when my family moved to San Antonio.

And I've been with them ever since. So here we are today, a little over ten years later, just loving it, growing with it, and really enjoying getting to work with the families we get to serve.

Marlin Detweiler:
That's wonderful. Tell us a little bit of the background of how the National Bible Bee came about and its purpose.

Brian Mullins:
Yeah. The National Bible Bee was founded in 2009, and it really came about as a way to engage young people around Scripture, centering a love and a passion for the Word of God. We know the truth of God in a constantly changing culture and try to find ways to stoke that, to incentivize young people to engage with Scripture in a meaningful way.

Our namesake, the Shelby Kennedy Foundation, was inspired by a young lady named Shelby Kennedy. She was very young and very passionate about the things of the Lord, particularly scripture memorization. She was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of cancer, and her life really inspired our founders. They wanted that same passion and zeal, even in the face of this horrible diagnosis.

Eventually, the illness claimed her life when she was just 23. They wanted to see that passion that carried her through the suffering she endured. But she did it in such a way that honored God—it really honored God the way she lived her life.

And even in her death. And so we just wanted to see that one small pebble, as we like to talk about that analogy, but one small pebble going to creep into a creek has a lot of ripple effects, and her life really has had that impact because it inspired not only our founders but thousands of families across the country.

Now, over the last 17 years, to really engage with Scripture, to see the value and the importance of memorizing it and internalizing it so that it can produce roots in our heart but then fruit in our life as well that brings God the glory.

Marlin Detweiler:
Tell us a little bit more about the vision of how it took shape. How did it go from a foundation named after a young girl whose life was cut short by cancer to biblical memorization and a real culmination aspect in a national event?

Brian Mullins:
Yeah. So it really kind of started small, an idea of like, what can we do to incentivize young people to memorize Scripture? And we know that it's important, but we know that lots of people, adults, kids, we like incentives, and things are sometimes a little bit easier to get the ball rolling when there's incentive.

And so it was kind of just started with the idea of like, hey, we can have a small prize to incentivize kids at the national level. And so really, the thing that sort of spurred it was seeing how God's Word carried Shelby and then trying to take that same idea and saying, hey, if we can get as much Scripture as possible into the hearts and minds of kids, then we can see a transformation not only in their lives and their family's lives but in our culture.

You know, that's really what we're trying to do is we know God's Word is truth, and truth changes culture and truth impacts every area of our lives. And so, you know, we sort of over the years, it's been a sort of an evolution of sorts, right, from a sort of a small beginning where we had a couple thousand people to where this last year with 13 plus thousand young people all across the country, there were 11 countries outside of the US to participate.

So it's really just grown over the years. And from a few little bits of Scripture memory to now, as you may or may not know, we sort of develop a full curriculum that sort of ties all into memory and study and everything, and it has ended up to where we've got now 375 of these super high-achieving young people that come to our national competition every year, and they just showcase how much they've learned and memorized and studied Scripture. So it's been a cool journey to watch that grow over the years.

Marlin Detweiler:
This is a question that you sort of answered already, but maybe with some bullet points. How would you describe the purpose and then the goals of the National Bible Bee?

Brian Mullins:
Yeah. So really our purpose is to get kids excited about the Bible. If I can just plainly state it, we want kids, young people, we serve ages five all the way up to 18. That's our primary focus is children. And of course, there's collateral influence with the families because the families are the ones that have to get their kids involved.

But our purpose is really just to get them excited and engaged in Scripture. And one of the ways that we do that is we try to make it exciting for them. And so in the Bible study tools that we develop, we put out a curriculum each year that's centered around a particular portion of Scripture.

And the goal with that is to help them to learn how to study the Bible on their own. And that's really one of our goals. If you visit our website, we focus a lot on Bible literacy. And we know just from basic observation, you can see that there's a lot of biblically illiterate people, even those that would say that they're Christian, maybe they attend church regularly.

There's still a high level of biblical illiteracy. And so one of the things we want to do is to equip young people to be able to study the Bible on their own and teach them and give them the tools that they need to be able to read the Bible on their own, to study it, to understand it, and to be able to parse through what Scripture is saying and teaching to us.

And so that's sort of what our curriculum, it's a lot different than a lot of Bible studies. The Bible study might be around a topic and it might just give you ideas or sort of thoughts or takeaways. What we really focus on, and one of our key objectives, is to teach kids tools to know how to look up things in the original languages, to know how to identify key words.

We use an inductive method. And so we just try to get them from a very young age, and they're excited about it and feeling competent. And then along with that is the memory portion of it. We study a portion of Scripture, but then we also memorize in the context of what we're studying.

Marlin Detweiler:

You know, you're surprising me in a really good way with that answer. My sense of the National Bible Bee was that it was virtually entirely about memorization, which, of course, is a good thing. But it's not everything. And I certainly understand one of the things that I've commented frequently in the last probably 5 to 10 years. We've been involved in classical Christian education since the early 90s, really 1992.

At that point in time, there had not been the growth of churches that were operating in more of a contemporary worship mindset and had eliminated Sunday school from their weekend activity. I grew up in a small church. The first hour was Sunday school. It was age-divided where children were with other children near their same age.

We were learning the biblical narrative. We were learning biblical stories. We were reading the Bible. We were coming to understand the content of the Bible, and that, I think, by definition, is biblical literacy. But in a very real way, with the disappearance of Sunday school, we've had a disappearance of the level of biblical literacy that existed.

Well, that's probably roughly 60 years ago. Do you have any sense of why that happened? And talk to us then about how you’re doing something about it?

Brian Mullins:
Yeah, I would agree with you. I think there's been, for lack of a better word, a streamlining of programing and more centering around, obviously, lots of churches still do Sunday School. But churches that we're seeing obviously see the surge of megachurches, where everything is sort of efficient and streamlined and quick and in and out.

This is painting with a broad brush, but there seems to be a lesser focus on, as you said, sort of getting in the trenches and really understanding what's in the Bible. What is the metanarrative of the Bible? How do you understand timelines? So even just really some basics.

I'm not sure what would contribute to that trend. But I think that it's certainly an alarming thing. Because you can have adults that have been in church for an entire generation that are essentially biblically illiterate, right? Even knowing some of the major characters in the Bible.

Marlin Detweiler:
But even that was far less prevalent 50 years ago.

Brian Mullins:
For sure. For sure. Yeah. And I think a general sense of streamlining, for lack of a better word, where we're focused more on in-and-out things being slick, things being smooth, as opposed to, this is what we do. This is part of our training. By and large, a lot of the church, big C Church, has offloaded some of the things that maybe were more nitty-gritty, more the trenches, and gone more towards a big corporate feel.

And you do lose that small group, age-appropriate setting. We're learning on our level, we're learning about things that are age-appropriate. And as we grow, that breadth of what we're covering grows. You do lose that with some of the more modern programing churches have adopted. And so one of the things that we really focus on is getting kids, like I said, comfortable, familiar, and excited about what is in Scripture.

I mean, you read the Bible, and it's filled with amazing stories. It's filled with amazing things that God did through the lives of His people from creation all the way to the New Testament church. And it's very exciting. It's an engaging book. But sometimes, for whatever reason, there's this idea that it's not.

And so one of the things that we try to do is take whatever portion of Scripture that we are studying for that summer because it's an annual cycle for us. Whatever we're studying that summer, for instance, our theme last year was truth, and we studied the latter part of the book of John. We normally take six or eight chapters and dive into it pretty deep.

And what we do for our approach is at an age level. We have different divisions. We have some that are what we call beginners, and those are ages five and six. They have a curriculum just for them. And each group, five or six.

Marlin Detweiler:
You're talking about really Bible study, reading the Bible, understanding its narrative. And as students get older, of course, understanding its teaching and theology, right?

Brian Mullins:
That's the goal. Even with five- and six-year-olds, they can grab a whole lot more than we give them credit for. What we do is obviously scaled down. You're not going to teach an 18-year-old and a five-year-old the same things in the same way. So we adapt it for their age and give them more activities, more hands-on things.

It might be a coloring activity and then writing out copy work of their memorization for that day and then connecting the two. What do we take away in one sentence? We call it a one-sentence sermon. What do I learn from this?

Of course, as they get older, we adapt it. By the senior level, any adult would benefit from going through one of our senior-level curriculums. That's for ages 15 to 18, but any adult in any church across the country would benefit from it. By that time, we're taking them through every step. We're reading our text, reading through the text, underlining, and observing.

Then we're going through all the steps of inductive study. At the end, we're arriving at conclusions and applications for our life. We're really trying to do that in an age-appropriate way—warming them up at a young age. As they build through the program, they’re really getting a deep and methodical study. By the time they complete our program, they will have had ten years of studying in a very focused approach.

Not only will they have studied it, but they would have added those tools to their tool belt. They know how to use a concordance, how to use a Bible dictionary, how to go back and look up things in the original language, and how to parse through in a way that is true to what the text is trying to say and communicate to us.

That’s important to us—not just telling them something, but teaching them how to mine that truth for themselves.

Marlin Detweiler:
That's wonderful. That is so much more and complementary to memorization. How does the memorization element connect to the study portion?

Brian Mullins:
In a similar way, when we publish the curriculum every May, they’re studying the broader passage. Within that, we pull out certain key verses as their memory passages. We start small. The young ones might have five verses—or eight since it’s an eight-week study.

A five-year-old might memorize eight verses. They’re memorizing part of what they’re studying in context. Our goal is never just rote memorization. There’s nothing wrong with rote memorization—it’s a good discipline, it works your mind. But that’s not our goal.

We want them to understand, as they’re memorizing, the context in which it was written and given to us. That scales up from, say, eight verses for a beginner to a senior who might have up to 60 or 65 verses, all within the context of what they’re studying.

And so it might not be pulled exactly like so if they're studying John, it might not be pulled all from John. It might be a key cross-reference that sort of is an allusion. But it's all connected to what they're studying.

Marlin Detweiler:
Describe to me your participants. Obviously, they're children 5 to 18 years old. From what traditions and backgrounds do they come? Talk to me a little bit about, in business terms, on social media and on marketplace things like websites. We talk about your personas. Who are the personas that participate in the National Bible Bee?

Brian Mullins:
Well, I would say the most common responses we get from our families are there's a high percentage of homeschool families because I think there's a lot of factors that contribute to that. It used to be that homeschooling was only for Christian conservatives, right? That was who homeschooled.

Marlin Detweiler:
But they're a smaller percentage today than they were 15 years ago.

Brian Mullins:
Right. And I think, obviously, there are a lot of reasons for that in the public school system. So there are a lot of reasons that contribute to that. I would say that we probably have 60 to 70% of our base as homeschoolers. Some version of homeschooling, whether it's completely at home or co-ops or different things. That's probably a pretty good percentage. As we've grown in awareness,

Bible Bee is still relatively unknown to the public, but as we've grown over the years, that's shifted. We've got people that participate from everything from homeschool to full-on public schools. They're in public school and carving out their schedule to be involved in Bible Bee during the summer and even throughout the national competition that ends up in the fall.

So it's really all over the place. But I would say our main persona would be homeschooling families that are looking for a way to either use our curriculum as their Bible curriculum or as a supplement to what they're already doing. Then through the summer, because our program happens in the summertime,

So it's a great way to lock in for the summer and give them something that's not necessarily full-blown like they might study during the year. This could be done between 20 and 40 minutes a day, but it's still something that keeps kids sharp, focused, and stoking the spiritual part of their lives throughout the summer.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Interesting. Are there programs that are built for Christian schools to take hold of and bring into the school, either curricular or extracurricular?

Brian Mullins:
At this point, we do have some that have adopted what we do. We put out our curriculum, which is eight weeks—seven weeks of instruction and one week of review. The length is because of the summer, but we give families ten weeks to do it.

So we have had some Christian schools express interest in making this part of their Bible curriculum for one quarter and implementing it over nine weeks.

Marlin Detweiler:
So it comes as a curricular piece for a portion of the year.

Brian Mullins:
Yes, and the curriculum is flexible enough for them to use and adapt. We would love to develop it further with lesson plans, teacher guides, and more structured content. We haven't quite reached that point yet, but we'd love to see that happen.

It's already being adopted by some go-getters—teachers or administrators who can easily adapt it. Also, in Sunday schools and small church groups, it's common for people to request multiple copies. Last year, our theme was "Truth," and the year before, it was "Believe."

And he would love to use it a small group and go through it throughout the summer. And so there's it's we it's built in such a way that's obviously focused on kids for a specific time frame, leading them towards a specific sort of conclusions at the end in terms of like the competition. But it's it's adaptable enough that lots of people use it. It's flexible enough.

Marlin Detweiler:
You alluded to an annual program. How many cycles do you have?

Brian Mullins:
We have one cycle every year.

Marlin Detweiler:
Do you have eight and you repeat on the ninth year starting over? How many do you have like that?

Brian Mullins:
Good question. Right now I believe I think we have seven cycles completed right now. Or maybe it's I think this is going to be our eighth cycle that will be completing. And so we're constantly evaluating that, like, do we write a brand new curriculum or do we repeat obviously, you know, there's different factors that contribute to that.

But right now we the last two, like last year's truth and the one before that, those were in the book of John that were actually rehashed and revamped from the inductive model that we used way, way early on into a more common, current format. Everything's, you know, full color. Back in our early days, it was like, hey, just get it done. And, you know, so everything was pretty rudimentary.

Marlin Detweiler:
So color printing was expensive, a lot more expensive today relative to black and white.

Brian Mullins:
Exactly, exactly. So yeah, we're constantly evaluating that. But, I'm hopeful to get, you know, a few more years so that, you know, you could have a full ten year cycle. Yeah. Before anybody repeats.

Marlin Detweiler:
It makes sense. Tell us about your annual calendar. What happens when that, gets repeated every year?

Brian Mullins:
Yeah. So everything kicks off for us in - this year it's in March with our host registration. Every year we we ask for holding that.

Marlin Detweiler:
We're recording this in March, and it will probably be released this month too.

Brian Mullins:
Yeah just this past Saturday, our host registration opened. So, I think we've got nearly 100 hosts that signed up in the first weekend, which is fantastic. A goal this year is for 500 hosts. And these are volunteers from, everything from parents to, pastors, youth pastors, kids, pastors, elderly couples that are retired and they just want to invest in the next generation.

I mean, we've got hosts from all over the country. I think in pretty much every state there might be, like Vermont, that we didn't have a host, but I think we had a host in every state last year except for maybe 1 or 2. We had over 350 hosts. And what these folks do is they get together and they get a group, they open their home or their church or a local park or a rec center, and they invite kids that have signed up for the summer to them, to their home or to their church or whatever.

Marlin Detweiler:
And they these are people that are going to have the eight weeks of meetings going through the curriculum, with a range of kids. That's from 5 to 18 years old. And they'll segment. I assume, as is appropriate.

Brian Mullins:
Yep. And we leave it open to it's pretty flexible, right. Like we try to make the job as easy as possible anytime someone's willing to give their time and energy during the summer to a group of kids, we'll make it as easy as possible. So we're very flexible on what every host group looks a little bit different.

But yeah, these people facilitate that. And like I said, we had 350 of them last summer. We're shooting for 500 this summer. So that's the phase we're in right now. So we're recruiting hosts. And then in April, the participant registration. So the kids, the actual kids, that registration will open up and it'll run from April to the end of May.

And we'll sign up kids from, like I said, all over the country, every single state and 10 or 12 countries from around the world will participate. And then come June 1st, that is when the actual study starts. So we'll mail everybody their materials, they'll get their stuff in hand, and they'll go through the eight-week curriculum and they'll do that through the summer.

Marlin Detweiler:
Now are all the eight weeks of meetings, which would presumably be June and July, maybe into August a bit. Are all of those in-person meetings? Are there any groups that have online participation?

Brian Mullins:
There is. It's a mix. And it depends again on the host. Some of the hosts are more comfortable with technology and so they're happy to host things on Zoom. Of course, one of the challenges with that is you've got a five-year-old maybe, or an eight-year-old and an 18-year-old online.

There's some challenges with that in segmenting it and making it accessible and easy on their level. But it is a mix. There's lots that prefer to do in person, and they might not meet every single week, they might meet every other week, or they might meet four or five times throughout the year.

And again, that sort of flexibility is built in so that people don't feel like, well, I can't do this because I can't meet this week. We try to give them that flexibility and say, hey, we just really want you to meet at least three times throughout the summer so that you're checking in, you're encouraging, making sure everybody's on track.

Marlin Detweiler:
So it might extend into the startup of the traditional American school year that starts there in late August or September.

Brian Mullins:
Yeah. So we ask them to wrap everything up by the second week in August. And the reason for that is because we do qualify people for the competition in mid-August. At the end of the summer, we have what we call the qualifying test, and everyone that wants to is included. There's no extra fee. If you register for the summer, you get access to all of the stuff, but you also get a chance to take this test.

You don't have to have done a certain level or anything like that. If you registered, you get to take the test, and some of the families will use it as a benchmark. How much did I learn? What did I retain? And then some are obviously looking like, hey, I want to compete at the national level.

So we ask the hosts to wrap it up by mid-August. And it culminates with the Proclaim Day, as we call it. Basically, they gather their group, they invite their community, and every kid gets up to recite at least one of their verses publicly. We think that's important for them to proclaim the word publicly and not just privately.

That kind of ties the bow on the summer. And those that want to test can take that test and move to the next phase.

Marlin Detweiler:
So the testing then qualifies people for the national competition.

Brian Mullins:
That's correct.

Marlin Detweiler:
Tell us about the national competition. And when does that happen? How does it happen?

Brian Mullins:
So out of the group of 13,000 plus last summer, we qualify the top 120 in each age division. And they're invited. So you have 127 to 10, 11 to 14, and then 15 to 18 years old. Those are the divisions.

Marlin Detweiler:
So you had 360 out of it. So you're roughly 30% now, 3% of the population that came to the national competition.

Brian Mullins:
Yeah, it's a high bar. You know, it's hard to get in there.

Marlin Detweiler:
Oh, it's a high bar, but then you've got in one location a lot of kids that are also competing. That's a lot of judging.

Brian Mullins:
It's a lot of judging. It is quite an undertaking. But, you know, again, like with everything else over the years, we've gotten some pretty good systems in place to where it feels like it's a well-oiled machine at this point. And that has not always been the case. But thankfully, we've grown and adapted over the years.

Yeah, we've got 375 kids, and those kids on day one of the competition, they're all competing. They're all reciting on day one.

Marlin Detweiler:
Of the national competition.

Brian Mullins:
It moves from year to year. And so we try to be in different parts of the country. We've had it here in San Antonio multiple years, obviously out of convenience for us. We've had it in North Carolina. Last year, we had it in Orlando, Florida. This coming year, we're going to be in Sandusky, Ohio at the Kalahari.

Marlin Detweiler:
There's the park there.

Brian Mullins:
Yeah, yeah. Yep.

Marlin Detweiler:
So the rollercoasters, the kids like that.

Brian Mullins:
Yeah, yeah. Lots to do out there. And so it's always fun to move it around. Of course, we have participation from all over the country. We don't really go too far west, but we try to stick somewhere in the middle. One year, we hosted at the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, I think is the name.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Northern Kentucky area. Cincinnati marketplace, really.

Brian Mullins:
Right. Yep.

Marlin Detweiler:
But it sounds to me, from what you said earlier, you should probably go to Vermont to do one. Yeah.

Brian Mullins:
So we need to get some host uptake there for sure. A little cold in November, though.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Yeah. That's true. You would want a group of people that enjoyed skiing. It's seasonal for that. But anyway, that is really, really cool. I am so encouraged because I have been so concerned to see that the organization, the National Bible Bee, is comprehensively concerned about biblical literacy because I think that, you know, the American education system fell and Christian education started to become a little bit more prevalent as a result.

And then classical Christian education back in the early 90s became a very substantial force. But during those times, we've seen biblical literacy falling on hard times. And it's organizations like yours that I think can do something about that. So thanks for what you're doing.

Brian Mullins:
It's a pleasure to be able to serve. And it's a joy to be able to look and see these kids. Now we've been doing it long enough to where some of the kids that were seven years old when we first started, their kids are now getting to the age where they can participate.

And so just seeing that long-lasting fruit that comes from being grounded in Scripture and having a clear understanding of Scripture and being dedicated to that as a core tenet of your life, it's really a joy to watch that grow into the lives of these families we get to serve.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Well, thank you. And folks, thank you for joining us on another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. We hope to see you next time. Brian, thank you.

Brian Mullins:
Thank you, Marlin. Appreciate it.