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What is Our Daily Bread? Many people think they are just a devotional ministry, but they are so much more!

Through their mobile app, podcast, YouTube channel, blog, and yes – the age-old devotional books we all love, they share God’s word and encourage people to be transformed by the Holy Spirit’s guidance. Our Daily Bread CEO, Matt Lucas, joins us on today’s podcast to tell you all about the history of this thriving ministry and where they are going today.

Episode Transcription

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

Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Welcome. Today we have with us Matt Lucas from our Daily Bread Ministries. Matt. Welcome.

Matt Lucas:
Hey. Thank you, Marlin. Glad to be here.

Marlin Detweiler:
It is so good to have you here. Matt is the president and CEO of our Daily Bread, and I have come to understand that our daily bread is more than a printed devotional piece that I find in the narthex of my church –

Matt Lucas:
Like the back of your grandmother's toilet!

Marlin Detweiler:
Ha, well, that's probably true too. But before we do that, Matt, tell us a little bit about yourself, your family, your education, and the things that you've worked in that take you, that brought you to this position.

Matt Lucas:
Yeah. So I've been at our Daily Bread Ministries for three years. Prior to that, I was in Christian higher education, serving as a faculty member and then as the provost, executive vice president and the chancellor at two different institutions. And had a privilege to go to a Christian university. And there I got I really love and passion for the Bible and really understanding the impact God's Word has on us and how it shapes us.

And like a lot of Christian universities, we actually came out with a Bible minor. Yeah. So that kind of birthed this love for scripture that led me into studying literature. So I eventually completed my doctoral program in literature. And so I've been able to marry my love for literature. The Bible, of course, God's Word is different than just any piece of literature, but it is a literary text.

And so it's really bringing literary aspects by literary training to the Bible and really studying and seeing what God's Word has to say to us in the 21st century. So it's been a privilege and excited to be here today, Bread Ministries, when I'm not here. I'm the father of six daughters.

Marlin Detweiler:
Wow.

Matt Lucas:
Yeah. Yeah. That's so a lot of women. Blessed to be.

Marlin Detweiler:
I hope you at least have a male dog!

Matt Lucas:
No. I don’t.

Marlin Detweiler:
Oh, no.

Matt Lucas:
No, I was definitely the odd one out. But I love, love raising girls. My girls love the Lord. Three of them are married one’s about to get married. About to be engaged. We're expecting that to happen any time now. Yeah. Serving the Lord. Involved the church and yeah, we're just. Yeah, it's a privilege and a pleasure to raise kids. And they're all doing what we hope that we want them to do.

Marlin Detweiler:
That's great. So going from being the chancellor of a college to the CEO and president of our daily bread does not seem a normal step. How did that happen?

Matt Lucas:
That's a question I get a lot. The kind of wonder that myself, you know. Three I got to go back to about the young man, in my early, late teen years, early 20s, I wanted to write devotional literature, and I attempted to do that. They were pretty bad. Lacking some maturity, lacking life experience, lacking more Bible knowledge than I really had.

So, you know, fast forward when I was getting ready to leave, Indiana Wesleyan University and step into a new role, I was thinking I was looking for a presidential role at another Christian university.

And I was headhunted for this position here at our Daily Bread Ministry. Said I applied. Partly because I was interested in the ministry. But I was also curious about what it would look like when I made the transition from higher education to something else. I knew that at some point that that might happen. So I was exploring that possibility, and as I stepped into that process, fell in love even more with the ministry and my passion for global work.

As well as Bible engagement and devotional writing from a much younger age kind of coalesced into what I'm doing now. So in some ways it's a surprise. But in a lot of ways there's a lot of overlap between what you're doing in Christian higher education, you know, theological integrity, developing content that actually brings about change in people's lives.

A lot of our content creators, and most people don't realize that we write our own content for the most part. So we're a publisher and a content creator. So in a lot of ways, it's a lot like a university in that our authors and writers have a very faculty bent. I mean, they all have master's degrees or doctoral degrees.

They're trained to be thoughtful, engaged Christians. So you're working with people who are highly educated and have strong opinions – a lot like faculty.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, absolutely. So I, as a young man, remember encountering the little it's probably about three inches by 4.5in booklet that I think had a month's worth of devotional messages in it. Is that so? Am I remembering accurately in those details?

Matt Lucas:
Yeah, that's one version. We started doing that in 1956. That was our first year that we published a devotional, but we started the ministry. Wow. Yeah. In 1938, when we started. So for about 20 years we were doing radio Christian ministry. And that sphere stepped into the devotional space. It's really a way to tie the radio program to people's daily lives.

And then the devotional just, you know, really went viral before viral was a thing. I mean, we were everywhere. We still are. We're all around the world. We've got work that's happening in nearly 200 countries now. We work in nearly 60 languages. And the devotional was still an anchor of what we do. It's not all that we do.

Our mission is to make the life changing wisdom of the Bible understandable and accessible to all. The devotional is one way we do that, and is probably the most famous way. But we're both print, digital. We're multimedia. We do long form film, short form films.

Marlin Detweiler:
Focus for just a moment. So did I understand what you just said? That you were on the radio early on in our Daily Bread. So what was where was that broadcast? Who hosted? What was the essence of the radio work?

Matt Lucas:
Yeah. So it was back in 1938. M.R. DeHaan, the founder of our Daily Bread Ministries, got behind a radio microphone, started teaching the Bible. He was a gifted teacher, famous for his gravelly voice, as people often remember him. And it was just a lot of expository preaching and teaching, working through texts. He was an early adopter of the radio and really kind of.

And then many others followed suit. We kept in radio for a long time. In fact, we still have radio around the world that we're doing, but we quickly moved into television even before that was popular. I believe it was ABC actually paid us to produce content for them. So you can tell that's a long time ago.

Yeah. And yeah. Then we went to print. We got a publishing arm, our own publishing house. And then yeah, we've done a lot of multimedia because we've been in both radio, television and print. We've done a lot of multimedia work, and we still continue to do that today.

Marlin Detweiler:
Okay. So, live and recorded broadcasts have been going on since, goodness, since the inception back in 38. When did the little devotional that I described a moment ago first become available?

Matt Lucas:
Yeah, that's 1956 when we first did it.

Marlin Detweiler:
But you changed.

Matt Lucas:
A lot's changed since then. I'm looking at one right here, right now from 1979. But yeah, it was just incredible to see how God used it because actually, as missionaries and other people went around the world, it often became an anchor for them because that was the only source of Christian literature they had.

So today, I mean, we found we've recently found material in the Himalayas of Pakistan, when the tribal areas were the only known Christian literature to be found there. Prison cell, solitary confinement, possible bedrooms, end of a row. I got a picture from a friend of mine. Sent me a picture of Our Daily Bread at the end of a beach road in Hawaii.

And it's just amazing where God has taken that. How it is used for both sustaining people's Christian faith as well as introducing them to a new scene with Christ. We just recently started tracking our engagement in prisons and digitally, and last year we've seen about almost 7000 people come to faith in Christ through Our Daily Bread material.

And of course, it's the Holy Spirit. We're not taking any credit, but it's been amazing how God has used that. And so we're probably, I got a letter from a prisoner once who said, hey, you're the only thing in this prison that everyone agrees on whether they are the skinheads, the Crips, the Hispanic gangs.

We all read Our Daily Bread. We might not tell everybody that we read it, but we all agree that we can agree on this. So it's interesting to see how we've been able to go to places that have, yeah, we've just been a safe place of truth, both understandable and accessible.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. So as you and your team are strategically considering content, talk to us about how you make decisions for what's going to show up in the devotionals of a given month or season.

Matt Lucas:
So, you know, what's interesting is that we're actually working on our content about nine months ahead of time. Okay. So we've got a nine month leeway. So how do we do that? Well, we've got a stable of writers who will write for us both internal and then people that are writing specifically for us that are contracted.

We have a theological review team and an editorial review process it goes through, making sure that the theology meets our standards, as well as the editorial process meets our quality standards. But really our focus, I mean, that's just one piece, and we've got hundreds of different pieces of product that we're creating all the time. But really, the genesis of our focus is our mission, right?

To make the life changing within the Bible understandable and accessible to all. So we're really focusing right now on creating Bible engagement journeys. We want people to move from one place in their Christian walk deeper into the relationship with Christ. And then we've recently purchased the center for Bible Engagement. So it allows us to do research at the individual level to track how people are growing spiritually.

And so we're using that research to help shape our content as well as being led to we really do try to be led by the Holy Spirit in creating the content that will be whether it's a devotional or a long form book or a number of other series of pieces. Whether it's a video, radio, audio podcast that helps people go on a journey so they can go deeper in the relationship.

So that's what our passion is. It's been the last three years. That's kind of been the focus for us. And in the next couple weeks and months, as people track us on the web, they'll see more and more journeys that help people wherever they are in your spiritual walk, help them go deeper.

Marlin Detweiler:
Okay, so if we were to provide some categories of saying this is Christian education, and I mean that in the Sunday school sense not in the K-12 sense. Or if this were expositional or devotional, you would have your focus primarily in a devotional category, would you not? Or do you not like being pigeonholed that way?

Matt Lucas:
I think we've been pigeonholed that way because the success of the devotional. But we do expository and Bible study as well. So there's a and a lot of it's for free so we can make that available. We haven't done a very good job of communicating that and we've allowed the devotional to shape a lot of our people's understanding of us.

But yeah, I mean, it is true, we have a lot of devotional content but, you know, speaking to your audience. You know, one of the things I would say is when I was the higher education, Christian education. So you'd read the Bible for a textbook. And so I remember as a student and then when I became the provost, which is the academic, I was in charge of all the academic quality for the ministry or for the university.

The conversation was, well, I'm reading the Bible as a textbook and I can't read it devotional or it or that. Our students would say, If I'm reading the Bible for my Bible study, for my, you know, Intro to Bible class, does that count for my devotional as well? I mean, there's this very, you know, 18 year old is very legalism trying to make sense of this.

And I think we can fall into that trap even as you know, but you're Christians, how we approach Scripture, there is a sense in which we are invited into Scripture to know and discern who God is and learn more about him. Our head right? It should be. You know, the mysteries of God are unfathomable. The Bible reveals who that God is, and specifically Jesus Christ.

And the way we discover that is through God's Word. So there's definitely an educational component but if that stays at your head, it doesn't make the 18 inch travel to your heart, then you have a problem. And so I would argue that's a false dichotomy. What you really want is you want your academic passions, your studying of God's Word to be devotional.

And when you're engaging God devotionally, it should change your head. Right? So I think for us, we're always talking about that is kind of like two ends of the spectrum. And you could talk about like a field. And when you take sheep out to the field, you want them to graze across the whole field. And the idea that you're going from one end to the other should be less important.

As you are feeding and you're eating well. So that's kind of our heart's desire. So we want people to engage God's Word, whether it's devotional or intellectually, but it should change, you know, times. Yeah. Right. Yeah. You know, I would say for your audience, I mean, I think, you know, working with homeschool, you know, children and others. And what we have seen is that and the research parents of ours that parents and schools that have developed in their children a pattern of engaging God's Word, not just knowing about it, not knowing, you know, that Moses was the person who met God at burning bush and just knowing those facts, but knowing that God and learning that transformed them and developing that pattern early in their life. Actually has is probably one of the biggest indicators of them being able to maintain their faith later in life.

Marlin Detweiler:
And so that's fully understandable. One of the things that I have observed, Veritas Press, our business started in 1996. Of course, I was involved in all kinds of Christian work prior to that and in my lifetime. One of the things that I've observed is that young people are not learning the narrative, the content, what's in the Bible, the Bible stories the way that they once did, the way that I write. And I was young, and to me, that seems to create a problem then for them to take the content of the Bible and glean its wisdom because they have a lack of context. Are you seeing that as the organization which exists a lot longer than I have, let alone Veritas Press?

Have you seen that happening?

Matt Lucas:
Yeah. So even before our Daily Bread Ministries, you know, when I was the provost and chancellor, I saw for 20 years the lack, the loss of biblical literacy and understanding the narrative of Scripture each year got weaker and weaker. I've been out for five years now, and I still hear people telling me, like, you know, the students seem to be less engaged with Scripture.

Let's, you know, less about the Bible. And I do think in a lot of ways, the seeker friendly church in its attempt to make more engaging, relevant experience, the church has definitely undermined some of that.

Marlin Detweiler:
You mean this other. Let me just make sure we're clear because I think I agree with you. The seeker friendly church has not introduced children to a comprehensive narrative of Scripture. And that is undermining biblical literacy in the younger generations.

Matt Lucas:
Yeah, I think that's one when, you know, and then I think every secret church is like, I think that's a generalization. Yeah. I think another pattern I'm seeing is an emphasis on spiritual formation to the detriment of Bible engagement. And what I mean by that is, I think a lot of children's curriculum I'm seeing now is really heavy and creating it. So forming the child's heart, which I think is important, I think that's critical.

Marlin Detweiler:
Right.

Matt Lucas:
But it's more of a reaction to a Bible, a Sunday school class that was really biblical. You know, biblical centric. And there are times I would say, you know, when I grew up, I grew up in a church where or at least in a church subsection where at times you could begin to think that the Bible was the second person or the fourth person of the Godhead.

And so, you know, I think there was a move that we don't want that is kind of bibliolotry. And so like, how much can I know about the Bible? Right? I mean, so I grew up going to Bible study fellowship as a kid studying, memorizing verses like these are all great, but if that just made me a really smart Christian, but not a changed man, that's a problem.

So I think there's a pendulum swing against some of those excesses. But in typical fashion you go from one extreme to the other, and I think what got lost is, well, what shapes our formation is Scripture. Like we get our formation ideas because we are rooted ourselves in God's Word. And so it's not either or. It's both.

And right now we need a grounding in God's Word that shapes you spiritually. That's around the spiritual formation elements, but you can't have one without the other to really have a truly, you know, changed heart. I like to say this you know, we forget that I was just writing to our team today about this. We forget that people had died for God's Word, right? John Wycliffe, you know, he didn't. His body was exhumed and it burnt after his dead.

Marlin Detweiler:
And that's together. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matt Lucas:
I mean, there was a sense of like, hey, this is so important. I'm willing to die for this or to sacrifice my life for this.

Marlin Detweiler:
His father might have died for it.

Matt Lucas:
Yeah. Martin Luther definitely. Even today, right. There are Christians around the world who would sacrifice a lot if they could just have God's Word completely right. I think of North Korean Christians where it's nearly impossible to have that. So we don't want to lose sight of that, that we have a privilege. But sometimes familiarity breeds contempt.

So we're like, we become overly familiar. Yeah. So I think that's the danger for us in the West is that we sometimes have forgotten, you know, the beauty of God's word and how much it does change us. And because we have access to it and it's on a refrigerator magnets and it's, you know, we've got a Hobby Lobby.

We could buy art with a verse. Well, yeah, but that's not telling us that. That loses the picture of what God's Word actually has to say.

Marlin Detweiler:
It paints the picture as if God is quaint.

Matt Lucas:
Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. And yeah, there are questions that we start with. Is there a God? And if so, what is he like? That leads us into Scripture, where he's told us what he's like and with a myriad, an opportunity to never finish exploring and understanding and that just alone in God's word, it will take more than a lifetime.

Matt Lucas:
Yeah. I think what shapes you. Right. I mean I think getting the narrative arc of Scripture, being able to get the big picture, understanding what's going on and then engage that regularly. So that's not just the heart and not just the head knowledge. Right. So our research is showing that people who engage Scripture four more times a week by reading, reflecting, responding, experience less temptation and more spiritual growth.

Now, we're not saying that that's a magic formula. No, but it is predictive. Like we can see it in the research. And it's across generations, across cultures, across languages and even but it's not across religious texts. So we studied this with the Torah and with the Koran, you don't see the same transformation.

So there is something I mean, we know the Holy Spirit activating God's Word in our heart that does that. So again, I think so often we've lost that discipline. And it doesn’t have to be a discipline in the sense of like, oh, here's this formula, but I want to engage God's Word. I want to know him to functionally to in the sense of the real meaning of the word in a loving relationship.

And this is how I understand it as well as I could put that within the arc of Scripture. So when I read a passage in Isaiah, I understand how that fits within the whole story of the Old Testament, and how that tells us who is going to fulfill that in the New Testament.

Marlin Detweiler:
Prophetic. Realization in the first century. Right.

Matt Lucas:
And the more that we have that as Christians and the more that we can help our, you know, our kids have that head knowledge and that heart knowledge, and then the better they're prepared to deal with the challenges that they face in the 21st century, you're not going to be successful just having a head full of knowledge, right?

But I have family members who know their Bible better than either of us on this phone call. I mean, brilliant, and they've deconstructed their faith. It just they've walked away. Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:
But I now want to apply what attracted me to classical Christian education so much? It was an understanding of a way of learning things that is not only true of how adults learn things but how children are inclined to grow up. And children have a natural attraction to just learning stuff. The content of the Bible in this case, they want to know who, what, where and when they're motivated to do that.

But as you pointed out a couple times in this call already, once just now, that's not enough. But it is a foundation that provides an opportunity for really being able to be moved, devotionally in a deeper, richer relationship, is it not?

Matt Lucas:
But I agree. Well, I mean, I think the dangers of current educational philosophy, at least those that have put process over content, have missed the boat. You can't learn if you don't have something you're actually learning. Again, you swing the pendulum too far the other way, right? So Dewey had some very good points about, hey, really understanding the cognitive processes that go on in educational settings.

And, you know, very pragmatic whether you agree with him or not. But like he started studying the actual educational process, building up Rousseau and others. Great idea. But you got to have content. And then as we become increasingly, I don't know, politicized in our education department, the one thing you can agree on is how not what. Yeah. And I think as Christians we shouldn't sacrifice that.

What, because the what is truth right there. You have to have some truth. Truth with a capital T truth with a lowercase t. Both. You got to have that. And then you can apply that educational psychology in how you go about the learning process. But so I think that's what's missing. And I think the church to its detriment has focused a lot on the how and not always on the what you need both.

So that's another way I look at this, right. That what is the content and the how is the devotional like how do you put those together in a way that actually brings about change?

Marlin Detweiler:
Is there a theological tradition that you use to put up guardrails for what you write and how you write it?

Matt Lucas:
That's a great question because I think because we're in Grand Rapids, Michigan, people have assumed that we are reformed or we come from background or some other denominational background. And I find that interesting. In the early 1930s, he founded denominational church. That was what he called it. So this is before non-denominational was the thing.

He was a groundbreaker. So he came. He's a Dutch, came out of the Dutch Reformed Church, but he was premillennial dispensational in his eschatology. Like he just didn't fit normal categories that we would want to put somebody in. So we've been true to that since our founding. We have been truly un-denominational.

Which I think is more accurate than non-denominational. We have a clear set of what I think our readers and listeners here would say would be a broad evangelical Orthodox conviction. Okay. What is true?

Marlin Detweiler:
That's language that people tend to be able to embrace or at least to understand. Yeah.

Matt Lucas:
So if you looked at us, you mean we have people. So I have people from the Reformed Church, you know, it sounds so Wesleyan man, you know, and then I got the Western saying, hey, you sound so reformed, and I got the Baptist. Amen. You got this whole emphasis on the spiritual guess and holiness.

So you must have Pentecostal and the Pentecostal saying, you sound deep. And so I feel like we found a place that can serve as many people as possible. While putting people back to Jesus without one word to say so. But yeah, we get it from all sides.

Marlin Detweiler:
We've run out of time. But let me just say this summarily. If you've found that you can offend everybody just a little bit, you've probably found the right spot.

Matt Lucas:
Yeah, I agree. I agree.

Marlin Detweiler:
Man. Thank you so much for joining us today. This is really helpful. Our Daily Bread has been a ministerial devotional piece in so many people's lives and so many homes. People my age and much younger all know who you are. Thanks for the work that you all have done.

Matt Lucas:
Yeah. Thanks, Marlin, I appreciate it.

Marlin Detweiler:
It was very good to have you. And folks, thank you for joining us on this episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of Classical Christian Education. We hope to see you next time.