The Reformation brought Bibles into the hands of everyday people (so good!), but did we then lose the art of listening to Scripture? We’re joined with Jonathan Bailey this week to talk about this. He and his brother are releasing Dwell, a new smartphone app that makes listening to Scripture easy and beautiful.

 

Who is Our Guest?

Jonathan R. Bailey is a Serial Entrepreneur and serves in the area of Christian Spiritual Formation. He is Co-founder at Dwell, which is a forthcoming app that is completely reimagining Scripture listening. The app seeks to help Christians worldwide cultivate a habit of listening to the most important book in history: the Bible.

Episode Links

The Dwell app comes out at the end of this month (June 2018)! Make sure to check out the main site for more.

 

 

Also, check out jonathanrbailey.com for more from Jonathan.

 

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Isaac:

With me today is Jonathan Bailey. Jonathan is a serial entrepreneur, which is awesome, and serves in the area of Christian spiritual formation. It’s great to have you with us today, Jonathan.

Jonathan:

Hey, thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it.

Isaac:

Some of us, and including myself, we don’t know you. Perhaps, share your brief testimony so we can just know you a bit more.

Jonathan:

Yeah, sure. Well, I think at my core, I’m someone who’s always loved to create things. My brother and I we’re actually identical twins and so we both get the chance to work together and we’ve created three companies over the last 10 or so years. It’s just something we love to do. We grew up in the North Texas area in Dallas. Just had a chance to really create some really cool products for people, especially focused in the Christian space and the church space. That’s been really great, but we grew up as pastor’s kids. There’s good and bad that comes with that, right?

You know, while I didn’t get to see my dad as much as maybe I wanted to, I did get to enjoy the privileges and responsibilities that came with having this big church sanctuary open to us. So we’d have BB gun wars in the church sanctuary. Our friends would come up and we would terrorize the instruments and have our own personal concert set up on stage and so it was fun, you know? But, my dad started this church out of his house in the early nineties and I think my brother and I had the good fortune to be able to watch him start something from scratch. I think that built in us this entrepreneurial sense like, “Hey, we could do this too,” and so it was like this genesis point for us. We’ve just been starting things I guess ever since.

Isaac:

Yeah, no. That’s awesome. So you say you started these three companies, organizations. Can you share with us what maybe those are?

Jonathan:

Yeah, absolutely. The first one was called gracewaymedia.com which I think now has been renamed into Igniter Media. But it was a place that pastors and church leaders could go to find all types of church and ministry graphics for whether it’s their screen or the service. We started that I think it was early 2000s maybe 2005, 2006 and had a great run with the company. After about six or seven years, we sold it to another great group and then my brother and I start...