You know, it's one thing to be in a position honestly to check a box, marking that "I can read," and quite another to read well. Early on, I decided my primary task as a teacher, while teaching students *how to think*, was to teach students *how to read*. That meant mostly that I worked at teaching them how to read theology, but it also meant that I worked at teaching them how to read philosophy, film, literature, history, and anything else I had a chance to work on. It's not easy to learn to read any of those genres of texts—and learning how to read one of those genres is by no means learning how to read any of the others.
Learning to read the Bible is learning a rather unique craft. It's like reading the body language of a dog that has strayed into your yard or a lover's tears or the solitary laughter of a theatergoer in an otherwise quiet theater or the smell of a change of the wind or sheet music—or rather all of that at once. Although formal literacy rates in America are high, pollsters announce that less than 100,000,000 Americans read "literature." My guess is that few of those read really good literature and even fewer of them read very well what they do read. And "literature," in certain important respects, is quite different from "the Bible," which is only seldom read even by most of the 39% of Americans who say (!) they've read it a few times in the last year.
So, I'm thinking that it might be good for churchy folks like me to begin approaching congregations as if they were actually only semi-literate, if not altogether il-literate, unable to read any written text. That's different from approaching congregations as if they were stupid. Most illiterate people aren't stupid. Some of them are really smart, geniuses, even. So, maybe what a church is to do is to stop imagining congregations as poised to read the Bible (or anything else), but also to stop imagining them as dull witted. It would be good to see people start reading the Bible, but not as good as seeing people start following the gospel. I'll take a faithful illiterate church member over an unfaithful literate one, any day.
Still, the task to get churchgoers to read the Bible is not entirely different from getting university students to read Catherine Mowry LaCugna or Søren Kierkegaard. These are different audiences, of course, and different texts. Further, the external motivators are different (congregants may be worried about the afterlife, but they're not worried about getting into grad school or losing a scholarship).