In the month of August in the YouVersion Bible app, there’s a clear, unmistakable message about what users are seeking in terms of biblical guidance.
In 33 states, the number one search term was “healing.” In eleven states, the term that appeared the most often was “love”. In the remainder of the states it was a wide variety of terms without a discernible pattern.
However, when that search data is visualized in a map - an interesting pattern begins to develop. We see a solid swatch of blue (searches for "healing") that dominates all of the southern United States. Searches for "healing" also extended upward into New England, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York in the month of August.
But what drove users to seek out healing so heavily last month? There is one apparent answer: the rapid rise in the number of COVID cases that have been steadily rising. To test that, I constructed a simple scatter. Scatter plots are used to determine if there is a relationship between two data points. Here, the horizontal axis shows the number of confirmed COVID cases in each state in August. The vertical axis shows the number of search queries for the term “healing” in that same state.
It’s clear that there’s a positive relationship between states whose people are suffering from a higher prevalence of COVID-19 and search queries for healing in the YouVersion Bible app.
We can also see some significant outliers. California, Texas, and Florida all have high searches for "healing" while experiencing a range of positive COVID cases as a percentage of their population.
When millions of Americans are being infected every month, that means that no person is left unaffected by this global pandemic. It's likely that every person in your local congregation knows someone who has suffered or is suffering with the Coronavirus.
People are hurting. They need comfort...and they are searching for that comfort online. How does that inform the way you shepherd your people?