When I was a child, Sunday school was full of little challenges.

Who could find the Bible reference first? Who knew where the Minor Prophets were? Who could get from Genesis to Jude without using the contents page!

And then there were little sayings to help us remember the order of books.

“God Eats Pink Custard” was the one I could never forget. It helped us remember the order of Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians. There were lots of others too, all designed to help us build a mental map of the Bible and the order of the books.

Today, things are rather different.

Most of us simply open a Bible app, tap the book we want, and we’re there in seconds. In many ways that’s wonderful. We carry dozens of translations in our pocket, we can search for a phrase instantly, and Scripture has probably never been more accessible in the West.

It has also removed one of those rather unnecessary ways Christians used to judge one another. You can’t tell how “spiritual” someone is by how worn their Bible looks, and nobody knows whether you found Habakkuk in two seconds or twenty!

But it does make me wonder.

Does it actually matter whether we know where the books of the Bible are? Is this simply nostalgia from someone getting older, or is something more important happening?

I was reading recently about research suggesting that physical books and digital reading don’t always engage our brains in the same way. Its called the “screen inferiority effect”

Physical books help us build a mental picture of where information lives. We remember not just the words, but where they were on the page, roughly how far through the book they appeared, and how ideas connect together. Digital reading is efficient, but it often encourages us to search for isolated passages rather than develop a sense of the whole.

I wonder whether our Bible reading has become a bit like that.

Instead of knowing that Colossians follows Philippians, or having a feel for how the prophets fit together, we increasingly jump from one verse to another through a search box. We find exactly what we need, but perhaps we lose something of the wider story.

Of course, the goal has never been to win the Sunday school race to find Romans first. The goal is to know Christ. A Bible app can be every bit as helpful as a Bible if it leads us into God’s Word.

But perhaps physical Bibles still have something to teach us.

Perhaps slowly turning pages, seeing passages in their context, scribbling notes in the margin and becoming familiar with the shape of Scripture forms us in ways we don’t always notice.

So I’m not about to throw away my Bible app. I use it every day.

But I do wonder whether, we should encourage each other to pick up a physical Bible more, get slightly lost in the pages, and maybe even remembering that…

God Eats Pink Custard.