A couple of weeks ago a co-worker was sitting next to me during a staff small group meeting and he was looking up a scripture passage. Instead of YouVersion (which is a great app and I highly recommend), he was using something different. there was something amazingly refreshing and different about the layout. He told me about it and I downloaded the free “lite” version. It’s the Bible app “Glo.”

If you have a iPad, I highly recommend the app. Here’s the best way I can describe how it is different from all the other Bible apps.

Remember when Google Earth first came out. We were amazed by it and spend hours zooming around the world, looking at our old house from childhood and zipping over to foreign sites you’ve dreamed of visiting. I feel that Glo is similar to that, but with the Bible. It has a very refreshing layout that makes “discovering” the Bible very informative and fun. When you first open up the Bible lens, you see all the book of the Bible in the proper order, but grouped together by genre. You get a little glimpse of the entire Bible all on one page. It looks very much like a periodic table of elements. Each chapter in each book is represented as a white box, so you can visually see how long a book is just by looking at the overview.

Then, as you dive into an actual book, you see an overview of the entire book with major themes and chapter descriptions. It still holds the periodic table look, but with a few words describing the chapters below each chapter box and brackets linking multiple chapters above describing major themes.

Once you dive into an actual chapter, you can read the text in multiple translations, see artwork, photos, maps, videos and virtual tours that may be associated with the passage you are reading as well as add notes or read other people’s notes tagged to that particular passage. It seems that they’ve worked with YouVersion where you can see the notes you’ve made in YouVersion within Glo.

I’m certainly enjoying the app, so be sure to check it out and enjoy discovering the Bible in a new and fresh way.