The Archbishop of Canterbury has criticised Anglicans who use Bible readings as a "mental snooze break" to take a quick 40 winks in church.
In what appears to be a comment on his own Church of England, Justin Welby laments the problem of "Biblical illiteracy".
He says: "In some parts of the Anglican Communion - thankfully not all of them - we are caught out by the fact that people don't know their Bibles at all. Perhaps the only time they hear it is when they go to church and they hear it read.
"And as one of my tutors at theological college once said, too often the Bible readings are a mental snooze break where you can just take 40 winks before you get on with the main bit of the service again."
He goes on to praise the Anglican churches in "other" provinces.
He could reasonably be inferred to be referring to churches in places such as Nigeria.
He says: "And I go to other parts of the Anglican Communion where the Bible is taken immensely seriously, where every month a new reading plan comes out for the following month, where tens of thousands, even millions of people, actually read the Bible seriously, week by week, and it has a huge impact on them."
Welby is speaking in a video that is part of a "Bible tool-kit" to help Christians come to know and understand the Bible.
The Bible in the Life of the Church project launched today includes 120 different online articles and guides to the Bible from around around the world.
"I see this project as utterly foundational for our life together. I can hardly stress that enough," says Welby. "It's incredibly exciting." He says the Bible can be a "hugely exciting" journey of discovery.
In the series of four vidoes linked to the project, the Archbishop says: "When people say we need to read the Bible better, it's one of those nice ideas but we all struggle to know what that means in practice."
People have "no idea" where to find stories or books in the Bible, he adds.
He confesses that the first time he tried to read it, he approached it as a book to read from cover to cover. That was not the right way to approach it, he says.
He suggests three things. The first is knowing the Bible.
Second is to treat it as a "library" rather than a book. The Bible is "inspired by God in order that we might know God more clearly and better."
Thirdly, and most important, is allowing oneself to be "transformed" by it. Christians need to allow themselves to be changed by the Bible, he says. He describes working with a Christian who had suffered terribly in a war-torn area - and how this man went from hatred to forgiveness by studying the Book of Jonah.
Stephen Lyon, of the project, said the aim was to encourage "deeper engagement".
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said he hoped the resources would help towards "fuller biblical literacy" among Anglicans.
The project was produced following a request by the Anglican Consultative Council when they met in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2012, according to Gavin Drake, writing for Anglican News. It follows Bilc's first publication, Deep Engagement; Fresh Discovery, which was published that year.
The Anglican Communion Office has sent thousands of printed copies of the new resources, together with a memory stick, to all primates and archbishops as well bishops and theological colleges throughout the Anglican Communion.
