What Bible translation does your church use?

That’s the question we asked in our survey of all WELS congregations in 2025. Respondents were able to choose more than one.

Here is the result.

• New International Version 2011(NIV11) – 57%
• New International Version 1984 (NIV84) – 13%
• Evangelical Heritage Version (EHV) – 41%
• English Standard Version (ESV) – 8%
• Other – Christian Standard Bible (CSB) – 2%
• Other – New King James Version, New American Standard Bible – less than 1%
• Other – Spanish, Hmong, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Apache – less than 1%

The answers to the question demonstrate the historical fact that WELS has never adopted an official translation of the Bible. Although many congregations used NIV84, which had language that correlated with the Christian Worship hymnal that was published in 1993, those same congregations did not automatically use NIV11 when that update was published. Some of those congregations switched to EHV (offered by Northwestern Publishing House in 2019), and some switched to ESV, which correlates to the Missouri Synod (LCMS) hymnal published in 2006.

There are clear regional preferences, and the twelve WELS districts exhibit noticeably different translation profiles.

Translation Distribution by District

The strongest geographic findings are:

• Michigan and Western Wisconsin have the most EHV users.
• South Atlantic, Southeastern Wisconsin, North Atlantic, and Pacific Northwest are strongly NIV11.
• Dakota-Montana retains the highest NIV84 usage.
• Most districts exhibit a recognizable translation culture rather than mirroring the synod-wide average.

Three districts stand out for their EHV usage:

• Michigan (59%)
• Western Wisconsin (48%)
• Northern Wisconsin (43%)

Dakota-Montana is nearly evenly divided between EHV and NIV11.

This suggests that EHV usage is concentrated geographically rather than uniformly.

The highest NIV11 usage occurs in

• South Atlantic (73%)
• North Atlantic (68%)
• Southeastern Wisconsin (66%)
• Pacific Northwest (62%)

Although NIV84 is no longer dominant anywhere, it remains noticeably stronger in

• Dakota-Montana (23%)
• Western Wisconsin (15%)
• Minnesota (13%)
• Michigan (12%)

Elsewhere it has largely disappeared.