Non-commercial access
Core resources stay free online, with sustainability pursued without paywalls or extraction.
An initiative rooted in the LIT Bible
Liberating Scripture Collective
The Liberating Scripture Collective creates open-access, trauma-informed translation, learning resources, and pathways of spiritual support that serve liberation, healing, and belonging.
The Collective was founded by Brandon Vélez Johnson to support the Liberation and Inclusion Translation (LIT) and build the wider ecosystem around it.
"Get involved" can mean offering feedback, collaborating on resources, or helping build sustainable support for the work.
Who We Are
We guide the Liberation and Inclusion Translation and extend it into teaching, public conversation, and practical support.
Translation is never "just text." The word, its conversation, is always trying to become flesh. It becomes teaching, practice, community, accountability, and care. We smooth the journey between translation and faithful, responsive hearing: making scripture more transparent, more honest about power, and less likely to be used as a tool of harm.
Why it exists
Many were taught to treat the Bible as a weapon, a test, or a loyalty pledge. The Collective exists to make a different kind of engagement possible, one grounded in consent, context, and the dignity of real human lives. More incarnational than authoritarian.
We're not here to make a "safe" Bible by sanding down hard texts. Our aim is honesty, transparency, and a liberating ethic, so readers can actually see what the text is doing, how it has been interpreted, and what kinds of communities it tends to produce.
Our Commitments and Goals
Open-access translation
The LIT Bible is a trauma-informed, liberationist translation approach that prioritizes clarity, transparency, and accountability to the source text.
It's built to be readable, teachable, and auditable, so readers can understand not only what the text says, but why translation decisions were made.
Courses and learning resources
Short courses, study guides, reading companions, and practical tools to help people engage scripture with context, care, and critical honesty.
The goal is accessible formation, not gatekeeping — giving people handles for reading well without needing a seminary degree.
Podcasts and public teaching
Conversations about translation, theology, liberation, and spiritual practice, with guests and collaborators who bring rigor and lived experience.
This is where the "why" becomes audible, and where the community of interpreters becomes visible.
Conduits to spiritual support
Curated pathways to aligned spiritual companionship and care, aimed at helping people find consent-based, trauma-aware support.
This isn't about funneling people into institutions. It's about helping people find safe, fitting forms of support for their actual lives.
A collaborative community
The Collective invites people into the work through feedback, conversation, and partnership, because liberating scripture is not a solo project.
Collaboration can include readers, scholars, practitioners, artists, and people with lived experience whose insight has been ignored by "official" interpreters.
Non-commercial access
The core resources remain freely accessible online. Sustainability is pursued without locking the work behind paywalls.
Financial support, when needed, is aimed at infrastructure and longevity, not extraction.
How to connect
If you want to collaborate, support the work, or track what's launching next, start here:
LSC is in active development. This page will evolve as projects launch and collaboration pathways become clearer.