A new edition of the protestant Bible Today's Taiwanese Version Romanized-Han Edition (現代台語聖經漢羅版), published late 2021, is quite epoch-making.
On each page, you see the romanized version in pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) on the left, Chinese characters on the right.
In order to understand its innovativeness, you need to have some background knowledge. Primarily, Taiwanese Hokkien (hereafter Taiwanese) is a language yet to be codified. That means, there is no single variety that is promoted by the government as the standard and accepted by all. Each place has its own variety, usually closer either to the Quanzhou or Zhangzhou dialect of Fujian. Traditionally, Amoy Version translated by Rev. Thomas Barclay and published in 1917, has been used in Hokkien-speaking churches across the world. As its name suggests, it uses the Amoy dialect, which is an amalgam leaning more towards the Quanzhou side. It is quite close to the local accent in the Taipei Basin, but not exactly the same. The Bible is typeset entirely in POJ only, which means the reader in Taiwan is forced to read it out with an Amoy accent, which is different from his or her own. The potential solution is a Taiwanese Bible entirely in Chinese characters. But the problem is that, like I said above, Taiwanese is not yet standardized, so there are potentially many different Chinese characters used to denote a single Taiwanese syllable. This causes trouble for the reader, because he or she does not know how a Chinese character should be pronounced in Taiwanese.
So this new version is quite revolutionary in at least two senses. First, the reader can now choose whether he or she wants to use the romanized version or Chinese characters version when he or she reads, solving the problem of different accents. This is useful in case the reader and/or audience are not familiar with the Amoy accent. The reader can choose to pronounce the Chinese characters in his or her own locally appropriate Taiwanese accent.
Second, this could reconciles the tension between the Old and New, in other words, the Amoy POJ tradition and newly emerging General Taiwanese (GT; 台灣優勢腔) accent. Traditionally, thanks to the Barclay's Bible, the standard orthography and pronunciation of the entire Hokkien-sphere have been the POJ and Amoy accent. However, starting from southwestern Taiwan, an amalgam accent called GT is spreading all across Taiwan, especially through the media. This variety is a Zhangzhou-based mixture, so it's quite distant from Amoy. The Ministry of Education (MoE) in Taipei has selected this variety (possibly for ideological reasons) and been using it in school textbooks. Because of mass media, this accent is becoming an unmarked one for many Taiwanese all over the island. The Tâi-lô (TL; 臺羅), the romanization system endorsed by the government although not yet widespread, is closely related to POJ. So it poses little problem for people who learned TL at school.
Personally, I think the government should have just adopted POJ, which has been used to make people literate in Hokkien not just in Taiwan but also the rest of Hokkien-sphere. The motive behind TL, namely difficulty in typesetting, has already been overcome by new technology (unless the real motive was just trying to be as different as possible from the rest of the Hokkien-speaking world). If the publication of this new Bible will reverse the trend in favor of POJ remains to be seen.
