Reading the Bible: Introduction

“Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord God, “when I will send a famine on the land—not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.
Amos 8:11

Wikipedia suggests there are over 142 different English translations of the Bible right now.  Many Christians own more than one Bible. Yet it seems fewer and fewer people are reading the Bible on a daily basis.  With the advent of the Internet and the growing smart phone market, the Bible is more available to us today than at any other time.  Yet we still aren’t taking advantage of it.  Over the next few days, we’ll be looking at resources to help people dig into God’s Word.  We’ll cover:

1. Online Bibles
2. Tools for Understanding the Bible
3. Developing a Plan
4. Strategies for Success

Innovate 2008

Wired Churches has posted full sessions from Innovate 2008 online.  They are free to watch for anyone interested, but they haven’t been edited down to just the speakers.  You can either watch the worship/skits leading up to the speaker or click the orange progress bar beneath the video to skip ahead to the speaker portion.  Sessions available include:

• Stop Talking by Mark Beeson
• Brand Schizophrenia by Shawn Wood
• Pop Goes the Church by Tim Stevens
• Missional Moves by Rob Wegner
• Innovate Impact by the LifeChurch.tv Team and Steven Furtick
• Start Doing, by Mark Beeson

Sharpen the Sword

Vanessa sends along word that MIT has many of their courses available online for free.  While many of the courses may seem over most of our heads or not applicable to our ministry, you may find some gems in there.  Vanessa suggests you check out the courses in the Sloan School of Management.  Teaching a course on Creation and Evolution?  Refresh your scientific knowledge with Thermodynamics of Biomolecular Systems. 

The format for the courses varies, so you’ll need different applications to run the various pieces.  The big ones you’ll need:

• A PDF Reader.  Adobe Reader is the original, but FoxIt is my favorite because it has a small memory footprint (that means it loads faster and uses less memory).
• A video player for Real Media files.  Real Media Player is the original, but it comes with lots of bloat.  I prefer using Windows Media Player Classic with Real Player support.  You can get all that in a single package, called Real Alternative.

Which classes look interesting to you?