T-NET International    Discipling Disciplemakers     February 2003

Introducing Dr. DIMM

(Editors Note: Dr. DIMM the Cyber Saints Clergyman is a pseudonym for a pastor who will be sharing occasional tips for Christian power users.  All we can say about him is that even if you might not want him on your staff or as your pastor, he does know a lot about computers!  Then again he might be your pastor, who knows?)

Never let it be said Dr. DIMM doesn’t deliver on his promises . . . I said I would tell you where you could get free Bible study software. I even have Mac software listed here. However, freeloader be warned . . . Free is not necessarily FREE. These will all cost you time and perhaps some blood, sweat and, yes . . . even, tears. But they are free!

Perhaps the most well-known of these is The Online Bible. Even some commercial programs have utilized some of the tools produced in this pioneering project by Canadian iconoclast Larry Pierce. You’ll find a surprisingly large assortment of Bibles, Commentaries and Dictionaries all in the public domain. You can download them all for free at http://www.onlinebible.net/index.html  or order a CD which will be a lot easier to install, but will cost you $35 at https://george.he.net/~davepohl/olb_order_us.html. There is also a Mac version at http://www.online-bible.com/maconlinebible.html. As with most of these programs, “unlocks” are available for some copyrighted material primarily Bibles like the NIV, NAS, NRSV and NLT. Outside the US, CD’s are available from https://shop.importantia.com/invoice/shoporg/taal.htm. There are quite a number of languages represented here and in some you will find extensive collections. Edition Cle from Lyon, France has an excellent French collection (sounds like a movie, doesn’t it?) with add-on libraries you can purchase http://www.editionscle.com.

If all you ever use, in The Online Bible, is the instant look-up feature for the huge Treasury of Scripture Truth cross-reference collection you will find it well worth the trouble. Being able to instantly scan through 30-50 cross references for your preaching text will never make you long for the “good old days” when you might have spent an hour sharpening your “sword drill” skills just looking up each passage.

Another pioneer in the field of online Bible reference tools is a former Wheaton College Prof (now at Calvin College) Harry Plantinga. During a personal family crisis he was helped so much by finding a copy of The Imitation of Christ online, that he began OCR-ing some of his favorite spiritual classics and putting them online. That was the beginning of the very impressive Christian Classics Ethereal Library http://www.ccel.org. Remember this is largely the fruit of volunteer labor. Commercial publishers will be quick to tell you these products are more likely to have errors and are not proofed as extensively as professional copies. But, hey . . . it’s not like we never find errors in the pro stuff we pay big bucks for! You can search online or order a CD. This is an amazing gift to the kingdom.

Perhaps you bought one of those MP3 players for your teenager, but now they’ve gone on to bigger and better things (like burning CDs that will allow them to play hundreds of songs on a single CD). Well see if you can dig that "state of the art" dinosaur out from under somebody’s bed; you can still get some value for the exorbitant price you paid. CCEL has a large collection of audio books in MP3 format that you can download for free and play while you do your morning jog. (You can also, of course, play them on your computer). Get your teenager to give you a lesson in the finer points of MP3’s and you will be off to the races.

Mac people! Don’t say I never did anything for you. Two links in the same article should get some appreciation! (A friend of mine just got one of those new mega-wide 17 inch PowerBooks that Mini-Me trots out to upstage Yao Ming on TV . . . almost made me want to go over to the other side!) This next link with versions for Mac, Linux, Windows and Palm OS is really very impressive. In their words: "The SWORD Project is the CrossWire Bible Society's free Bible software project. Its purpose is to create cross-platform open-source tools - covered by the GNU General Public License - that allow programmers and Bible societies to write new Bible software more quickly and easily. We also create Bible study software for all readers, students, scholars, and translators of the Bible, and have a growing collection of over 200 texts in over 50 languages." But, you don’t have to be a programmer to download and utilize their resources. Just go to their nicely maintained site at http://www.crosswire.org/crosswire/index.jsp.

I’m telling you . . . you will be amazed at some of the things that are online. Try entering the title into Google http://www.google.com  surrounded by quotation marks. Better yet, browse by topic at the University of Pennsylvania site that attempts to catalogue every online book on the Internet!!! http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books  You can also search by author title and subject. The number of resources grows each month.

But I must add this disclaimer. There is a catch to all this. You can waste an incredible amount of time trying to find what you need. For my money, if you do a lot of sermon or lesson preparation, you will find a program like the new Libronix from Logos an incredible time saver and well worth the money. The new version has been extremely popular. Zondervan, BibleWorks and Parson’s QuickVerse are just some of the alternatives. Two discount retailers who specialize in these sorts of programs are Rejoice Christian Software http://www.rejoicesoftware.com and Bible and Theology Discount Software http://www.bibletheology.com. But remember, you can tell very little by comparing the titles that are included. Good Bible study software does far more than turn your computer into a very expensive eBook reader. You want something that becomes a research assistant saving you time, doing instant word studies and ferreting out the precise illustration or bit of information you need. If you really want to evaluate these competing companies visit the user support section for each one and you will soon get a feel for their user’s experience.

Speaking of saving time . . . StageCoach and the Online Spiritual Journey Evaluation Tool will save you, big time. Both are intended to help streamline the T-Net process and have been gratefully received by church leaders because they not only help you do these two T-Net tasks much more efficiently, but also to do them better http://www.tnetwork.com/Software.htm.

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