Category: Spreading Light Ministries

Bible Questions and Answers

Christianity, Spreading Light Ministries

After a couple of months off during a tumultuous summer I am back to doing web projects.  While I fear that I am never going to complete all of my projects I keep coming up with new ideas.  Fortunately I have a lot better follow through with my Christian related sites and ideas than I do with any other projects.

My newest project is up and running already.  Fortunately it is designed to be quickly expandable and relies on the questions of other Christians.  Bible Questions and Answers is designed to answer the questions of Christians about what it means to be a Christian, issues of theology, questions about passages in the Bible, and just about anything else that people come up with.

I got this idea from another pastor who did a sermon series based on questions from people in the church.  I’m doing the same thing in October at my church and I’m using the questions submitted as a starter for the site.  I figure if people from my church are asking these question, lots of of Christians must be asking the same questions.  So a new site was born.

I’m also working on another site which I hope to have up in a relatively short amount of time.  I could have things up this week if I have a good week or I might get distracted.  I have everything I need, I just need to do some time intensive work of copying from notes to the site.  After that it will be very low maintenance which is something I really like for websites.

More devotions

Spreading Light Ministries

Even though I’ve been working on some other web projects, I’m proud to say that I’ve kept up my work on the devotions site.  All of June’s devotions are up and I hope to make good headway on July early next week.  I find it hard to believe that the devotions site has been running for two years already and I’m proud of the site’s performance.  Originally I expected to to get all of the devotions up within a year – one week at a time – but that proved to be too much.  Getting married last year proved to be a big distraction.  Who would have thought?  When I’m finished with July’s devotions I’ll have an entire year of devotions online.

After July I won’t be finished with devotions however.  I plan on taking some time to work on a few other web projects, like the 140 more articles/commentaries I need to write for my gospel site.  That alone is the equivalent of four to five months of devotions.  But when I come back to writing devotions I have some more themed ideas.  They won’t necessarily follow a month’s timeline but will still be set up to read one a day.

Also I have already reserved the domain name for another devotions site.  It won’t contain any new information but rather it will be a reposting of existing devotions.  I plan on using a blog format that will post a new devotion each day so that if you like you can make the site your homepage so you read a new devotion every day when you visit.  I’m tempted to launch the site now since I have the material for it but January feels like a much better time to be launching a devotional site.  That way the new material won’t abuptly stop in the middle of the year either.  By the end of next year I hope to have at least six more months worth of devotions ready to post for the following year as well.  At least that’s the plan.  That’s kind of a way down the road and there’s no telling what may happen in the meantime.

Four Gospels Together

Spreading Light Ministries

I amd very please to announce that I am officially launching a long time project, Four Gospels Together.  www.fourgospelstogether.com  This is actually only partial launch as I only have about half of the commentaries finished.  Nevertheless, I have the largest section, the life of Christ, complete and I wanted to get the site going live and start to attract traffic.

If you’ve followed the blog, I’ve been talking about this project for a number of months.  It has been very time consuming and I’ve faced my share of distractions in completing it.  I now have commentary on over 100 gospel stories, covering the entire life of Christ.  I still have miracles, parables, and teachings of Jesus to complete.  I plan on saving the teachings for last because they will be the most in depth theologically.  In retrospect the life of Christ is probably the hardest section to do however, not only because it is the largest but because of the details that need to be looked at.

My goal in this site is to compare and contrast the stories in the gospel.  Because each gospel gives a slightly different account of what happened, I often find myself looking for a story, only to discover that it doesn’t contain the particular detail that I was looking for so I am forced to look for the story again in another gospel.  The site provides all of the gospel accounts of one story on one page so that anyone can read all versions at one time. 

In the commentary section I point out key differences between the accounts and try to put things in chronological order when there are a lot of things happening in one story.

I found myself using the research that I already did for this site as I completed my sermon series on the gospel of John.  I believe that this site will be equally valuable for anyone who is studying or teaching anything from the gospels.  I encourage everyone to check out the site and recommend it to friends if you like it.  I’ll continue to provide updates as I get more of the site up.

New Format

Spreading Light Ministries

Regular visitors to the site will notice a new format for the website.  After a day of toying around, I’ve decided to move the blog onto WordPress.  This will allow me to do updates a good bit faster and also gives visitors the opportunity to respond to articles with comments.  The site can be searched and it is easily navigated to view previous posts.

The other advantages to the new format are mainly behind the scenes.  Hopefully this will allow the site to be picked up by by search engines and other blog sites that will register whenever there is a new post.

Feel free to drop a comment about the new format and let me know what you think.

Nice Weather

Spreading Light Ministries

I’ve been working, I promise.  April has brought about a ton of nice weather and I’ve been left with the choice between working inside or outside and I’ve chosen the latter of the two. 

We had unbelievably warm weather at the beginning of the month with temperatures hitting 90 two days in a row and shattering the record for the date by about ten degrees.  Since then, the weather has consistently been in the 60’s and 70’s and it has been hard to pass up.  I’ve spent the mornings during my necessary church work and the afternoons working outside.

Oh, and I got a new puppy who requires a lot of attention so that has taken up some of my time as well.

Fortunately, despite the nice weather, the website work hasn’t been completely abandoned.  April’s devotions are all up and hopefully next week I’ll be able to get a start on May. 

My major web project that I hoped to have completed in April isn’t quite halfway done.  Some of it has been other projects and some due to unforeseen circumstances.  I had a great opportunity in March to make headway and spent most of that time unable to work much at the computer so that was a big set back. 

I am hoping to do a partial launch of my big website project in May.  I have around 30 articles to finish which is still a fairly daunting task because I usually can’t do more than 5 a day (when I have nothing else to do that day), but I believe that it is achievable alongside doing May’s devotions.  I’ll give all of the details of my new project here as soon as it’s ready for its partial launch so keep an eye out here.

New Website

Spreading Light Ministries

As I had planned, my new website production has slowed down since the spring and summer of 2009. I really hadn’t planned on launching a new website any time soon and was going to focus more on my devotions. But the best laid plans get distracted when I’m behind them. First of all, I’m finally caught up on my devotions and have everything posted for January. This is the first time since Thanksgiving that I’ve been caught up I think. I’m actually launching a couple of new web projects but there’s no telling when I will make them live. My best guess is that it will take a couple of weeks at least. There is one new address to offer, but it’s not a new site. I registered the name www.theonlinebibledictionary.com for the Bible dictionary. The dictionary has been around for some time and even my new, updated site has been up since the fall. However this domain will take anyone directly to the dictionary instead of having to navigate around the spreadinglight site. In all, not a big deal but I thought it was worth the investment. My current website project is something that has come out of a sermon series. I’ve been preaching from the gospel of John and have been using the details in the other gospels to fill in the holes of some of the stories. I suddenly had an idea – wouldn’t it be nice to have every story put together in order to read all of the gospel accounts of the story in one place? So that is my project. There are 233 separate stories recorded in the four gospels. I am not only posting all of the relevant verses to each story but will be adding some commentary about why the story is significant and how the gospel accounts differ. In other words, 233 webpages written by me. It will definitely take a while to get the site finished but I’ll be sure to add the link here when I’m done. I already have plans for another future project. I purchased the domain name for it already so there’s a good chance that I’ll get it done as well. It will be my attempt to consolidate the business/affiliate side of Spreading Light Ministries. Ultimately there are some Christian business sites that I’d like to launch but I don’t want to clutter up the ministry site with links so this will be a new launching platform. Once again, this will be a long term project but I will likely put up a smaller scale site to get things started.

November Devotions

Spreading Light Ministries

The devotions for November are up now. They deal with the theme of thanksgiving. As I was writing I came to realize more and more that we simply don’t off thanks to God often enough. I’ll be taking a couple of weeks off from devotions, both to give my brain a break from devotions and to work on some other projects. I will be working on redoing the online Bible dictionary with a new design. After looking at my statistics, I decided to keep the pages hosted on spreadinglight. It will only take a day or two to switch the pages. After that I will be adding more definitions. This will be an ongoing project that I will be working on between other web projects. I figure that I will basically never run out of things to write about in relation to the Bible. In addition to theological definitions, I will be adding sections on Bible places, people of the Bible, and a discussion of Biblical weights and measurements.

Long Term Goals

Spreading Light Ministries

This year I have launched several new websites – I’ve honestly lost count but I think there might be 14 – under the Spreading Light Ministries umbrella.  As the year winds down I will probably be doing less expansion and more maintenance.  I’m sure that I’ll have a great idea sometime in the middle of the night and that will spawn a few more sites but for the most part I think I’m going to slow down on new sites.

There are all sorts of things that I have to add to current sites however and this will continue.  I literally have a to do list that goes back to 2005 that I have not completed everything on.  So there’s plenty left to add.

At the top of my priority list is the completion of eight more months of devotions.  I hope to be able to do one month’s worth every month until I have the entire year set.  This was my goal last year too but I have more time to devote to not just devotions but all of my web projects now.

Next on the list is more theological definitions.  This is a long term goal and I don’t think that I’d ever run out of things to write if I chose to keep adding definitions.  What I am still debating is whether to keep the dictionary under spreadinglight.com or to launch a new site for the definitions.  There are advantages to both and I haven’t fully decided what I’m doing yet.  One thing that I am sure of is that the design will be different from the current Spreading Light design and more like the newest sites in form and function.  It’s a cookie cutter design but I’ve really come to like it and it makes it easy to launch a new site.

Third on my priority list is additions to the Bible studies.  I’m always interested in adding more Bible studies as they have had good success on the site.  Now my goal is to have at least one study for every book of the Bible.  This will obviously take a very long time if I write them all myself.  I hope to post a study on the Gospel of John in late winter/early spring when I finish preaching through it.  I also have a study on Malachi that I’ve done before that I may be able to post before John, it depends on how my schedule works out.

So those are the long term plans.  They’re all subject to change of course but that’s how I see things working on currently.  I will be making regular posts here about any new projects that are going on.  For now I’m going to work on some devotions for the month of November.