As semester 2 gets underway, we’re launching a new course: the Unichurch Partnership course. Over 3 weeks we will be looking at God’s word and hearing from Rory, thinking through what we believe as a church, what our mission is and what is actually involved in being a church. We hope to better communicate what we’re on about as a church, and that at the end of the course people will choose to sign up to become a partner, to affirm that Unichurch is your church and that you’re onboard with us in our mission to reach Perth with the gospel.

When: Begins this week at Hub, Tuesday (students), Wednesday (workers) at 7pm

Where: St Matthew’s Anglican Church, 114 Onslow Rd Shenton Park

Who: Everyone at Unichurch, whether you’ve been around for a long time or a short time, whether you’re regularly part of Hub or not.

We look forward to seeing you there!

It comes from the Lotus Sutra composed at the end of the 2nd century AD. The setting is similar to Jesus’ parable of the the sons, a son abandons his father and runs away to have fun in foreign lands. But the outcome could not be more different. In that story the son returns to his native land by chance, and the father hides his identity from the returning son and hires him as servant. As the son proves himself competent he works his way up through the family business by his hard work and diligence and advances up through the ranks of employees to a position of seniority. Finally as the father is becoming ill, after 20 years he decides that his son is sufficiently enlightened and worthy to inherit the family estate, and he reveals to the son and to all that he really is his heir…

How good is grace right?

You can see Rory’s talk on the parable of the two sons in Luke here

Yesterday Jen raised the question of fasting and it got me thinking… Right off the bat, my impression would be that fasting is a normal commonplace thing in the New Testament that everyone does but that we don’t really do… for no particular reason. So should we be doing it?

In Matthew 6:16-18 Jesus is commenting on a common Jewish understanding of piety – loving God involves the practices of prayer, fasting and alms-giving (see for example the apocryphal book Tobit 12:8); only one fast was mandated by the Jewish law on Yom Kippur but many more fasts were added over the years and the Pharisees would fast twice per week – see Luke 18:9-14. They, like Jennie’s Orthodox friends, understood these threefold acts of piety as a way to please or appease God; and in this passage I’m not sure that Jesus is challenging that at all – he’s making an entirely different point.

So if fasting was a common Jewish religious practice how does it translate across for us? I went digging to see what the New Testament actually says about it…

• The only mention of Jesus fasting himself is in the gospels at his temptation in the wilderness when he has no food.
• Jesus disciples don’t fast and this is a point of conflict with the religious leaders and John’s disciples, Mark 2:18-22. In response to this discussion Jesus tells the parables of the cloth and the old garment, and new wine and old wineskins.
• There are a few references to “prayer and fasting” in Acts, none of which includes Gentiles.
• There are no direct references to fasting in the rest of the New Testament – all of the epistles and revelation; with the exception of 2 Corinthians 6:5, 11:27 where involuntary starvation is in mind.
• One possible reference is Colossians 2:16-23, where the phrase in v18,23 translated asceticism in ESV, false humility in TNIV, may be translating a Hebrew idiom referring to fasting (in some Jewish writings at the time fasting is seen as a way to invoke angelic visions).

So should we fast? I think at the very least you’d have to say – we don’t have to do it – Jesus enables us to know God… And if by fasting you ever thought that you were somehow atoning for your sins or helping get closer to God then you’d be better off not doing it all! Jesus’ parables of the cloth and the wineskins in Mark 2 are confusing, but I think they warn us against mixing the “shadow” of traditional cultic practices with their fulfillment – knowledge of God in Christ.

What do you think?

Over the last 15 months you’ve been able to stream videos of the preaching at Unichurch on the website; but that can be a hassle, particularly if you’re on a slower internet connection. As of this week the videos have now been set up in a vodcast (video podcast) so that you can set it to download in iTunes and watch it when you want…

The videos (since the start of the Romans series) will now also work on portable devices like your iPhone or iPod – so you can listen to and watch Rory preaching when you’ve got nothing to do on the bus, or you’re bored in lectures or you’re lying in bed…

Click here to access the vodcast in iTunes, or use this feed for other programs.

In ministry we should expect to see fruit – people growing in their knowledge and love of Christ and that being reflected in their lives… but is that the most important thing? How would you evaluate the performance of someone in ministry?

I remember listening to the talks from the Desiring God conference in 2006 The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World. I couldn’t tell you what the talks were about beyond the basic gist, but this comment by DA Carson during the panel discussion about the danger of trying to evaluate success in ministry has stuck in my mind…

[media id=1]

Some people missed camp last weekend which is a shame for them, as you can see from this photo of Oscar, it was an awesome weekend packed with great talks and good times! You may have landed at the website from Dave’s email promising talks from camp, which may have been just very slightly premature… …however the post-production processing is almost done and you’ll find the talks will appear here in audio and video over the next couple of days.

Alternatively, if you’re  a Unichurch member you’ll be able to get extended versions with question times, out-takes and humerous clips and photos from across the weekend on CD/DVD at church.

If you’re new to Bible software and low on cash, there’s really no reason not to start here. Free. Everybody likes free stuff and there’s no reason not to give it a go.

What are the options?

This is obviously not an exhaustive list, there are other options out there but these are the main players.

E-Sword (Windows)

The Sword Project:

• Xiphos (formerly GnomeSword, Windows and Linux)
• MacSword (MacOS X)

Web-based options:

• Biblegateway.com
• Zhubert.com

What all these programs have in common

These programs have several things in common so it would be worth starting there. They are all quite simple. They don’t do a whole lot compared to the costly stuff but that also means there fairly easy to use. There’s not a lot in the way of frills here, the interfaces are usually a bit clunky compared to the bigger programs but at the end of the day they are free, they’re not trying to do a lot but they do it well.

The biggest drawback the free options have in common is the lack of contemporary resources. They are all modular and allow you to download and install dozens of different bible versions, commentaries, dictionaries and devotional material, but is almost entirely limited to resources that are available in the public domain. This is not surprising, the reason the expensive stuff costs so much is that you’re paying publishers for current books. This is not the end of the world, there is plenty of good stuff there. They all have ESV and KJV, greek texts if you’re so inclined (textus receptus and Westcott-Hort texts), whole bible commentaries by Barnes, Clarke, Henry and numerous others, and some old school dictionaries and encyclopaedias.

Comparison

The main advantage E-Sword has is the availability of current resources to purchase if you want them. So if you want to get other contemporary English translations you can pay $10-$30 to get what you want. There are also various commentaries and dictionaries, though besides Baker’s New Testament Commentary I don’t think there’s much there worth paying for.

The Sword Project has the advantage of being free and open source. This means its code is freely available and is being developed by a community, rather than one person; it should be upgraded and improved more rapidly and it uses a shared code-base across multiple platforms so it feels pretty similar across different operating systems and will be easily ported to new ones.

The Web-based Options

The online options are a different kettle of fish entirely. Because you are not downloading entire books, they are able to offer free access to contemporary resources. So for example, you can access any of the contemporary english translations at Biblegateway.com. It’s not designed for extensive study but is very useful for comparing translations and you can also listen to an audio version for free. If you want to study the bible in Greek you can’t go past Zhubert.com, it is much better for this purpose than any of the free programs that you can install.

Conclusions

As I mentioned previously, the best option for you will depend on what you want to use it for, your proficiency with computers and how much you’re willing to spend. These programs are about as elementary as it gets in terms of what bible software can do, but they’re free! If you’re into ratings heres my attempt:

E-Sword: Interface 2/5, Capability 1/5, Resources 2/5, Cost 5/5

Sword Project programs: Interface 3/5, Capability 1/5  Resources 1/5, Cost 5/5

Biblegateway.com Interface N/A, Capability 1/5, Resources 3/5, Cost 5/5

Zhubert.com Interface 3/5, Capability 3/5, Resources 2/5, Cost 5/5

Obviously the different options all have advantages and disadvantages and the best choice will depend on what you would use it for, your level of technical expertise and ability to make use of what the programs offer, your computer’s hardware capabilities, and available funds.

Perhaps the place to start would be – why use bible study software at all? The ink and paper variety functions very well so why bother? That’s certainly worth asking before you go throwing any cash down on something. If your only use of the bible is in personal reading, taking it to church or Hub then you have little use for Bible software. It’s just not as good for sitting down and reading, and it’s not transportable with the exception of PDA/smarthphone versions.

On the other hand, if you want to study the bible and not just read it; if you lead a small group and want to really come to grips with a passage, to contrast all the different english translations, to explore how it connects with the rest of scripture, do word studies on key words, see how commentators have grappled with a passage, use other reference books – dictionaries and so forth; and if your skills allow, grapple with the text in its original languages and do sophisticated grammatical and syntactic analysis; you’ll either need a large free table, a pile of books and plenty of hours to scour through finding the information you need… or software.

Over the next weeks I’ll try to give you a snapshot of what’s out there, what it can do and who it would be useful for.

What’s worse, being patronised by your food? Or having to concede it has a point?

While I would struggle to find the time to sit down and do that much reading every day, I’ve found that with an audio bible I can use time that otherwise would be wasted. 20 minutes walking each way to work, going for runs, cleaning the dishes. All time spent doing mindless tasks that could be spent doing something useful – Hearing the Word and praying about it. These days you can choose your version and get the whole bible on one cd as MP3s and put them on iPod, I’ve been listening to The Bible Experience, a dramatic reading of the TNIV with sound effects and so on – a little cheesy to be sure, but it does help bring narrative sections of scripture to life.

Listening to an audio bible is not quite the same as reading through it – you can’t read the same verse 5 times to mull it over, but this is the way that people had access to God’s work for millennia before the invention of the printing press and the near universality of literacy. And we have the luxury of being able to look it up again when we get home.

So if you’re struggling to read the bible, why not engage with the scriptures old-school, and Hear the Word?