Craig and Jon + the Berean Study Bible team. A Public domain Bible translation. New faith.tools updates. And, a story of persistence leading to a blessing for all.
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🎵 An app I’m excited about:Navigate the Way is an example of using AI for good, making it easier to do Bible studies and ask the hard questions, while getting solid, Biblical answers. Ted, the creator, serves as Deputy Director for the AI Center of Excellence at IBM's oLabs.
The Bible API is a tool that provides free and unlimited access to various Bible translations, so that people can easily integrate Scripture into their websites, apps, and more.
If you’re not a programmer, you might wonder… “should I keep on reading? Is this relevant for me?” Yes! Your favorite Bible app most likely uses an API to help deliver Scripture text to you. And, you’re about to hear a story of how persistence brought about a blessing for many.
Q: wait wait wait... what is an API?
For the non-programmers who may read this newsletter. An API is pretty much a way to use a computer to ask another computer to get and deliver to you information that you want or need: text, images, videos, etc.
What is the story of your app or tool? How did it come to be?
Our API came about because we needed an unlimited, free-use API for the Bible that we could leverage for user generated content and AI without any limitations on sharing or attribution requirements. Basically, we need a Creative Commons or public domain Bible.
After much scouring of the web I was unable to find a good translation until I was introduced to the Berean Study Bible (BSB).
After a year and half of lovingly harassing them with the help of Jon, the founder of https://gracious.tech/, the BSB team decided after much prayer to release their Bible into the public domain.
We had already built an API to use the BSB for our own purposes, and wanted to add to our API any and all free use, public domain Bible translations. Jon (the same Jon behind gracious.tech) had already built a scraping and consolidation tool for https://fetch.bible/ so it was not too hard to to use the same tools he built for our own purposes to take only the public domain, free use translations and add them to our API. We owe both BSB team and Jon of gracious.tech a great debt of gratitude!
Craig, it's incredible how your persistence and collaboration with the Berean Study Bible team and collaboration with Jon led to a modern, readable public domain Bible translation.
For those who don't know. One popular public domain Bible is the King James Version, which is a honored classic, but is hard to read for many given the differences in how we talk today. I like to say and have heard from many that the best Bible translation is the one you can read and understand. Making the BSB translation public to anyone for free makes that so much easier.
Here’s an example.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. John 3:16 KJV
For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that everyone who believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16 BSB
The latter is more readable. Respects to both.
Craig and Jon, your persistence... I can see people would be tempted to quit after just a few weeks, but you guys kept on asking. I think it's worthwhile to say that when processes aren't smooth, it doesn't mean you should stop when God's put a vision on your mind and heart. Reminds me of Moses and Pharoah. Moses came back again and again asking Pharoah to do the vision God put on his mind and heart, but it took persistence and time.
Persistence can sometimes be seen in a bad light, but there are time where persistence can lead to big blessings — like what we've seen here with the BSB translation being freely given.
What's one challenge that you overcame when working on this project? Or, when it felt like quitting, what helped you stay the course?
One major challenge was that there was no API that suited our purposes. We needed the Bible as a structured JSON data set, and no API could give us exactly what we were looking for. Ultimately prayer and an uncompromising vision, by God's grace, gave us the strength we needed to stay the course. We resolved that, if necessary, we would have to crowdsource our own Bible translations from scratch and trust God to do the rest. Thankfully that was not necessary!
Anywhere you recognize God's hand throughout the journey of creating this app or tool?
God's hand has been all over this in a way that was not visible at the time, but incredibly obvious in hindsight! It's kind of like the book of Esther in that sense for us. We have faith that if we trust God and walk He will take care of the rest. Even getting the phone number of the creator of the BSB translation was a miracle in itself, and it was only possible because of a series of conversations that led me in directions I never expected. So many parts of our story only emerged by walking in prayer and letting God reveal things in time.
"So many parts of our story only emerged by walking in prayer and letting God reveal things in time." That's a powerful reminder that God is in control and He is good.
If you could give advice to someone who's wanting to build an app or tool for Christians, what advice would you give?
Tools are amazing, but PLEASE don't build another app! Please! An app should be a last-resort option.
Build your value offering, whatever it is, as a tool or a "layer" that is easy to interoperate with with ministries and services. I'm happy to advise ministries on how to build their offering as a tool, layer, or service rather than an app.
If you already have a large audience and a well defined value proposition an app can make sense in that case, but if you are a small ministry or start up the app ecosystem is far to crowded. It is much better to build for the web if possible and then wrap you web service in app later when you're ready. Or do both from the start if you must.
But we have thousands of apps that don't interoperate already (see faith.tools for countless examples!) and we can't be the body of Christ if we don't start building tools like our body does!
Shameless plug! What's something cool that's been on your mind that you'd recommend to the faith.tools community?
Build stuff that interoperates and uses the Bible as the interface as much as possible. We're trying to make that easy with our larger project called the Home Bible which uses the .aux file format (which is just JSON) to make nearly any kind of interactive experience. It's easier to show then tell, so please try our demo and reach out if you'd like to build tools that interoperate so we can all stop trying to build the kingdoms of our respective ministries and focus on building the kingdom of Jesus! Everything we make is 100% open source and/or public domain to the greatest extent possible. Try the demo now!
Thank you Craig, Jon, and the Berean Study Bible team for this blessing. If you’re creating an app or digital tool for Christians, consider sharing your story with the faith.tools community.
Reflect & Respond
💬 Pick one question. Respond in the comments for community fun and discussion.
What’s something from Craig, Jon, and the BSB story that stood out to you and why?
How do you see persistence in your own life? What’s that thing God has laid on your heart that you need to be persistent with?
Instead of re-creating the wheel, what’s one thing you need that you could partner with someone else who’s doing a similar thing?
