Building a Professional Ministry Library On The Cheap

Yesterday I spent 10 hours in a meeting discussing training strategies for college ministers (most of whom come from secular colleges). While driving back I began thinking about the challenge a new minister without formal training faces in building a professional library. Books are expensive–the New International Commentary series on the Old and New Testaments retails for nearly $1,500 (OT, NT)! For some new ministers, building a quality library can seem so overwhelming that it’s hard to know where to start.

Inspired by a similar example, I decided to compile a solid (although basic) ministry library for under $200 (I failed by eleven cents). I priced the books (used) on Amazon.com on 6/18/2004. Books are listed in rough order of importance within each category.

The Reference Collection — $102.85

  • NIV Exhaustive Concordance $19.35
  • Systematic Theology, Millard Erickson $29.99
  • The IVP Bible Background Commentary — New Testament, Craig Keener $13.95
  • Handbook of Christian Apologetics, Peter Kreeft & Ronald Tacelli $5.99
  • Chronological and Background Charts of the New Testament, H. Wayne House $10.15
  • Chronological and Background Charts of the Old Testament, John Walton $9.99
  • Multipurpose Tools for Bible Study, Fred Danker $13.43

The Personal & Professional Growth Collection — $97.26

  • Devotional Classics, Foster & Smith $6.65
  • How to Read The Bible For All Its Worth, Fee & Stuart $1.99
  • Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis $4.95
  • The Spirit of the Disciplines, Dallas Willard $9.60
  • The Challenge of Jesus, N. T. Wright $10.97
  • Prayer, Richard Foster $5.00
  • A Tale of Three Kings, Gene Edwards $3.85
  • The Pursuit of Holiness, Jerry Bridges $2.49
  • Exegetical Fallacies – D. A. Carson $8.99
  • Between Two Worlds, John Stott $9.00
  • The Master Plan of Evangelism, Robert Coleman $0.97
  • The Purpose-Driven Church, Rick Warren $8.00
  • Christian Counseling, Gary Collins $10.50
  • Solution-Focused Pastoral Counseling, Charles Kollar $12.71
  • Take and Read, Eugene Peterson $1.59

Total Cost: $200.11 (excluding shipping & handling)

I tried to end each list with a book that would lead to more books, so that this would only be the genesis of a professional library…

I welcome suggestions for replacement volumes. What do you think important for a novice minister with little theological education to read?

Stanford Rakes It In

I get blown away sometimes when I think about how innovative Stanford is. I’m still trying to figure out which dorm room Google was founded in (I bet it’s in Escondido Village).

Anyway, I started thinking again about the incredible technological breakthroughs at Stanford when I read that the Farm raked in $45.4 million last year from royalties.

That’s a lot of money.

Wow. Wow backwards.

Email Bankruptcy

Stanford law prof Lawrence Lessig has declared email bankruptcy.

In a script-driven note sent out last week, Lessig wrote: “Dear person who sent me a yet-unanswered e‑mail, I apologize, but I am declaring e‑mail bankruptcy.”

He went on to note that he had spent 80 hours the prior week sorting through unanswered e‑mail built up since January 2002, and had determined that “without extraordinary effort” he would simply never be able to respond to these messages.

Evidently he gets an average of 200 non-spam emails a day. I have to say that makes me feel better about my own email inadequacies. My next three days will be chiefly comprised of a concerted effort to whittle down my inbox. I started this morning at 387 non-spam, non-newsletter emails. I end today at 347. It doesn’t look like much progress, but I had two hour long phone conversations and a bunch itty-bitty ones that kept me from the computer most of today.

My goal for tomorrow is to get my inbox down to 200…

Shrek 2

Public thanks to Elizabeth Garcia (good friend and Stanford Chi Alpha alumnus) for babysitting Dana last night so Paula and I could go enjoy an evening out.

We watched Shrek 2, and loved it. It was doubly cool, because Hector Yee (a friend of ours) works at DreamWorks and wrote the code that rendered the shadows cast by the fur on the cat. He’s listed in the credits.

Anyway, we had a great night. Thanks, Elizabeth!

Scripturizer in PHP

UPDATE 12/23/2004: I’ve moved my version of the code to the new WP Plugins repository, so you can download it at http://dev.wp-plugins.org/file/scripturizer/trunk/scripturizer.php

UPDATE: plans are afoot to merge the three existing codebases (Dean’s, Scott Yang’s, and this one) into a single Sourceforge project. (UPDATE 12/23/2004: nothing has really come of that–we’re all a little busy and haven’t really worked to make it happen. Oh well…)

Not realizing that Mean Dean was porting Scripturizer to PHP, I went ahead and did it so that I could begin using it on this WordPress site. At about the same time Scott Yang made one, so there are two versions out there. Sorry about that.

I originally wasn’t going to package it for release, but it turns out that I had to do it to actually use it on my site :), and so I figured I might as well put it in the public version to make it easy for anyone else to use. Also, figuring out how to use add_action was nonobvious (at least when I first did this–I believe the documentation has improved considerably), so I wanted to provide a clear example.

It extends the functionality of the original and also changes the data permanently in the user’s database (as opposed to Scott’s, which filters it on the fly). You can set mine to do that (see the source code), but Scott’s will work that way out of the box. Which you prefer is up to you. Mine is more efficient, his affects all the archives without making you manually edit anything.

Usage: just copy the source code to a file named scripturize.php in your wp-content/plugins folder. Go to your administration panel, click on Plugins, and activate it. Then just refer to the Bible in your posts. If you don’t want a Bible reference hyperlinked, be sure to enclose it in preformatting tags, like so: 

<pre>John 3:16</pre>

Changes from Dean’s original:

  • You can specify a translation you want to link to by putting the standard abbreviation after the reference like so: John 3:16, NIV or 2 Cor 5:20 (NET). This one is huge, for me.
  • Added New English Translation. I like this translation for several reasons, but mostly for its philosophical underpinnings.
  • Made syntax a little more permissive. For instance, you can now specify a reference by saying Gen. 12:1 or Gen 12:1 (period/no period).
  • Made syntax a little less permissive as regards whitespace. Just write things normally and everything will work fine (I changed this to correct some errors I was seeing wherein the link would run into the blank space after the reference).
  • The regular expressions handle linking a little bit differently. It does something more useful when confronted with a crazy reference like Rom 1:3, 5–8, 10,12 that the online Bibles don’t know what to do with.
  • As I mentioned, by default it will actually change your post as stored in your database. Forever. Irreversibly. With no backup. Just be aware of that.
  • You can now specify a default translation. It is initially set to the NIV, because I assume that’s what most people will want.

Please Report Bugs In Bug Tracker
I’d really like to know if you catch any bugs. I use this plugin myself, so bugs directly affect me! 🙂

There is a bug tracker set up at http://dev.wp-plugins.org/newticket, so please report any problems there.