Collaborative Bible Study Materials

The Internet makes large-scale collaboration possible, with Wikipedia as Exhibit A. Theopedia and others have tried to do something similar for theology and commentary.

But sometimes smaller-scale ideas can be just as productive, as in the area of personal or family Bible study.

For example, Kletos at Amor at Labor proposes a collaborative project for the Lutheran blogosphere:

Here’s the idea: 30 days of Old and New Testament readings appropriate for family devotions that teach a scaffold of the entire witness of the Scriptures with Christ at the center.

The rest of the post details his idea and provides examples of what he’s planning.

What’s interesting is that he doesn’t want to produce the sum of all Bible studies, the way a large wiki-style project would. With a more-modest goal and the prospect of simple collaboration using Google Docs, he hopes to produce a Bible study appropriate for family devotions. A few years ago he might have produced a similar study on his own and used it with his family, perhaps sharing it with a few others in his church.

Now he can not only publish the Bible study for everyone—he can solicit people’s help before he’s even done with it. The barriers to entry for managing a project of this scale have fallen so far that anyone with both passion and commitment can produce and make available something potentially helpful to Christians everywhere.

We expect that other microprojects of this sort will someday become an accepted way of coordinating Bible study and devotions. Homeschool networks, for example, can use (and are probably already using) this type of technology to manage collaboration among geographically separate students.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 9:11 am and is filed under Technical. Both comments and pings are currently closed.