Palm Addicts with a user talking about how they are using their iPod Touch and using applications to memorize and track Scripture reading. Here’s a snippet:

On my Tapwave Zodiac and my Palm TX, I used a free app called Memorize! to, you guessed it, memorize verses from the Bible. Memorize! was quick and offered easy flexibility for using various translations and languages (as long as the appropriate language was loaded on the Palm). I could also add whole sections of Scripture and not just single verses. It could also import verses from Laridian’s MyBible program. On the iPod Touch, I have found two alternatives to Memorize…

Read the rest over at Palm Addicts.

A new mobile application has jumped up on the radar called GM2:8 and it is an audio and video reader that displays Gospel tracts.

MMM was also graced to have a few questions answered by GM2:8. The following was answered by Ray from the GM2:8 effort.

MMM: Can you describe GM28 in two sentences? GM2:8: This is a down-loadable iPod application that can be used to share the gospel with someone who doesn’t speak your language. Anyone can share the gospel with the GM28–it takes no skill at all.

MMM: Is there a cost to using GM28 beyond getting online to download the application or the language files?
GM2:8: The application is completely free.

MMM: Are there plans to release GM28 in other languages or for other mobile platforms?
GM2:8: I would love to release it in other languages, as finances permit us to do so.

MMM: There are only Gospel Tracks available; was licensing a reason for not being able to do Biblical texts as well?
GM2:8: I didn’t consider doing biblical texts, but that is a great idea.

MMM: Can you tell a bit of the history behind the project?
GM2:8: I wanted to witness to the Hispanic driver as I got into a taxi to go the Los Angeles airport, so I said, “Do you speak English?” He answered, “No. Do you speak Spanish?” I only know two words in Spanish–“bueno” and “pronto,” so I replied, “All I know is bueno and pronto.” At hearing those tow words he slammed his foot on the gas and drove at break-neck speed all the way to the airport. I had replied “Good. Fast!” Needless to say, I didn’t get to witness to him, a continual frustration I have had many times over the years with those who don’t speak English. So I began to seriously consider how modern technology could help me overcome the language barrier. After months of experimentation, I came up with the GM28. It solved the problem. It really works.

So there you have it. Another mobile application that assists the proactive believer in Evangelical efforts by answering the problems of language, access, and interactivity that we many times see in these contexts.

To learn more, visit the GM2:8 and 100 Languages websites.

For a list of some other Bible applications, including some which handle audio and content in various languages, check out our Mobile Bibles pages.

Talking about data formats used in mobile/digital bibles is one thing, finding out what publishing houses are on board with moving their translations into digital domains is another. Over at Charisma Magazine, an interesting article has recently been published, and while short in length, the simple fact several Bible societies are coming together to make digital happen:

The businessman whose family’s $70 million gift lifted Oral Roberts University (ORU) out of debt is backing a cooperative effort to digitize Bible content and speed the pace at which translations are completed.

Every Tribe Every Nation plans to initially put 160 existing texts into digital format, although Mart Green said the process for converting several thousand will likely take 20 to 25 years.

“This is driven by the sense of urgency in several areas,” said Green, who became chairman of ORU’s board of trustees three years ago after helping the school pay off $54 million in debt. “What’s front and center for me right now would be mobile. Every hour 1,000 people are downloading the Bible onto their iPhone.”

What is most interesting about this story is that here we have publishers not just being pursued by their customer audiences, but now donors are also getting into the fray making sure that no effort is spared using financial and collaborative tools that would make sure the Bible makes it to every corner of the reading, listening, and communicating world.

In our Future Bibles series, we looked at publishing being effected by digital trends. This report by Charisma Magazine further emphasizes this point. For publishers, the challenge will not just be technical, but also aiding teachers and communities to also digitize their teaching tools and methods to account for this huge digital push.

With the New Year coming around the corner, many people make resolutions and promises for a better year. I don’t make these sort of promises to myself because I will not  keep  them. What I do use this time of year  is to look at where my time is being spent and what kind of connections I have. My very purpose of keeping a Social Media presence is to connect to with people I otherwise would not and to keep the connections I have fresh and alive.

To take this on a personal Christian level, I use Matthew 7:6 as a guide for my time “Caste not your pearl before the swine”. What does this mean?  I cull my connection lists to what  I find to be more meaningful. I know many people take on Twitter as a popularity contest and then use such services as Tweetdeck to tone down the noise of people they do not  want hear. I do not  have time for that. I take this time of year to evaluate what it is I want to hear.  I also need to know that people are listening to what I have to say and that not taking it for granted or advantage of it. This is a great time to  evaluate who is and who should not be my personal space. While I don’t pretend to think the internet is private, I do treat it like I would my home. I don’t have to invite people who I don’t want there.

I also go  through my memberships of forums I belong to. Am I getting out of them what I am putting into them? I had to learn the hard way that my time is limited just like everyone else and I can not give more than I receive. We are all looking for a connection, that is why we  have cultivated these tiny machines. We have social networks at our very finger tips, I feel that this is a  good  time to evaluate if we are connected to something  meaningful to our purpose in life.  I need those connections that challenge and push me further than I went last year, further than I want to go and further than I thought I ever could go.  I need to eliminate the connections that suck up my time and leave me drained. I am better able to give encouragement to the people who need it when I am not watching my pearls being trampled by swine.

I love New Years. No resolutions, just reconnecting with the possibilities that brought me to mobile in the first place.

Being called to be both a pastor and a geek is often difficult. The calling of a pastor frequently places me in the structure of the institutional Church which, despite whatever theological claims an individual congregation makes, is an inherently conservative institution. Churches embrace change and innovation slowly (if at all).

The calling of geek, however, places me in the world of the ever-changing. In the digital world technologies rise and fall at a rapid pace, and the ways people communicate with one another is constantly morphing into new forms. From my dual-calling perspective, I have come to appreciate these two opposing experiences of the world. The institutional church’s slowness to adapt often stems from a concern about the dehumanizing tendencies which comes with technological innovation.

The world of the digital revolution, the realm of the geeks, strives to make human communication the social currency of the 21^st Century. It is not a matter of one being “right” and the other “wrong.”  Rather, it is in the tension between the two callings that I am afforded an opportunity to be a distinctly Christian presence in the world. I call this presence, “technological contemplation.”

Natives, Immigrants, and Aliens – Oh My

Since Marc Prensky first coined the terminology in 2001, language about internet usage has been discussed between the poles of Digital Native and Digital Immigrant.  Natives, are those who have grown up with the presence of computers in their midst, which has changed the way their brains actually process information. Immigrants, on the other hand, are those who remember a time in which computers were not the ever-pervasive tool they are now. As such, their minds don’t process information in the digital world as readily as natives. They have what Prensky calls an “accent.”  The example he uses is the use of e-mail to see if someone got a voicemail message (I actually consider the use of any voicemail at all a digital accent).

Since Prensky first wrote in 2001, the shift has happened again. It’s no longer simply a matter of being a digital native or immigrant. We now have to wrestle with the reality of mobile natives and immigrants. These are people whose primary means of communication is their cell phone or, increasingly, their smart phone.

In this mix of natives and immigrants, I want to posit a third identity – there are aliens among us. Digital, and mobile, aliens do not have accents – they don’t even know the language!  These are people, or organizations, which have rejected the digital and mobile aspects of the communications revolution. Tools like e-mail frustrate them. Cell phones and text-messages tend to frighten them out of their minds. Church institutions make up one of the most populous groups of digital and mobile aliens in our culture. Older churches, in particular, lag behind the curve in the use of technology for communication. Many older (in terms of “years incorporated”) congregations do not even have access to the Internet in their buildings.

As such, tools like e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, texting, and instant messaging are not utilized to keep people connected. These digital aliens continue to use a tool from the 1800’s to communicate (the land-line telephone) and use this tool in a way that hasn’t been popular since the 1990’s (leaving voicemail at home). To digital, and mobile, natives (and immigrants) the efforts of these aliens are often met with a sense of hostility – as though a foreign world were invading their lives.

Crossing the Bridge

This sense of hostility between “native” and “alien” is a serious problem for churches. How can a congregation, which is called to communicate the message of the Gospel, spread the message of Jesus if the tools they use are met with a hostile response (often times from members of their own neighborhoods)? To begin, churches must recognize that that is a divide between the way they are designed to communicate and the way the rest of the culture communicates. Without this spark of recognition, congregations will continue to mark themselves as “aliens.”  This awareness must then lead to actions which enable the message of the Gospel to cross into the world of the mobile native.

Transitioning into action, however, is more than simply taking the tools of mobile natives (and immigrants) in hand and assuming that communication will happen naturally. To communicate effectively in the mobile world three interacting realities must be wrestled with.

First, it must be understood that “natives” of any culture have any number of rules and practices which attend their actions – most of which are not verbally transmitted but are rather learned intuitively. The intuitive nature of these rules makes it difficult for non-natives to discover what they are, as natives have never been forced to describe them!  They are simply, “what you do.”

When churches try to take up the same communication tools which mobile natives use, then, they will inevitably violate some of the rules which guide behavior. At first, natives (and assimilated immigrants) will view these violations as humorous or mild annoyances because they realize that the aliens simply don’t know better. If the church is not sensitive to the lines they are crossing and refuses to learn from past violations, however, mild annoyance can shift to hostility.

Second, churches must understand that taking up new tools of communication is not simply changing the means of communication. We must understand, and embrace, that what communicates well in one cultural setting will not communicate equally well into another!  When a church migrates into the world of mobile connectedness great care must be done to compensate for the drift in meaning from one culture/medium to another. If this care is not taken, a church may very well end up communicating the opposite of what they believe they are communicating. Taking the Gospel into a new communications medium needs a care which is similar to that of translating it into a new language. Time must be spent learning to idioms and grammar which is unique to the mobile world.

Third, churches must learn how to appropriately critique the culture of the mobile world without condemning. As the unspoken rules, idioms, and grammar of new communications tools are discovered Christians must ask, “How are we able to take up these tools within bounds of the culture, while honoring Christ?” It is as we wrestle with these questions, churches can take on a prophetic role, pointing out some of the unforeseen consequences of the mobile culture as a fellow traveler rather than as a voice from “on high.”  In fact, it may be that churches and individual Christians which have wrestled with the mobile world and it’s realities may choose to limit the presence of the technology in their own communities (for example, Twitter fasing).

Calling all Contemplatives

Churches must come to the understanding that, because of the digital and mobile revolutions, they are now missionaries to a foreign culture. The means by which they typically pass information is now as alien to the culture as a foreign language, and must change. This is where technological contemplation is vitally important. The call to cross the chasm between mobile native and alien is not simply a call to immigrate into this new era and pass ourselves off as natives. Rather, it’s call to re-engage the message of the Gospel while simultaneously reflecting on this rapidly changing culture in which we now live.

Churches need contemplatives who are filled with a missionary passion to identify the best of this mobile world in which we live – for that’s where the Gospel is ready to break through.

Wes Allen is the geek-pastor of the Central Baptist Church of Riverton-Palmyra and the Associate Regional Pastor for Ministry and Technology with the American Baptist Churches of New Jersey. He can be reached via Twitter, Facebook, or his blog Painfully Hopeful. He loves Jesus, technology, and the Phillies. He has never been subjected to Vogon poetry.

One of the conversations that I had this past Thanksgiving holiday with a few friends studying in seminary was the idea of the pastor’s library going away – or being greatly diminished – in its current form. A traditional pastor’s office is filled floor to ceiling with commentaries, narratives, resources, and Bibles of countless translations. In some circles, this is probably seen as some metric of validation towards the ability of that pastor to teach (or teach effectively).

With my friend and I standing in front of the Christian resources section of Barnes & Noble this past weekend, I openly stated that this view might be a thing of the past. We might be seeing the last stand of many of the shelves that are noted here. My friend, totally building an impressive library of his own, not only disagreed, but maintained that he’d be the last person purchasing books in order to keep things from going all digital. He admitted that he’s had issues with screens and workflows, and this centers on his perception (as it does my own).

Yet, as I stood/sat there, I wondered. Yes, we have iPads, Nooks, etc. and there’s almost no need to purchase a book at retail given the amount of tools at our disposal to price compare at places such as Amazon – yet, there’s something to be said for that library. That collection of books that commands reflection, contemplation, and usually the kinds of questions that can only be answered when sitting in the midst of just the covers of the mosaic of thought around The Faith.

That being said, the conversation he and I had evolved into not getting rid of all books, but looking for the appropriate context for digital versus print. I wrestle with this often having now an iPad at my use. There are some books (I’ll change term and say collections) that are better in a digital format not because they are contemplative, but because their value is best met when connected to other sources of information. Logos’s library stands out here as an example of what resource material that has a common index and considers that each component is a part of the whole can look like.

Other types of readings might be better left in print. I think about one of the books that I’ve read in the past (The Alchemist). While an excellent book, I don’t read that in the same way that I read The Next Christendom that I’m very comfortable in reading on my iPad. The reflection-like characteristics of The Alchemist in a print mode lends itself better to that type of reading.

Nevertheless, I think some pastors might be better served in investigating and considering ebook readers or tablets*. I’m not sure that keeping the method of how one comes to a reflection or the sources used in making a specific point should sit on a shelf. These links can and should be shared with the community so that discussion around “how” to study also meets the current common question of “what” to study.

In respect to the library, it needs to stay as a place of reflection. But, maybe it needs some better windows (with shades) so that reflection and revelation isn’t anymore held behind a curtain as something mysterious.

*Church Tech Today recently published an article on the current slate of ebook readers and their value to pastors.

Update: Today, Google announced and opened Google Books, a browser-based eBook reading service.

It is always great to see experiments like this from TechSMO. Especially when they can garner additional readers to offline media.

This was a recent project that I did with Southern Seminary. It’s a “tech edition” of one of their major publications The Towers. We used a QR code as the cover graphic and the articles are all themed around the importance of technology. Once scanned, the QR code opens a related video that is optimized for mobile phones. Turns out this was one of the most popular editions they’ve done.

Some of you have talked about using QR codes for bulletins or other print media in your communities, have you taken the jump? And if so, what has been the response?

The Harvard Business Review Blog recently posted a thought-provoking piece on the current Wikileaks situation(s). The thinking within this piece is that this kind of a break in traditionally secure or even private information is the most open challenge yet to the behaviors and thoughts that secrets will remain secrets.

Or, from the other side of the news delivery stream, what if newspapers were invented today? This isn’t as dissimilar a question as Google asked when inntroducing Wave (“what if email were invented today), but also asks us to think about media not just as a construct, but something that effects the context of life around us. There’s an implication to life that technologies always bring forth – and sometimes the questions and answers are easy to see, other times, they require the challenging or opening up of perceptions we’d not ordinarily consider.

Looking mobile in media [ministry], these kinds of situations not only offer a chance for reflection, but also ask of us to consider not just the consumption of media, but its effects in governed and non-governed contexts.

As we look at the ways mobile is pushing out various changes in our lives,* how do you expect the Body to adapt or resist changes which expose or break down barriers that once were (seemed) quite secure? If you will, disruption happens, but what also happens to secrets that are disrupted?

Or, are we making a mountain out of several molehills of compromised behaviors and information? Despite the changes happening in web, mobile, and the industries they touch, will there really be a change at all towards how we manage/secure data or how authorities govern the viewing of the decisions between that data?

*This article requires registration to be read in full.

I’ve always been a technology geek, but I can’t necessarily say the same for my wife. While she’s proficient with a computer, she’s nowhere near as techie as I am, although she’s grown since marrying me.

When we switched to T-Mobile back in 2007, I started off with the T-Mobile Dash (Windows Mobile phone with QWERTY keyboard), but my wife opted for a simple flip phone. After upgrading to the Google G1 in 2009, my wife inherited my Dash (without a data plan). Why did she get the Dash? Well, she was starting to do a lot more texting and saw the benefits and speed of having a full keyboard, so she gladly took my old phone. That was the beginning of upgrading my wife.

Fast forward to earlier this year (2010), and the Dash finally started to show its age by dropping calls & no longer keeping a charge for a good part of the day. With that, my wife started asking me to get her a new phone. The only requirement that she gave me was that it had to have a QWERTY keyboard because she had become accustomed to it & really liked it, although she said she might consider a device with an on-screen keyboard (ala the iPhone & the like). Seeing that we were still on T-Mobile & her wanting a QWERTY, that guaranteed that it was a smartphone, but didn’t leave very much wiggle room outside of a Blackberry or Nokia device, or maybe an Android. I personally liked the idea of a Nokia because I couldn’t bear the thought of my wife having a “better” phone than me (LOL).

Over Thanksgiving weekend, we both got our wish. Having followed the Windows Phone 7 since it was announced, I’d received many emails concerning their phones, including an email that I’d received earlier in the week that I could get the HTC HD7 in a buy 1 get 1 free offer. I also knew they had the Samsung Vibrant (Android) for the same deal (and price), so that was an option too. The only downside to both of these phones is that neither had the physical QWERTY that my wife wanted. Either way, I promised her a new phone and thought the HD7 would fit the bill, so we headed out to the local T-Mobile store in Detroit, where we were for the holiday. To our surprise, they had about 6 or 7 smartphones that they were selling with the buy 1 get 1 free offer, including the Google G2, which I had personally been coveting since I first heard about it.

Even though I wasn’t up for a new phone until next month per our contract (December 26), the representative was nice enough to call customer service, who gave the okay to give me the discount/upgrade a month early; which we needed to do the buy 1 get 1 free deal without adding a new line. So, now my wife & I are both happy. She has her new phone, and I have a new phone too, and the one I really wanted all along.

The nice thing now is that it’s giving me an opportunity to teach my wife a new operating system (Android), and how to use her phone to the best of its abilities. I’ve already shown her how to setup her Facebook account, and all the basics of the phone, including giving her a custom made ringtone. Over the next few weeks I plan on showing her the in’s & out’s so that she’s a proficient Android user.