Developing Closer Relationships with Bible Colleges & Seminaries

One of my aims in the coming months is to continue to develop my relationship with Bible Colleges and Seminaries around the world. I hope do do this in a number of ways:

1) A large number of organisations currently allow me to use their logos and weblinks on my site homepages under the heading "Site supported and recommended by:". This does not imply financial support (see 3 below) or that the organisation necessarily endorses all the content on the sites, simply that it considers the sites useful to its students. If you have the authority to grant permission for an organisational logo to be used in this way please contact me.

2) Many Bible College/Seminary websites list on-line resources that they recommend to their students. I would like to encourage more to link to the Theology on the Web sites. I would also like to see their library pages linking the the tables of contents of online journals. Many of these journals are not available elsewhere on-line and are now difficult to find in paper copies.

3) Very few colleges are currently in a position to consider either sponsorship or advertising on the sites, but I would be very happy to hear from those who could. I currently have only 3 people who support financially the sites regularly - out of around 1 million visitors per annum. Building a healthy foundation of regular financial support is vital the the Project's future. I have more than enough material being offered to me for digitisation to go full time. I currently work on the sites in my spare time in addition to my full-time job. For those not in a position to support financially there are a number of other options.

Have You Caught the Vision?

A friend recently suggested that I make approaches to grant making trusts in the United Kingdom in order to raise sufficient funding to begin working on my websites full-time. This grant funding would be partial and short-term, given in the expectation that income generated by donations to the websites would rise as they grew and developed. I have to seriously ask myself whether there is sufficient support out there to make my goal of going full-time a realistic one, given that out of over a million visitors the sites receive each year only three support them regularly financially (which is fewer than last year).

For this reason I would like to know how many of my visitors would consider supporting me regularly if I were to commit myself to making these websites my full-time ministry. I am not looking to donations now - just some sort of idea what level of support people are willing to give. After all if no one is willing to fund this kind of work it seems pointless to keep on asking. If you would like to make you views known you can e-mail me at rob(at)biblicalstudies.org.uk - remember to replace the (at) with an @.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank for Your Support

A big thank you to all those who support the work on the websites, especially to "Reader" who anonymously sent an Amazon.com Gift certificate this morning. It is greatly appreciated.

Your Prayer Support Requested for Theology on the Web

It has been almost 9 years since the launch of the first of my "Theology on the Web" sites and they now receive around a million visitors each year around the globe. In order to take their development on to the next stage I would like to gather a group of people around me who share the vision (as stated on their homepages) and who are prepared to support myself and my family in prayer. I have therefore have set up an mailing list for the purpose of sharing prayer requests with supporters.

You can subscribe to this list by sending an e-mail to:

listserver(a)robibrad.demon.co.uk [remember to substitute a @ for (a) ]

with the subject: subscribe supporters

Year End Review

From time to time it is useful to review what work remains outstanding - especially as more is being added on a weekly basis. The following listing gives some idea of what material is likely to appear on my websites during the next year.

I am particularly grateful to those who have taken out PayPal subscriptions to support this site recently. This helps towards achieving my aim of being able to work on the websites full-time.

Material Currently Under Negotiation with Copyright Holders(s):

Tables of Contents

Crux

Scottish Bulletin on Evangelical Theology

Bibliographies

Donald Wiseman

G.B. Caird

Articles

Articles by Donald Wiseman (various sources)

Material in Preparation

Bibliographies

Carl Armerding (almost ready)

John Barton Payne

Tables of Contents

Anvil (to be finalised in the next few weeks)

Bibliotheca Sacra

Bulletin of the John Rylands Library

Eternity

The Harvester

Review & Expositor

The Witness

Articles

Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society (complete run of issues Vols 1-11 in progress)

Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester (all of F F Bruce's articles)

Canadian Journal of Theology (various articles)

Evangelical Quarterly (various articles)

Evangelical Review of Theology (various articles)

Faith & Thought (various articles)

Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute (various articles)

Vox Evangelica (complete series in progress)

Books

Sir William Ramsay by W. Ward Gasque (awaiting copy from British Library)

NT Interpretation (edited by I.H. Marshall)

Reconciliation and Hope (Essays in Honour for Leon Morris)

Christ the Lord (essays in Honour of Donald Guthrie) - on hold as IVP are charging £30 per chapter for use of this work!

E.J. Young's PhD. Thesis - delayed due to the large anount of handwritten Greek and Hebrew text in the footnotes

A mid-year update on site development and support

In an earlier post I shared my hope that the Theology on the Web sites would eventually generate sufficient income to allow me to spend more of my time developing them. One way that I hoped that this would happen was by selling advertising space to selected UK Bible Colleges. With this in mind I wrote to 20 colleges in mid-February offering advertising space and suggesting several other ways in which they might like to support site development. Although two colleges initially showed some interest in advertising neither has to date followed through. I have, however, received considerable help from two others, London School of Theology and All Nations. Both have provided me with numerous photocopies of articles free-of-charge - for which I am extremely grateful.

Over the last two months I have spent time developing table of contents for a number of evangelical journals, Evangelical Quarterly, European Journal of Theology, Journal of Transactions of the Victoria Institute, Faith and Thought and the Caribbean Journal of Evangelical Theology. I see this as essential preparation for my future plans to make many of the articles themselves available. None of these table of contents currently available on-line to those who have no access to academic databases.

I appreciate Matt Dabb's words of support and the response I have received from a host of others to my requests for bibliographic data. Finally, a word of thanks to the authors and publishers of the books and articles that I have reproduced who have kindly allowed their hard work to be made available to all comers at no cost.

Coming soon, Vox Evangelica Vol. 9 - now in final proof-reading.