Berean Bible Study is a great, bare bones electronic bible program. It comes loaded with the ESV. The software is simple, intuitive, and small enough to load directly onto a usb flash drive (my key chain). This is a great single minded tool that allows a good reading platform and searchable ESV where ever you are, regardless of internet availability.
I am not impressed by the amount LifeWay “gives back” to the Cooperative Program. My church budget is dwindling through increasingly higher priced materials that are increasingly not applicable to my small church situation. Don’t get me started on the insane shipping and handling fee structure. LifeWay privileges large churches with multiple specialized ministries that can be planned far in advance. I am starting to understand the voices at the last few convention meetings calling for an increased focus and applicability for the small churches.
Rather than LifeWay the For-Profit Megalith donating a few extra dollars to the missions fund, I’d like to see LifeWay the SBC Agency Denominational Publishing House serve the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention by helping churches like mine perform local missions with high-value low-cost outreach and education materials.
It is getting to the point from a cost/benefits perspective where it no longer makes sense to support LifeWay. It is now worth my time to shop around for the best curriculum and best materials for the best price. Problem is, I have generations of people trained to privilege LifeWay out of denominational loyalty. Now, if I want to make changes, I’ve got to train and educate my congregation on why LifeWay no longer delivers value for our stewardship dollars. This puts me into the position of encouraging Cooperative Program style denominational commitment while denigrating an associated agency. I do not have a full complement of lifetime Southern Baptists - our folks come from all over - and this mixed message creates confusion and lowers overall enthusiasm.
I thought there was supposed to be this big LifeWay revolution under Rainer. But the website is still hard to search and navigate, the prices are still high, the kitch is still strong, and the curriculum still draws complaints of biblical insufficiency and non-applicability from my teachers. Perhaps it takes longer than I think to resolve some of this. If so, it would be nice to see some Baptist Press about what is actually going on in Nashville that might give some of us out on the frontier some hope. When the president “co-writes” a book called Simple Church, you might expect his organization to be slightly less byzantine and quite a bit more responsive to the many small congregations whose money it takes and whose denominational name it carries.
