Tranquility Base here; the Eagle has landed...

...but not without a few ruffled feathers!!

We are now settled with our new host and this really gives us oodles of space to work in. The new style website is up and running and most (hopefully all...) the kinks have been ironed out. The next exercise is to think through how we can make the site 'higher profile'. I am not into competitive things but I wouldn't have spent the labours (or other people's labours) on the site if I didn't think we had something that ought to be made available. My 'guru' tells me that one of the most efficient ways of making the site more conspicuous is if folk 'link' to it. So if you have a site of your own or some influence over a site please consider putting in a link to www.biblebase.com

I have oodles (please note this technical term for future reference) of tapes which need to be digitised and lots of ideas for new projects. A close friend tells me I am good a 'starting' projects! In particular I want to get some of the materials from the Church Life School online; this is really unique content and I think could be particularly useful for folks in other cultures as one of the themes of the CLS was to distinguish between culture and Christianity.

Another growth area is likely to be M-other Tongues. This is a section given over to providing materials in other languages which have been created in the course of visits to other places. If you have friends who are German, Spanish, Polish, Romanian, Russian, or Greek speaking please point them in this direction. In the UK at present we have oodles of Polish migrant workers and I would love to see some of these materials in theirs hands.

It would also be a help to know which parts of the site you visit most frequently. Can you let us know which parts you think are helpful? More later... as always His/yours Ron.

Rare Vintage Recording discovered

In the mid 1960s I was able to meet and listen to W F P Burton, aka Willie Burton. He was already a legend in his own lifetime. Born in 1886 he went as an independent missionary to the Congo (now Zaire) in 1915 in the company of Jimmy Salter (who later married the daughter of Smith Wigglesworth). When he relinquished his responsibilities in the work 50 years later it had grown to hundreds of churches. His missionary work saw notable miracles and thousands of first time responses to the gospel.

The churches he founded were simple and indigenous. He refused to allow any titles other than 'elders' and 'deacons'. If you want an insight into apostolic missionary work get a copy of "God Working with Them"; the story of the first 18 years of pioneer mission in the Congo.

He was a man with a delightful sense of fun with children but with a steel backbone. My first experience was to hear him preaching in our Anglican church pulpit against the errors of infant sprinkling! He was a man of exceptional natural talents; an engineer, scientist, artist, linguist, musician, bible scholar. He was also a man of powerful spiritual gift. He conscioulsy dedicated it all to God and when he passed into glory, in 1971, he was travelling with all his wordly possessions in two suitcases; one for clothes and the other for his books.

I will see if I can 'dust down' this old recording and make it a little easier on the ear, but this is a must-hear opportunity to hear him telling his own story in 1968 in Staffordshire, UK. If you want to catch the flavour of those old time Pentecostals be sure to listen to Willie Burton's Testimony

We have a problem, Houston...

This famous laid-back communication of the Apollo 13 mission has been much in use over the last few days.

We have switched host-providers... twice... in that time and even now there a few kinks to be ironed out. Our current provider is based in 'Houston' hence our echo of the phrase.

Gary has been looking over their shoulder at every twist and turn of this saga but we are 'getting there'! The discussions forums are now up and running again. The Audio and pdf files should be there soon and the menues to follow. The front page isn't looking quite as swish as it should but the great news is that we have oodles of space and download capacity.

Please do remember us as you pray. We have stacks of materials that we want to make available and now we have the space to do it... now all we need is the time.

Did you know that we have all the time to do all that God wants us to do? We rest on thee and in thy name we go...

meanwhile back at the ranch...

We hit some insurmountable problems with our first host and have retreated a little the worse for wear. We are now in process of trying to get our stuff onto yet another host server. This seems to be going better but we have almost 15GB of files to transfer and this seems to be a slow process.

In the meantime please bear with us. The usual BibleBase URL will take you to our start up page with the new host so there is not much to look at there. I will do another blog when it is all up and running.

In the meantime you can be thinking about some of those topics... back soon, we trust.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible...

Some will remember the early days of television with their many breaks in transmission and a static printed card which carried the title of this blog.

Normal service...
If you have been trying to take part in the discussions forum you will have found that it would not accept your posts. This is not a clever theological filtering system for rejecting rogue contributions but the consequence of having filled our quota on our server. The various parts of Biblebase have hit the ceiling for what we are allowed and so most things are quietly stalled at present. You should still be able to download audio and pdf files at the present time.

...as soon as possible?
I am in process of switching to another provider which will give us ample disk storage for the foreseeable future. Hopefully this will take place in the next day or two and I will do another blog then.

In the meantime my apologies for your frustrations... although frustration is always a call to prayer, so even this need not be wasted. ;-)

...and now with musical accompaniment

For the duration of the New Life Conference I am going to 'mirror' the morning meditations on Biblebase. If you would like to start your day with a bible meditation on 'the New Creation mirrored in the Old' you can visit Morning Meditations

This facility will only be available during the duration of the conference and will be taken off-line on 10th August.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

Well, February 2005 at any rate and in a place called Reading in the UK... I launched a concept on the unsuspecting world... New Covenant Workshops.

The idea was to combine a day seminar with the power of a discussion group on the web. It was a modest beginning and it has taken some time to get a video of the event online, but its here at last. The two teaching seminars are now online and I will add the Q&A session and the evening meeting as soon as I can.

You will find a link at
Sin: its cause and cure.

You can then join any discussions on the discussion forums. The presentation and presenter are not likely to win any oscars but there is a beginning here of a vital topic and one that is fundamental, in my understanding, to the nature and glory of the New Covenant.

Joshua Series

Last year (2006) at the Rora House Conference Centre in Devon, UK I began a series of messages on the book of Joshua. It is good to remember that Jesus was never called Jesus by Mary but was called "Joshua". I can't help imagining what it was like for him as a child as he heard the stories of Joshua. Did he begin to sense his own destiny in the story of the man whose name meant "Jehovah-Saviour"?

As so often happens I got to the end of the 2006 Conference with more than I started with and had the thought at the back of my mind for a whole year that I would return to the book of Joshua.

This May (2007) I shared another Conference, this time with David Medlock, and returned to my subject of the the 'Book of Jesus' (ie Joshua). True to type I arrived at the end of this conference too with more than I began with, so we will have to see what happens next year... DV.

If you would like to listen to both series you can find them here, and if you want to ask any questions or discuss any of the sessions you can join us on the Biblebase Discussion Forums.

The Online Bible School

If you have taken a look at the Biblebase Online Bible School you will have seen that one of my ideas was to introduce 'visiting lecturers'. It is a fiction, of course. It is just a way of bringing other men and gifts into the Online Bible School resource.

One of the sections in the Biblebase Online Bible School is Pastoral Theology. This is my favourite area of theology and has to do with the way that our beliefs affect the way in which we live our lives, in the world, in our families and in the church. In the area of Family Life one vital area is that of marriage; its foundation, purpose and provisions. Enter 'John Piper' as a 'visiting lecturer'. Clicking on Pastoral Theology will take you to a menu and then choosing "Marriage, Christ and Covenant" will take you to a series of that name from John Piper.

This series is an uncompromising statement of biblical truth and one which thrills me to hear. I strongly recommend this series and will be glad to hear your reactions in our Discussion Forum.

I want to 'invite' other 'visiting speakers' to our Online Bible School so if you have any recommendations please let me know.

their sound went out into all the earth...

...a bit of an overstatement at present but this represents another long cherished thought.

The saints are scattered in many places and in some there is little opportunity for fellowship or to be under the 'sound' of the Word of God. I want to add to this small beginning from other preachers and teachers and give the folks in other countries access to another precious resource.

Over many years friends and colleagues have traveled to many countries to preach and teach and this page is the beginning of a project to gather some good grain into accessible garners.

At present it is mostly from Poland but do watch this space... the sound went out...

The Legacy: Christie Costigan

This is something of a quite different nature to anything I have put on my sites previously.

In 2006 Christie Costigan 'went home'. She was the daughter of Sandy and Beth Robertson and had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. In the February of 2005 she had given a testimony to the exercises of heart she had passed through since her diagnosis. She left a husband and two young childred ...and an amazing legacy.

That was her own description. Faced with the prospect of an early death her prevailing thought was of her life's significance to others. She wanted to leave a legacy; and she has. This short testimony is a credit to the God she loved and served.

You will be moved and greatly blessed by The Legacy

Workman Workshops Launch

One of my original ideas for this website was to reproduce some work which had been done in what I called Workman Workshops. These were occasional weekend Bible Schools where we studied some Bible book or topic together. I prepared take-away notes and the sessions were recorded with a view to some kind of publication later.

I have now completed the first of these and if you would like to see and hear more please go to Workman Workshops and choose "Studies in Colossians". You will then be able to download, freely, both the notes and the recorded sessions. This is not swish professional stuff but I think it will be good enough to be servicable.

Please do let me know what you think. I will create another section on the Discussion Forum specifically for Workman Workshops so please feel free to ask questions or to comment.

Keeping a promise

It has been a long time since I added to the Biblebase blog but this is to keep a promise. One of the 'departments' of Biblebase is Workman Workshops, these are units of studies which were prepared for various groups at different times. I promised to let you know when I added more units to the list, so here we go...

In 1995 I did a residential Week-End Bible School at Rora House in Devon. The topic was Paul's letter to the Colossians. I want to add these kinds of resources to the site and I have created a 40 page pdf file of the notes which accompanied the studies. I want to get the audio files up as soon as possible but in the meantime if you would like to see what we have available so far...

please try Workman Workshops and then choose the "Studies in Colossians" option. More soon, hopefully.