Tuesday, August 28, 2007

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.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

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

Monday, August 13, 2007

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...

Thursday, August 09, 2007

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.

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

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. ;-)