This has been an extremely busy year working on Scripture App Builder. Chris and his team have been working on the new Progressive Web App (PWA) template for two years. They released the new PWA in SAB 11.2 in March of 2024! However, there were still many missing features. This past summer, they had hoped for 1 or 2 interns to help them with the work. God blessed them with 6 interns to work on implementing these features. One of the interns was Mikayla, our daughter, who is studying Coding: App Development. It was such a joy for Chris to work with her this summer. Thank you for your continuing prayers for our team.
Archives for September 2024
Divine Sovereignty: The Fuel of Death Defying Missions
September 19, 2024 by Leave a Comment
While recently talking with a potential partner, Chris was asked: “Why did you get involved in missions?” He described the different stepping stones in our journey to missions. One that stuck out this time was a quote from a message by David Platt at Together for the Gospel 2012. In the middle of the message (at 18:09), David Platt said:
God involves us in His mission
not because He needs us
but because He loves us and, in His mercy,
He has invited us to be involved in His sovereign design
for the spread of the Gospel to the ends of the earth.
Thank you, Lord, that you love us and invite us to participate in what you are doing to accomplish the spread of the Gospel to the ends of the earth. Thank you, Lord, that technology can be used to speed the translation and distribution of your living Word to the unreached people of the world.
AI Assistant for Scripture Engagement?
September 19, 2024 by Leave a Comment
It’s not enough to translate the Bible; it’s not enough to distribute the Bible. Our desire is to see real Scripture Engagement: people encountering God’s Word in life-changing ways.
Scripture App Builder (SAB) is a tool for Bible translators and language workers to provide Scripture in a format that best meets the needs of the community and helps them engage with the Scripture. One of the challenges for new believers is how can they study the Bible and do that in community?
We have introduced an EXPERIMENTAL feature in SAB 12.0 which allows the person building the app to enable an AI Assistant by providing some predefined tasks that the end user can perform on a whole chapter or selected verses. Here are some example tasks:
- “Give me some Bible study questions”
- “Share some devotional thoughts”
- “Suggest ways to apply this to my life”
- “Explain some key Greek or Hebrew words”
- “Give me an outline of a talk”
- “Write a poem”
- “Show me the main points and structure of this passage”
- “Tell me about the cultural, historical and geographical context”
- “Show how this passage fits into the message of the book”
When the user selects one of these tasks, the app will connect to a configured AI provider. It tells the AI the role it should play and the format of the responses it is looking for: “You are a helpful Christian assistant who believes in the reliability of the Bible, the importance of following Jesus as Saviour and Lord…” It then asks the AI service a question such as “Look at Mark chapter 8 in the Bible and write six discovery-style study questions which can be used in a participatory Bible study group.” The app writes the streamed response to the screen with a disclaimer at the end stating that the answer was generated by an AI assistant and to use its responses with discernment.
What do you think? Would you like to try this out yourself? Contact Chris, and he will get you access to a beta of an app.
