About our Page ads

You might be wondering why I have these ads on my pages. The bottom line is that we need help in sustaining our expenses for this website, and I believe that it is just that people who download and use the modules that I make should cooperate economically with me in this endeavor.

Typically it takes me from 20 minutes to 45 minutes to make a module (once I have it identified and downloaded to my computer). This is basically formatting time that it takes to format a module. Some have footnotes that I feel I want to make links to, so that kind will take longer.

After I format a module, I go back and skim read over the text rapidly for OCR errors or Bible texts that didn't versify correctly.

Some books, those from archive.org or especially, are old out of copyright books that are OCR (Optical Character Recognition technology) that takes an image scan and deciphers the letters and words and makes a text file out of it. Without this, the text of these modules are not searchable.

Typically I have to reformat a great amount to prepare one of these types of books/modules. If there is Greek or Hebrew words in the text, then I have to hand enter these words because they never come across correctly. Some books have extensive Greek and Hebrew and are still waiting to be made.

Even English books have a lot of words that the OCR didn't correctly identify, and in some cases I know what that word is without having to check the original text, but a lot of times I don't which means I have to go to the archive.org website open a PDF or Image file of the book, find the right page, and look for the word(s) that are incorrect. Since the page breaks and placement on the page is totally different from the OCR text version and the original image, this can sometimes take some time. A 500 page book where I have to check and correct words two or three places every page takes a lot of time to prepare.

After that point Costas (THEWORD program developer) has given me a block of module identifiers which he wants me to fill out the information on each module (some 15 fields).

Once the module is made, I need to make the installer program for that module, and then I need to go into my HTML editor, bring up the pages that will mention the module (a topic page like Bibliology, the author's last name page, and the news page), change all of these pages to show the new module, and then upload the changed pages to my website which can take sometimes 10 minutes or more just for that.

All of this means you get the benefit, but I pay for it with my time and energy. Up until June 2009, I had a part time secretary that helped me with some of this stuff. My point in making these ads is to remind you that I am here and have economic needs.

Gal 6:6 Let him that is taught in the word communicate unto him that teacheth in all good things.

There is a spiritual obligation for those who benefit from a ministry to cooperate economically with that minister. Personally I don't like, nor believe any not local church ministry is a valid ministry, and I think that the people in that local church should support their own ministers, and that should be their principle income. The exception is for a true NT missionary, which is an individual like Paul who goes to other countries, announces the gospel, and organizes those converts God gives him into local churches which support him as well as local churches "back home" (but the church at Antioch didn't give regularly to Paul in the first part of his ministry Phil 4:15, but it was the churches that Paul organized and was the product of his hands that supported him).

Notwithstanding the general principle of a man living of his labors stands as a foundational Biblical principle.

Luke 10:7 for the labourer is worthy of his hire.

1Cor 9:14 Even so hath the Lord ordained that they which preach the gospel should live of the gospel.

This being the case, every Christian should just pay for the labors of others he benefits from or takes advantage of.

These modules represent long hours of work for me. They are not easy to find, nor to format, nor to maintain. My principle interest is in having these resources for my own ministry, and I very well could have all of this invisible and unknown to the general Christian world, and the ministers of Christ. It is my feeling that God would have me make available these resources to anyone who wishes to better study the Bible, so I do so at a cost to me.

Why don't you sell these modules?

I don't think that the commercialization of the ministry and the services ministers provide to the world is of God but of the devil. See my discussion of this here, DCox: Why my resources are free

What do you think is "just pay" for your labors?

I visited Logos.com and saw some videos of the Logos program on Youtube.com. They say that their program provides $10,000 worth of books to the user. I don't own the program Logos, but from the videos of how to use Logos, it seemed like overkill and very complicated to sort through the resources. I estimate that I have around 800 modules from e-Sword I am converting, and since starting with THEWORD in April of 2009, I have made at least 300 modules for theword that I don't have in e-Sword (these are waiting for formatting and checking, Webpage, uploading, etc). So that is around 1200 modules/books. If we take an average cost per book of $5, then the value of my module library should be around $6000. I am offering it for free.

What I would think is just reward (well maybe not "just", but I will accept this), is simply that you do me the favor of showing somehow your appreciation. If I were living near you, and came to your home and gave you all of this for free, would you think it unjust or excessively overbearing to just invite me and my family to a meal? I hope not. So since I live in Mexico and cannot travel to where you are, just send me the equivalent of taking me and my family out to McDonalds. That today here in Mexico is around $5-$7 per person, or about $25-30 for my family. Is that unreasonable of me? If everybody that uses my resource library would do that once a year (every six months would be even better), I would be happy.

Maybe before the Lord in heaven you should think that if you minister much better for the Lord and for the people of God, and that advantage that you have is a result of the labors of David Cox, and Costas Sterigou (which I don't have any relation with him except I use his program, and you should donate something similar what you donate to me to him), then maybe on judgment day, God will want you to donate more than $30 a year.

If you want to donate, visit our donate page to see how to get money to us.

"Aren't you a missionary so you are rich?" No.

Pastors who have seen missionaries come and go through their churches know that most missionaries make great sums of money. This is true in general, but in our case it is not. We feel that the biblical method of missions is a man of God being sent out under the authority of a local church. Mission boards suck off millions of dollars from the work of missions every year, and after having spent 15 years under a mission board that did little to nothing FOR my ministry, and caused great disturbances (spiritual, economic, and emotional) to me, my family, and my ministry, we decided to leave the mission board situation permanently. This is not an issue of rebellion. It is a issue of unjust and unfair domination. The Roman Catholic church is what we fight more than anything here in Mexico, and I have fought much with Mexican Catholics that the RC church has unjustly usurped the authority that God gave only to local independent autonomous churches. It is hypocritical of me (and I realized this and fixed the situation) because I refuse the authority of the Pope over me, but accept the unilateral absolute without any discussion authority of a mission board over me. The issue is the same. When the mission board starts sending out dictates of what we will and will not teach in our churches, what practices we will and will not do or allow, then I have a conflict. One of the main issues for me was that of not allowing divorced men in the pulpit in our church. I had taught this (that a divorced man is disqualified from the ministry) for years, and so the issue was not what they told me to do, but the fact that they are the authority over me and our local church, and I have no recourse nor comment when they tell me to do something.

As such being an independent missionary under a local church (see our donation page for contact information), our support fell from 65% of what it was at that time, to around 20%. We have it back up to around 40-50% (really I stopped using all that dumb support level stuff a long time ago). We make around $2000/month on good months. Recently our support has fallen from this because of the economic crisis. I was paying for our church secretary's salary, our literature expenses, and our church locale's monthly rent by myself as added economic loads on us. In September 2009, I was bitten by a cat visiting one of our members, and went to the hospital for a week, and almost lost my right arm in the infection that doubled the size of my arm. They operated and opened two large holes in my arm above my elbow (which they left open and didn't stitch either hole up), and that drained the fluid. That cost me about the equivalent of all of last year's income, and we lost our health insurance years back because I am diabetic.

As a consequence of all of that, our church here on the field has started giving more (we only have about 30 core people and some are single divorced mothers and others unemployed), but they are covering the rent of the church, we released the church secretary, and the offerings are covering the church expenses much better now. But I am still saddled with a debt to the hospital which I have only paid half of so far.

No I am not rich. I don't have much income, and I don't have money laid up for years and years. We own no property (house, building, land, etc) anywhere, and my only property is a 2000 Dodge Caravan, and our household furniture. I joke with my wife that we are working on a reverse to zero plan. That is, when I die, my total economic value of possessions will come down to zero at the point of my death. I am trying not to do that, but that is what things look like from my point of view. We lose money every year.

My priority and concern is not to get rich in this world but the next. Even though I will not see hardly any benefit in this life of my spiritual labors, in heaven I will maybe get a small reward for all of God's ministers that I have added something to their ministry through my work in e-Sword and THEWORD. That is sufficient for me to continue on, and if nobody donates anything to us, that is fine. I will wait for my reward until heaven.

Why images of food?

People are attracted to good things and are repelled by bad things. When you get a bill from the light company, you normally are not the happiest you have ever been. To me, the food images attract the eye, and people will read something under a picture of some attractive food. If I put, "You owe me", then hardly anybody will read that. Besides that, I like to eat, and being diabetic and on diets, I cannot eat a lot of what I want to eat, so at least I can look at it!

visits since July 14, 2009