New Church Bible Study Website Project

Pittsburgh Society Adopts a new "Internal Sense of the Word" Web Project

• People use Google and other search engines to look for the meaning of the Word about 130,000 times every day.
• The most popular Christian Bible Study sites get more than one million visits a day. Every day.
• They don’t get to see the true internal sense. But they would like to.

So, some Pittsburghers are leading an effort to develop a New Church Bible Study site, for evangelization. Brian and Steve David are spearheading a new project to create a New Church Word-Study website, in which the internal sense of the Word is presented in a format like commentaries in other Christian Bible Study websites. The Society's executive committee has agreed to provide a home for the project while it is being incubated. Brian and Steve are working with ex-Pittsburgher Chuck Ebert, New Zealand native Ian Thompson, Andy Heilman and Roy Odhner from the Kempton Project, Rev. George McCurdy, Rev. David Lindrooth, General Church webmaster Rob Andrews and others.

Update as of 7/18/2011: The Internal Sense project is moving along well. The Glencairn Foundation has provided startup funding, and the project has gotten a lot of interest throughout the church. Many people have expressed interest in helping to explain stories from the Word, based on the internal sense as presented in the Writings, and Brian's working with them to set up that process. Steve's been working on database development, importing the text of the Word and the Writings, and indexing them together. There's not much to see yet, but there is a Facebook page where we're keeping people up to date: New Christian Bible Study Page

• A cover letter requesting donations.
• The New Christian Bible Study Project - A Proposal.
• This is a PDF file showing sample website pages.

Here are some draft User Interface designs:

Here's an example Home Page:

Here's an example view in which the user is reading a passage from Swedenborg's Writings that relates to "beginnings":

Here's an example view in which the user is reading a passage from Swedenborg's Writings that relates to "beginnings":

Here's a view in which the user is looking at the correspondences of key terms in Genesis 1, with the internal sense explained in the right hand column: