Have had a few conversations recently where me and a few close friends were talking about topics in Scripture. In one case, there was a sermon of a friend that we were taking a look at. In the other case, a bro and I were talking about a passage in a book (print) that he owned and I didn’t. In both cases, sharing our perspectives was exciting and infuritating.

First Sermon Feedback

In the first instance, a friend asked me to take a look and give feedback to her first written sermon. It was short and didn’t need much but to be placed in an email right? Well you see, this was also something being submitted to a professor for a class she was teaching. And at least because I received it inline via email, I understood that the system that she was using to submit the paper wasn’t able to facilitate people outside of that network/school looking at the same digital copy that the professor saw.

So, I got a copy via email, and therefore replied via email. No highlighting, no hyperlinks to other resources, just a plain text reply. Another friend came into the feedback loop and his replies were of course in other emails, some private to her and another shared with us all. But again, the conversation was all out of wack with anyone involved needing to mentally manage different threads of the conversation.

Chafer and Systematic Theology

Another brother and I were on Google Talk talking and he mentioned about a portion of Chafer’s Systematic Theology that he was investigating. The passage was familiar to me from my youth and I asked if there was a snippet available for me to take a look at that would be able to help me see things as he read them – thereby keeping my experiences from being primary in how I’m viewing his points. I asked for him to send me the snippet – surly the Bible software that he was using was able to do that much.

For one, it wasn’t. He sent me the snippet in a Google Doc. This takes the text out of the publisher’s environment, and now we are discussing the text in a manner that neither the publisher, developer of the Bible software company, or even my bro, could easily refer to that later when we resume the discussion. He’ll have to have two apps open (browser and the Bible app) and I’ll be in the browser looking only at the snippet of text.

Exciting and Infuriating

This is a problem. There’s way too much of a strain on people to have to share anything. And the pain we ignore because “this is the only way we know how to do it.”

Don’t get me wrong, it was great to be chatting with two people in two different time zones, and across multiple devices, on the depth of life to be uncovered in Scripture. If anything, this reaffirms that digital and connected spaces are great areas with which to do these kinds of conversations and studies.

But man, to have to slice-and-dice content, to have closed systems or processes that don’t allow authors to be able to re-resource their works to other audiences, that’s painful. Books like Chafer’s Systematic Theology should be operating in an open and easily source-findable environment so that people can access a snippet but not deprive publishers, developers, and authors of their compensation. I think of Amazon’s Kindle or Google Books, where you can send someone directly to a page, or a snippet of text, but they will not get the whole book without paying for it. There is no excuse that some of the larger tomes of knowledge aren’t done this way.

It was also great to be on IM and Google Docs with a brother on this. This makes sense for too many reasons, and why my friend’s school might not have allowed for something like this. We were in the same document, and I could highlight and link to reasons for my comment. They could see the changes, make adjustments, and then just leave it there for other eyes to see, or even for the professor to see how they came to their conculsions after not just sourcing textual references, but real persons that can be “googled.” What about that kind of discussion and learning isn’t where we should be?

But that’s not the case. We deal with attachments, document formats, publisher’s rights on viewing versus sharing, and reader applications which might not be compatible with the book that I’m using. Aren’t we done with striving in a direction that doesn’t take advantage of the tools that are before us? Or, are we not motivated enough to change the behaviors that have somehow ensnared us?