I’ve been working on a Bible Reading Plan app for Churches that have a Subplash Church app. I have plans beyond just Subplash usage, but that is my immediate need, so that is what I’m focusing on.
However, I have a full-time job and 3 kids among a host of other things that lead to the typical “busy life”. So I’m not making fast enough progress with the app to be useful to my church’s immediate need of creating our next Bible reading plan for the fall.
Introducing Redeemer Bible Reading (.info)
I already have a site that hosts our static reading plan file that our Subplash app needs to generate the Bible Reading Plan feed. So I decided to just update that to look nicer and be more useful beyond just hosting the static file.
I’m using 11ty and DecapCMS to build the site and Netlify to host it. You can check it out here: https://redeemerbiblereading.info/.
I can now easily break down the week-by-week plan I get from one of our elders to a day-by-day plan to use in our app. I created a page so humans can view the plan and added the ability to have alternate/key chapter readings for those who struggle to get through books like Leviticus. When you give a plan a start date it will display the actual dates for the days. When you mark a plan as current it will also be built out to https://redeemerbiblereading.info/current/ so that our Subsplash app won’t have to be pointed to a different location to get the next Bible reading plan.
The Future
Right now everything is just statically built pages that we can reference for ourselves. Which, really, is all we need. But this is just phase 1.
Phase 2 is open-sourcing the code for the website and creating a tutorial for other churches to set this up for themselves. It’s not that complex and it beats having to create a spreadsheet to send off so someone else can make a file to send back to you so you can host it yourself anyways. If you need to make a change, you can actually do it yourself without the back and forth and without touching XML, and immediately see the results in your app!
Phase 3 will be to get the app going so this can be a generalized and shared experience. You won’t have to set it up yourself, you’ll just have to create an account. Insert marketing blah blah blah. It won’t fix your life; it just may make one small part a little easier.
Phase 4 will be to make the app its own thing that isn’t just focused on generating files for Subsplash apps. Create, read, check off, and share all from the app. But there’s no point in going into details now. We’ll get there when we get there.
For now, if you want to know what Redeemer Church of North Santa Rosa is reading, check out Redeemer Bible Reading or follow along on the app.