Dancers celebrating their culture in the Papua New Guinea Highlands on PNG Independence Day, the 16th of September. We serve Papua New Guinea with Bibles on PNG.Bible.

I am happy to announce that a new free and open source Bible study app is available for iOS and iPadOS: AndBible. This Bible study app has long been available for Android devices, but has recently been ported to the Apple ecosystem by some dedicated volunteers. AndBible is one of several Bible study apps that use the Crosswire Bible Society Sword engine. We host a repository for all of those apps on eBible.org. In other words, people can use any of these apps, including AndBible, to download one or more Bible translations from eBible.org and read them as much as they want offline. This is very valuable for people who have limited or expensive Internet access. If you would like to try AndBible (and hopefully boost its ratings so that it is more discoverable in the app stores), please do.

I would like to know what you think of AndBible, and how it compares to your current favorite Bible study app. Your comments could be useful in improving free and open source Bible study apps.

Street signs in Tlingit and English in Hoonah Village, Alaska. How many languages are spoken in the United States of America? See below for the answer.

The last two weeks, I have been very busy increasing the capacity of our Bible web servers to meet increased demand, etc. I’ll spare you the details in this email, but here is a high level view of what I do:

Work on the World English Bible so that a quality modern English Bible translation can be distributed freely by anyone without copyright hassles.
Digitally distribute Bible translations in many languages for free that other Bible translators allow me to distribute.
Freely help and mentor Bible translators and Bible ministries with consulting, typesetting, etc.

This work is made possible by the prayers and support of our partners and the great God we serve. Thank you for being a part of this ministry.

Thank God that

Hurricane Nolo didn’t disrupt our Bible web sites.
I was able to shift our Bible web site traffic to a mainland data center before fringe effects of Hurricane Nolo knocked out our home office data center connection.
God has provided enough through our partners to have good backup equipment and a backup Internet connection.
Bible web traffic demand has increased enough to crash our servers repeatedly, but by adding another server, a load balancer, and doing some software optimization, we are keeping up again.
We have awesome prayer and financial partners making our ministry to the world possible.
God’s Word never returns to Him without doing what He sent it to do. (Isaiah 55:11)

Prayer Requests

That I would be able to efficiently update the metrics counting software to work with the new, faster server configuration. (The current readings on that page are not updating due to an incompatibility with the new, faster web server software log format being different.)
Pray for provision, protection, health, and wisdom for all who volunteer their time working on Bible translation, Bible study software, and Bible web sites.
Wise balancing of competing time demands.
Supernatural productivity for me and our volunteers.
Wisdom to know which projects to take on, and which ones are best left for someone else.

We don’t charge for Internet access to the Holy Bible in any language. We rely on donations to fund the costs of our ministry, since asking people to pay for access to the Holy Bible is not a very effective evangelistic strategy, not to mention impractical for most tribal language groups. If the Lord prompts you to donate, please do. May God bless you

Photos above by Michael Johnson.

Answer: The Ethnologue lists 241 living languages spoken in the U. S. A., 199 of which are indigenous.