We Need Your Help for Our New Christian Education Initiative

Reformed Forum is calling for volunteer web developers to assist in a new project. We plan to collect and organize our theological resources into course modules or structured collections of media that would better assist people in growing in their knowledge of the bible and its teachings.

Christ the Center began in January 2008 as a way to expose informed Reformed theological conversation to people who otherwise would not have the opportunity. Since those early episodes, Reformed Forum has grown and been given new opportunities to support the Church by helping people grow in their knowledge of the Bible and its teachings.

At the moment, Reformed Forum has published more than 1,000 media resources since its early days just over 6 years ago. We have spoken with many—if not most—of the world’s greatest Reformed scholars on a wide range of biblical and theological topics. As a whole, this media library is invaluable, and it is freely available in its entirety. Nevertheless, its growing breadth and depth has made it difficult to navigate.

We desire to create a new application that would harness the tremendous value of our media library by allowing us to organize our 1,000+ resources into structured course models integrated into a comprehensive knowledge map. Let’s say you want to learn more about the Reformed doctrine of justification. What do you do? At the moment, you can search for justification or browse the justification category on reformedforum.org. That will lead you to many resources on the subject, but where do you begin? Perhaps you don’t have a grasp on regeneration quite yet. In that case, will you be able to take full advantage of the advanced resources on justification?

Our vision is to organize all of our content into an integrated whole so that you can intelligently navigate the riches of Reformed teaching in our archives. In this new system, you would be able to find a course module on justification. You would also be able to identify suggested prerequisites to that course. Once you complete these modules, you would be presented with suggestions for related courses to continue your learning. If desired, the system would track your progress and connect you with others who are learning the same things. Our desire is to provide an intuitive interface for young and old, neophyte and post-doc to learn more about the Bible and what it teaches.

How you can help

First and foremost, we need developers. We are currently designing our backend in Python/Django with a MySQL database. We need skilled UI/UX designers to create a standalone web interface similar to KhanAcademy.org. But since we want the new site to reinforce rather than replace our current site, we also need PHP developers to integrate the new backend with reformedforum.org, which runs on WordPress.

Perhaps the greatest impact can be made in mobile. Seeing that we have a great opportunity to promote Christian education during our commutes and exercise times, we also hope to expand this system into mobile applications using Objective C for iOS and Java for Android.

While developer support is our principal need at the moment, financial support is also needed. Once this project spins up, we will have increased infrastructure expenses, such as application, web, and repository hosting and bandwidth. Please contact us if you can lend a hand.