This is Your Bible.com (TIYB) is nearing completion of its fourth year of Internet outreach. To date, the site has attracted nearly 12,500 correspondence course students from over 150 countries. These students work with 538 Christadelphian tutors from 20 countries. Each month, TIYB draws between 7,000-8,000 individual visitors, viewing between 75,000-100,000 pages.

We have continued to see exciting growth of TIYB in countries that typically are not known as being English speaking. Russia, for example, is consistently one of our leading countries for both visits as well as correspondence course sign-ups. Advertising in the Caribbean has dramatically influenced visits and course registrations. Small islands such as Barbados, the Bahamas, Trinidad & Tobago, Jamaica and St. Lucia are generally well ahead of much larger countries in visits and course registrations. Additionally, in Africa we are seeing outstanding growth in countries such as Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa. In Asia/Pacific, a bright spot in a generally underdeveloped region is the Philippines.

One of the clear needs is to expand TIYB outreach to accommodate other languages. Our first plan, Lord Willing, is to merge LaBiblia.com onto the TIYB platform. This will enable LaBiblia.com to fully utilize the administrative and contact management resources, while we leverage site maintenance and security for both sites. LaBiblia.com has already generated a very significant number of visitors to its site. Together, TIYB and LaBiblia.com represent the languages of nearly 1 billion people around the world. During 2010, we will be investigating other language opportunities for inclusion in our global Internet outreach.

New courses are under development for TIYB. In October, the “Learn to Read the Bible Effectively” course was taped in front of a studio audience in Los Angeles. These video segments (16 in all) have been designed to be used in a new correspondence course. The student will watch the video on-line and work with a tutor to apply the skills learned in the session. We are also beginning work on a “Virtual Sunday School” project for TIYB, which is in collaboration with the Christadelphian Sunday School Union in the UK.

In early 2010, Open Bible Forum will be merged into the TIYB site and will be “re-branded” as the “This is Your Bible Discussion Forum.” This will help to better integrate the two sites and focus the important work done by the Open Bible Forum team.

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