Hi, everyone! We are back! While we were down for the past month, we completed our first lap around the Sun. One year! God has blessed us beyond our imagination (Eph 3:20). As the Earth has been completing it run around the Sun, we have made some big moves ourselves. Due to some unexpected events, our URL was canceled (always lessons to learn), so we thought it was the right time to do a remodeling and rebranding of our site. The riverabiblecollection.org was quite a mouth full and hard for people to understand what we were about. So, we have coined a new name for ourselves: Cultivating Faith and moved to a new URL: www.cultivatingfaith.org. This new name and URL will make it easier for us to share the site with others.
We went through a lot of name options, but we did not want a name that sounded like a site to buy Bibles. We wanted the name to express our mission to glorify God by reintroducing and educating people on biblical truth and translation, sharing our family’s passion for the Word of God. We wanted to update our name and look, not our mission. You will notice we also have a new logo to go with the whole new layout for our site. Thank you, Jennifer, she is the best! We want to keep what we do and how we present it fresh and relevant. All our previous content is still on the site with plans to keep adding more!
The Rivera Bible Collection name and logo will continue to be used for the physical collection of Bibles and other biblical material. As with the site, the collection itself has grown. At the end of 2020, had over 220 items in the collection. The collection included 156 Bibles: 136 unique English translations representing 77 translation families (see our posts : What’s the Rivera Bible Collection and How Bible are Counted. Today the collection has grown to 266 items including 185 Bibles; 153 unique English translations representing 87 translation families. While it is harder to find older Bibles of interest—and affordable ones—new translations and revisions are coming out almost every year. Thus, we are always on the lookout for translations, materials on translations and biblical backgrounds to add to the RBC.
On June 1, 2021 we started our site, RiveraBibleCollection.org (RBC). Well, actually we started planning and working from the beginning of 2021. Then on June 1st we published 20 items from our motto and mission statement to information about the family and our Bible collection along with various resources. We published a welcome post: What Is Worth Doing Well Is Worth Doing Poorly at First and one of our most popular posts The Bible and Mr. Miyagi . The welcome post was quite accurate. In it we confessed we have had a lot to learn. Wow was that true then and is still true today. The second post explains the purpose of the Old Testament through an illustration from the wildly popular Karate Kid movie. From the very start, we have been trying to share what the Holy Spirit has taught us.
On June 3rd of 2021, we published our first Thursday post: Bible Primer: Part One . This was not only the first Thursday post but the first of a seven-part series. We have been able to remain faithful and publish a post each Thursday for almost a year! All praise, glory and credit belong to God. We have been seeking to be faithful to His call on our lives. We did unfortunately have to shut down for about 5 weeks in May, but God is always faithful!
While sharing on a wide variety of topics, we have launched a number of series of post on topics we thought are of great importance and interest to our visitors. An especially important collection is one under the topic of Translation. Under this topic, we are presenting four series of posts with the subtopics: Translation Theory, Translation History, Translation Evaluation and Translation Comparison. In A Call to Good Translation, our introductory post, we explained the purpose and goal of the collection.
The Names of God is the main topic name of another series seeking to help us grow our understanding about God by examining the names He uses for Himself in His Word. Unlike today, in the culture of ancient societies, names were particularly important and were to be descriptive of the person. Our prayer is we will learn a great deal about God from studying His names.
Working to gain an understanding of our Lord, we have started a series on the topic of Jesus in the Old Testament. In these we are looking at typology of Jesus, predictions of Christ’s first and second coming, and theophanies of God. Many, if not most, of these theophanies being the second person of the Trinity: the Son. We also have some posts in this series showing us Jesus from outside of these subtopics in places such as creation.
We have just recently started a collection under the Topic Growing in Knowing. The first subtopic in the Collection is The Triune God. In this series we are learning theology proper: studying about God. We see God, at His essence, is a Triune God. We have so much more we are looking forward to discovering together in the days and years ahead. The plan is to cover all our beliefs from our Core Beliefs under a large number of subtopic with in the main topic of Growing in Knowing.
You, our visitor, and followers, have been unbelievable. In our first year, over 1,300 of you have come to our site viewing over 3,100 posts and pages. Meaning you are coming back more than once and viewing multiple pages. This is even with being down for over a month! Thank you! We have had the privilege of having visitors from 28 different countries, reaching people on every continent! Well, except Antarctica. We need to get ahold of some researcher, LOL.
Thank you so much! We have been humbled and are keenly aware of the responsibility we have to do our jobs right. Our goal remains to glorify God and to develop our craft. We are holding to our mission statement: “We exist to glorify God by reintroducing and educating people on biblical truth and translation, sharing our family’s passion for the Word of God.”
We are developing plans for the future. First, to continue to work on the topics and subtopics we have started. To complete them, we are well aware will take years, but we seek to be diligent and cover all the Lord has called us to share. We will also continue to publish posts on assorted subjects we feel will interest and help you.
We also would like to add another series entitled: “The Settings of Scripture.” This would be a series of posts on the topic of biblical backgrounds. We would have posts with bios of key biblical characters, geographical posts helping us to understand the lands of the Mideast and Israel in particular, plus informative post on groups such as the Pharisees or the “sons of the prophets.” We hope to also have posts on ancient history to grow our understanding of the times, people, and the events we read about in the Bible.
We would like to provide our first teaching guide in the Growing in Knowing collection in the next year. This first guide will be on The Triune God—the first subtopic we are doing under this main topic Growing in Knowing. In addition, we plan also have quality student handouts for each course. We want to do a first-rate job with this material, so we will need to first create it, then teach the material in an actual class situation, and refine it based on the real-world experience with it. Next, we will have some of those in the family with teaching backgrounds review the course material, refining it based on their input. The last step is to make it available at CultivatingFaith.org free of charge for all to use. If we are not able to do this by June of ‘23, it will be our top priority for our third year. Note my confidence that God will give us a third year!
Of special pride to me as a dad, Jason, my youngest son, will be writing a monthly post: The WORD in Music. This new series looks at how God’s Word is communicated in Christian Music. Much of Christian Music is full of rich theology that can easily be missed when singing it, especially in corporate worship where years of singing the same tune can blind our hearts to what it is saying. This series of posts will start this month on June 14th. It will appear the second Tuesday of each month. Alex, Jason’s wife, will be doing his content review and proofreading. So excited to have Alex on board and as a new board member!
Another change we are making is that the posts under the topic of Names of God are moving to the 4th Thursday of the month starting June 28th. This will mean we will now have at least 6 posts published each month. ON top of this we will be having a very special guest writer on June 30th with an impactful post: “Yes, He Has Autism.” from a mother of a child with different needs. It is a joyful and touching account of her son, her family, and herself seeking to have a Christ-centered home. More important than growth in the number of posts we present is the quality of those pieces. We are working diligently to be sure we offer posts that are of benefit to you in both content and excellence.
We’re open to wherever else God may lead us. We so desire to be in tune with the Spirit’s direction and to be obedient to His desire for this site and the ministry. Our hope and prayer is that you will continue to come to our site to see what we have for you, and that the posts will be edifying to the Church and convicting to the lost. We do this in the power of the Holy Spirit, giving all glory to our Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ!
Please be in prayer for us as we start our second lap around the sun. We do have a few other things up our sleeves for our second year, yet it seems awfully hard to top this first year, but we have an amazing God who can do beyond what we can imagine (Eph 3:20). Thank you for your support and faithfulness to our site.
Until the next time we see you here at CultivatingFaith.org, God Bless! #CultivatingFaithOrg