It’s often in the normal, mundane moments of life when God hits you with an idea, a vision; a mission. A long summer’s day has passed without event and the hours are sliding by stumble after stumble after stumble! Then, an article catches my eye “Make your own QR codes for free”.
I like technology and I like free, but they don’t go together all that often. So I thought I’d give it a go.
An empty white space is in front of me, a canvas for some QR brilliance. I can write anything I want; I write my name… Surely I can do better than that. A self-labelled “creative type” must be able to create something more than his name! I lean back to think about it and I see my Bible, sitting on a shelf behind my laptop.
There’s a theological point in here somewhere about having my laptop in front of my Bible, but that can wait for another post.
A thought popped into my head:
Bible. Verse. QR. Codes.
This might actually be a good idea. There are Bible verses on posters and t-shirts and bracelets; why not QR codes? I reach for my Bible, and select a few verses. I make a few codes, planning to show them to some friends, and think no more about it.
But God has bigger plans for this project. The seed had been planted.
I posted the QR codes on the Saturday Sunday Share and people seemed to like the idea. Mark Robinson suggested adding a link to our Church website and this got me thinking. The more I thought, the more ideas came.
This is my vision for QuickVerse:
- We create QR codes which contains a Bible verse and a link to a mobile site.
- The mobile site explains the verse and has information about the love of Jesus, and what it means to be a Christian.
- The site provides ‘next steps’ for people who want to learn more.
- The site makes use of location services to provide links to local Churches.
- The site gives a link for people to download more codes and encourages people to spread them
This is where you can help:
I need you, readers of Churchmag, to help make this project a reality.
To make this project work we need people who can:
- Contribute to the content and design
- Develop and code the site
- Create QR codes and
- Print out and spread the codes around your area
Together we can make this happen and create a quality site which could potentially change lives for Christ.
So, can you help the QuickVerse project?
Have you seen the social tools that YouVersion is starting to build out? Looks like a very early “soft launch” happening at http://bible.us – their URL shortener (for Bible Verses) with some “embeddable” type features.
These ideas might be a cool mashup?
I have seen them; it looks like they’ve got some pretty cool features. They could definitely be useful.
So would this be a digital version of Gospel Tracts?
Yes. That’s what it looks like it is. Nevertheless, it’s good to hear others getting a bug to try something. For as much as some of us might have done or heard of these efforts, it helps the Body to have others pop up every once and a while with the idea.
I will say that you’d want to find another name besides QuickVerse, that’s already a licensed product that’s got a signifiant brand in the religion space.
I’d also throw out there that John Dyer’s http://Bib.ly service might be good to use to keeping codes smaller. And maybe even usinig Google’s QR Code creator to turn any URLs into QR Codes more simply.
Thanks for the comments. I hadn’t heard of QuickVerse or Gospel Tracts – I should have googled it :/
I like the bib.ly idea. I’ll definitely keep it in mind.
This is a cool idea. You should consider a different name, though. QuickVerse is the name of a well-known Bible software product.
Thanks, I had no idea about the name…
I like this idea a lot, I’d be willing to help.
Glad you like it. In what way would you be able to help?
Just a heads up — QuickVerse is an established brand in the Bible software field. You might want to pick a different name before you get too far down the road.
Thanks for the comment Geoff. I thought the name sounded quite catchy – evidently someone else thought so before me!
Jonathon:
Quickverse includes QR codes when you copy the link into Facebook, etc: http://www.youversion.com/ … Does this help?
Yeah, that does help. Not having to create the codes ourselves will save time that we can use to work on the content. Thanks for sharing that