Married for 35+ years to my fantabulous bride, Kim.
We were not blessed with any children, but do have an Australian Cattle Dog or two around.
I’m an elder at Heritage Presbyterian Church a part of the RPC-Hanover Presbytery.
Joe Morecraft is our pastor there and has been my pastor since 2011.
You can find out more about my work and other background on LinkedIN.
To faithfully build the Kingdom of Christ on earth in obedience to His word in the Bible. The Bible is authoritative on all about which it speaks and it speaks about everything. Disseminating widely clear teaching of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord is being obedient to Jesus Christ and key to building His Kingdom on earth.
1. To publish in ebook format, books by Joe Morecraft, that have formerly only been available as typewritten, largely unedited sermon “notes” created at the time the sermons were delivered to facilitate the further study of the subject matter.
For instance the “notes” for the exegetical preaching series on Genesis came to 657 typewritten 8.5” x 11” pages.
You can see what all we’ve published on the Shop page.
2. To scan a variety of notes and written materials generated by Pastor Joe Morecraft over the past 40+ years for safe archiving and eventually indexed, searchable, online access. This content is contained in approximately 50 bankers boxes.
As time and opportunity allow, other works will be published here by other authors. There are certainly a variety of additional goals that are on the planning list, as nascent opportunities develop and funding allows. Stay tuned…
A little over a decade ago I was providentially brought to a better understanding of the Bible through books and podcasts by people such as James White and R.C. Sproul. This started me down a path that eventually led me and my wife to return to the church after 15+ years of disobediently, not attending.
After several more providential steps, God brought my wife and I to Pastor Morecraft’s church in January 2011. The preaching and the teaching there was like dropping us, seriously dry, cracked sponges into a bucket of warm water, we soaked it up! The thing we appreciate and a big reason why my wife and I decided I should undertake this work is that Pastor Morecraft’s preaching and teaching, while incredibly in-depth and meaty, is just the tip of the teaching and preaching iceberg. The rest of the iceberg is all of the authors, books, preaching & teaching he references throughout the entirety of church history. So many great Christian authors ancient and modern. So much to relearn after finding out things like what an anti-nomian is and that I had been one for all my Christian life!
This approach to teaching and preaching was incredibly important as I was hearing so many things that I’d NEVER heard before though raised and involved in evangelical churches throughout my life. So I went to the books he mentioned, I did some research into the past and found that indeed, much that was common teaching and believed in the church for century after century by godly men of many “denominations” has been “lost”. While that is troubling on the one hand, it was a huge confidence builder as I realized that this stuff wasn’t something this Joe Morecraft guy had dreamed up last week!
Part of what has been lost, certainly in the American church, is the applicability of all of the Bible to all of life. This ties into the mission statement here,
To faithfully build the Kingdom of Christ on earth in obedience to His word in the Bible. The Bible is authoritative on all about which it speaks and it speaks about everything. Disseminating widely clear teaching of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord is being obedient to Jesus Christ and key to building His Kingdom on earth.
That is admittedly broad, covering all of life. That’s because, that’s what we’re called to do as Christians. Jesus is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, victorious over everyone, everywhere, everywhen. He reigns and we are to serve, as He, the Word made flesh, speaks throughout the Bible from Genesis to the Revelation of Jesus Christ.
This should now help explain why the site and the work here is called Comprehensive Christianity!
This is a project my wife and I kicked around for a couple of years. In the fall of 2018, when a couple other consulting gigs closed out, she encouraged me to start earlier than we’d previously planned, “Let’s start now.” Pastor Morecraft was gracious enough to permit me access to his voluminous content and here we are. This isn’t about me, this isn’t about Joe. This is about getting solid, biblical, Jesus Christ glorifying material out where it can do the most good in helping grow warriors in Christ to build His Kingdom, His way.
Primarily through the selling of ebooks and Subscriptions and Donations, though Subscription is the best value for your money. It also helps me be able to better plan ahead knowing what future revenues are likely to be.
I want to be clear, this is NOT a non-profit situation! Comprehensive Christianity is a project being run as a business by me and my company Tim Renshaw Consulting. The more money the business takes in the more investment can be made in getting things done better, quicker, faster, stronger.
There are no employees, just me. This is the only work that I will be doing for the foreseeable future, as God permits. This effort began back in November 2018 and costs to date, have been covered by me.
The annual budget floor is $3,000 covering the costs that keep books getting created: scanners, computer, software, this web-site and publishing costs, like ISBNs. That certainly doesn’t get anyone paid for their time. I’d like to add more help eventually beyond the kind volunteer efforts of some family members, but I believe as Jesus taught and Paul reiterated, “A workman is worthy of his hire”. Matthew 10:10, Luke 10:7 and 1 Timothy 5:18. This work, like any vocation, is worthy of getting paid.
Check out the rest of the site!
Buy books. soon there will be more, check back often or better yet, Subscribe and you’ll get an email with new material attached! Your books come to you!
Subscribe to get books!
Donate if you want and get a service and / or book(s)!
Share about us on your social media networks!
Comprehensive Christianity is a business publishing ebooks for sale.
The Subscription model of providing products and services is a strong, existing sales approach. Subscriptions help smooth out the revenue stream vs. selling products. Sales of products, such as ebooks is difficult to predict and make business investment plans. It is no accident that many businesses are moving to this approach, even super huge companies like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc.
Donations for this type of effort are also welcome, but like direct sales of products, are difficult to estimate and plan with.
Regardless of how you decide to go, this is a business and you will receive value for your hard earned money, regardless of how you spend it here.
Purchase an ebook, get the book.
Subscribe and depending on the level at which you subscribe, you will receive at least 1 ebook!
Donate if you want and get a service and book(s)!
No, this is not a non-profit “organization”.
Setting up a 501C3 or equivalent is costly, time consuming and in this case, I believe unnecessary. Jesus taught and Paul reiterated, “A workman is worthy of his hire”. Matthew 10:10, Luke 10:7 and 1 Timothy 5:18. This work, like any vocation, is worthy of getting paid.
Depends on if the contents of the book are currently in electronic format or only exist on paper.
For instance, the commentary on Genesis only ever existed on typewritten pages being created prior to widespread computer adoption. Genesis weighed in at 657 pages on 8.5” x 11” paper and had to be scanned, OCR’d (Optical Character Recognition) then edited letter by letter to correct for machine “guessing” and of course edit typos, minor grammar and spelling issues carried over from the print version. The book was also reorganized by Joe Morecraft to better serve as a book to be read straight through. Additionally, there was a lot of work to get the formatting usable in electronic format. Ebook creation software is not geared toward academic, theological format where there may be 8 sub-points. On paper, you indent each one and on letter sized paper, that can work, but not so much on a tablet, let alone a phone screen.
Anyway, Genesis took 262 man-hours of work. That’s a little over 6.5, 40 hour weeks.
If the book is at least in electronic format, the process should go much quicker as the scanning step will be gone and the editing step will be greatly reduced. For instance, Pastor Morecraft’s book, “How God Wants Us to Worship Him” only took about 80 hours.
Lead time to get an ebook published with wide availability is much shorter than that for a paper book. We’re talking about weeks or a couple months for an ebook here compared to years to get through a publisher and printer process.
It is not only faster to get an ebook published, it is much less expensive.
Ebooks are much easier to carry around than a paper book. The first book, Genesis, Christ, Creation & Covenant was 657 pages on 8.5” x 11” paper. We’ve received several requests from missions organizations for ebooks instead of paper books as they are much more useful in places where disseminating, storing and transporting paper books is extremely cumbersome. One of the reasons we started the project with Genesis isn’t just because it is the first book of the Bible, but it was specifically requested by a pastor in Brazil who not only wants it for his own use, but for translating into Portuguese.
Ebooks can be encrypted and transported more safely into areas where possessing Bibles and Bible related texts can be hazardous at best and life-threatening at worst.
You can have your paper if you want! Most, if not all the longer books available here are being made available as Print-On-Demand (POD) paperbacks at Amazon. POD is just what it sounds like, the book is queued up for printing when you order it. Generally, you will get your paperback from them 2-3 weeks after you order it. Or you can order it here and have it in a few minutes in your email inbox <grin>!
As of October 8, 2022 I’m removing MOBI format ebooks from the Comprehensive Christianity store as Amazon has finally killed the MOBI format! Amazon is no longer supporting it and they were the only ones using it, so buh-bye MOBI! Only EPUB ebooks are provided here going forward.
Ebooks are also available on Amazon.com.
Revenue from ebooks purchased here at Comprehensive Christianity are used to fund the continuing publishing work here as well as funding the giving away of these books to missionary organizations for free use in their work!
Royalties from ebooks sold at Amazon.com go to Joe Morecraft.
The easiest way is to email the file directly to your Kindle. Every Kindle device and software instance has an email address contained in the Settings. Email the EPUB file to that address and it will show up in your library.
I plan on putting together a couple videos on this eventually, but for right now, I’m going to refer to our comrade-in-arms, Gary DeMar’s site: American Vision for the full instructions.
Being an industry standard file, there are a lot of applications you can use to read epub files.
For PCs (including Macs, Linux, etc.), I recommend Calibre software. It supports both epub and mobi formats.
Whether on Android or iDevices, I suggest Google Play Books.
Not all readers are the same. I tested on several and a couple did strange things with the formatting. What you want to see is something formatted properly like what is shown below.
Amazon keeps 30% - 65% of the total price to utilize their service, so overhead is significantly higher. Prices for books on Kindle are set commensurate with books of similar type and length. Proceeds of Kindle book sales on Amazon go to Joe Morecraft.
Epub versions sold here have lower overhead by taking out the middle-man, Amazon. Proceeds of epub ebook sales here go to support the ongoing publishing effort at Comprehensive Christianity.
Subscribers who contribute in excess of $60 / year receive all publications released while they are Subscribers via email. Subscribe at $5+ / month and the books come to you!
Epub versions are also provided free of charge to Christian missions organizations. Contact Tim@ComprehensiveChristianity.com for information if your organization would like to take advantage of these materials.
Kickstarter is not a good fit for a long-term effort. It is a one-time event, fund-raising vehicle. Our goals here are longer term.
Patreon and other such “patron funding” service providers have already begun to enforce the anti-Christian views of the broader American public, by shutting them down… period. Most things Christian are now deemed “hate speech”, open to every high-handed tyranny available to commercial enterprises and civil institutions. Of course we want to be visible, but not subject to more levels of tyranny than I absolutely must be to operate this business… to stay visible.
Consequently, I have built in Subscription functionality right here on this site so you can sign up as a “patron” right here, removing the blocking, censoring middlemen! Of course, you can Donate as well, though I recommend Subscribing for more benefits.