I have been using the YouVersion iPhone app for about a year and I have been pretty happy with it. It provides a large number of translations and has good navigation. You can download a number of translations for offline reading, such as The Message and the New Living Translation, so it’s not just the King James Version or American Standard Version that most of the other free Bible apps provide. The mainstream versions like the English Standard Version and New International Version are only available while on the network.

The app has had two main problems problems for me: (a) performance and (b) losing my offline translations after every upgrade. The performance can really suffer on Sunday morning when I’m sure there are thousands of people using the app during church services. It does appear that YouVersion is building out their infrastructure to handle the load. It’s great to see so many people taking advantage of a tremendous resource. The app also has had trouble after upgrades of losing my offline translations or even failing to start without deleting the app and reinstalling. The quality has been better recently, and with the release of 2.2 near the end of 2009 I was happy to see them come out with a version that included a number of reading plans. Every year I try to complete a different Bible reading plan, and I have done a number of different plans over the years. By mixing it up, I find that getting through those long stretches of Deuteronomy is not so difficult. With any reading plan it’s important to be able to track your progress against the plan and to be able to eliminate any excuses for not keeping up. Once you are behind by more than a few days it can be tough to catch up.

I have found the iPhone to be an excellent tool for regular Bible reading. It is always with me and thus allows me to get some reading done when I normally might not. For the last three years, I have used the ESV web site to complete the Through the Bible and Book of Common Prayer Daily Office reading plans, both year A and B. Their mobile site works well on the iPhone, but the only drawback is that it doesn’t provide you with tracking against your goal.

With the YouVersion app, you create an account and they will track your progress on a reading plan. You can then catch up if you get a few days behind. The interaction with the daily reading plan is pretty straightforward when you use it for the first time. I quickly found and started the Project 345+ plan and started reading it on January 1. Now that I have been using it for a solid 6 weeks my only real problem with the application is the complicated flow it takes every single day to get to my daily reading. I think they got the flow right for the first time user, but once a user has setup a reading plan there should be at most two taps to the daily reading. Also, the application does not restore your reading plan if you exit and return, so you have to traverse the six steps every time you open the app. I really hope they have plans to fix this soon.

Here’s what the process looks like. First, you are told about the new feature.

Then, you are presented with the list of reading plans that you are currently reading, plus a sepate list of available plans.

Once you select your plan, you see the plan overview.

Tapping on “VIEW TODAY’S READING” finally takes you to the list of passages for the day.

Then you tap on a specific passage to read it and mark it completed. You can tap the arrows at the bottom of the page to go to the next passage in your daily reading.

It looks like Greg Boyd has written a book based on the sermon series that the article is based on: The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church. I might have to get a copy. I wonder if this will be a start of a trend?

There are a few interactive features – like the ability to tag and search tagged verses, storing bookmarks, and seeing who last tagged a verse. However, I don”t see too much in the way of community building – it looks like more of a resource site that is trying to sell Christian literature (which is not a bad thing). The ads are not too obtrusive, and it looks like they have a few companies publishing ads now (and while they”re in beta, it looks like the ads are free).

I have 3 invites, let me know if you want one.