Design a new package for new pastor on limited budget

Lynden Williams said:

 P A, Silver package clocks in at 999.95. I think this is a good start, plus you have a year to pay it off.

Agreed.  Silver is what I would recommend.  If the pastor wants a starter package for under $200, then I'd recommend the IVP collection.   Best bang for buck, and its on sale for little over $100 often.

http://www.logos.com/product/8588/the-essential-ivp-reference-collection-version-3

Rick said:

I still think that it would be neat if Logos offered some sort of a "Build it Yourself" package.

I doubt that anyone who has purchased a Base Package is 100% happy with the Resource selections that Logos made.  I know I have a bunch that I would be just as happy to throw back (MyTag:UGH).  As a result, a $1000 Silver Package, even though the price is relatively low, might actually be very costly once one sorts the wheat from the chaff.  Thus, a B-I-Y package makes a lot of sense.

I'd guess (and it is only a guess) that the appearance of "dynamic pricing" is an indication that they are quietly trying to do exactly what you suggest.  But adding all 35,000 resources into one giant pricing algorithm sounds rather daunting and possibly prohibitive.  However, smaller B-I-Y packages that break down along, say, Pentecostal/SDA/Reformed/Weslyan/Evangelical/Catholic/Greek/Hebrew/Text Crit/Higher Crit/Exegetical/etc. lines would be far more manageable.

Speculation only.

Mark Smith said:

... commentary starvation.

This would go a very long way towards feeding the poor with a highly nutritious diet!

P A said:

The challenge

Design a new package for new pastor on limited budget of $1000 and this will have to last for next 5 years!

A) with no Greek       

Rules. You must base your package on current Logos prices, however you are allowed to take advantage of current discounts.

To bad everyone [so far] is on the "Expensive" side of Logos.

A new pastor at a Catholic Church could spend a lot less - and it would be useful for his entire career. [[The advantage of a unified church]]

Verbum Basic $269.95
Plus
Catechism of the Catholic Church Collection (9 vols.) $49.95

Even if he upgraded to:
Verbum Foundations      $489.95  or 
Verbum Scripture Study $889.95

He is still under the grand limit

Mark Smith said:

I think your price point is simply too low for a real pastor's "library." Three times that gets you a lot closer. Sorry about that, and it wasn't your question. Most seminary/Bible college educations cost way more than $1,000. A car does. Why think that a pastor can feed and minister to his congregation with a $1,000 Bible study expenditure? I know that sounds a bit harsh, but it is the reality. Better to give your pastor money to spend on books as he wishes than put together a package he might not use because he'd feel limited.

I agree with this. A plumber who is starting out will have to find about $12,000 to buy all the tools he would need. Is the work of ministry less important? Is a minister less in need of tools to do his job?

Personally, I would recommend a minister buying his first package should get what I've listed below. I've deliberately chosen these as being excellent packages that offer a heavy discount when bought with a base package (several are half-price, one is an 80% discount). Assuming a 15% discount for Gold (fairly easy to get), that comes to just over $3,682. A payment plan would make this cost around $157/month for two years, or $36 a week. I think that's great value for all these excellent tools. What's particularly appealing about this collection is that Gold is free! That is, if you remove Gold from your shopping cart, then the price goes up by $142. That's how significant some of these discounts are.

Of course, I'm not saying that you shouldn't go into the ministry unless you spend that sort of money. But I am saying that in many other professions there are significant start-up costs, and I'm not sure I see why the ministry should be any different.

PS - You can save a little more on Gold by joining SBL for $109. That nets you a 25% discount and a total price for Gold+membership of $1,271 (a saving of $40). You might save even more by NOT joining SBL, but discussing that option with a sales rep!

PPS - At a glance, the person buying this package would get all the Logos tools, and hundreds of resources, the most important of which are :

• Technical Commentaries
• Exegetical Summaries
• Keil & Delitzsch
• NICOT/NICNT
• Intermediate Commentaries
• Bible Speaks Today
• Black's NT Commentary
• Calvin's Commentaries
• New American Commentary
• Tyndale Commentaries
• UBS Handbooks
• Expository Commentaries
• Boice's Expositional Commentaries
• Holman NT Commentary
• Matthew Henry
• Welwyn Commentaries
• Bible Dictionaries
• Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary
• Baker Encylopedia of the Bible
• Dictionary of Biblical Imagery
• IVP 'Black' Dictionaries: Jesus and the Gospels, Paul and His Letters, Later NT and its Developments, and New Testament Background
• Lexham Bible Dictionary
• New Bible Dictionary
• New Dictionary of Biblical Theology
• New Dictionary of Theology
• Lexicons
• BDAG
• Brown-Driver-Briggs
• Liddell & Scott
• TDNT
• Theological Lexicon of the NT
• Theological Lexicon of the OT
• Interlinears
• Greek NT
• Hebrew OT
• Septuagint
• Apostolic Fathers
• Systematic Theologies
• Berkhof
• Shedd
• Other
• Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha in English
• Concise OED
• Early Church Fathers
• Works of Francis Shaeffer

Allen Browne said:

lt is probably more than someone starting out might consider

I agree with that, but the attraction of the initial discounts, coupled with the possibility of a 2 year payment plan, coupled with the fact that when you begin your first 'job' after college is a great time to set a budget, means I still think it's appropriate for someone starting out. (Although that obviously depends on personal circumstances, of course.) The payment plan will cost you $120 over the period, but you'll save far more than that through the discounts available when you buy the base package.

I also failed to get in your $1000 budget.

No Greek base -

Verbum Foundations - 490  (Gets you ECF as well as a variety of Bible translations and useful addins cheaper than anything else)

Luther's Works - 259

Anchor Bible Dictionary - 270

IVP Reference - 190 (but on sale for 100 now)

Bible Speaks Today - 100 (NT only, but good value)

Tyndale Commentaries - 225 (Value)

Totaling $1534 (minus sales)

Greek Based

Bronze - 630

Luther - 259

ABD - 270

IVP Ref - 190

WBC - 700 (All sets have their pros and cons, but this is the best value, IMHO)

Totaling 2049 (again, minus sales)

The answer to all the questions is easy.

We assume that the pastor did some theology studies on a university which gives you 50 percent on base packages (like mine) and wise as he is he puts together his package under this circumstances :P, no matter what you add, the price tends to be right!

Johannes Hendrik Menkveld said:

The answer to all the questions is easy.

We assume that the pastor did some theology studies on a university which gives you 50 percent on base packages (like mine) and wise as he is he puts together his package under this circumstances :P, no matter what you add, the price tends to be right!

According to the SBC 40% of their pastors have no college. A program like Logos is their college and seminary.

elnwood said:

Kent said:

According to the SBC 40% of their pastors have no college. A program like Logos is their college and seminary.

Source? That seems rather unbelievable to me. There are gobs of Southern Baptist bible colleges around. Of the eight largest seminaries in America, five of them are Southern Baptist. 40% haven't had any college? Really?

Indeed - I am attending one. However I know three maybe four pastors personally who would fit that category.

Also the SBC is a large denomination.

I think this whole thread is creating a false dichotomy or two...

Firstly that one cannot be a pastor and not have a massive Library. There are good pastors in the third world, and in difficult countries that are doing well to have a full copy of the Bible.

HOWEVER I do believe standing on the shoulders of those who've gone before can take a good pastor and make him great.

Secondly that a pastor MUST have ALL the tools he might possibly need right from the start.

We are not plumbers, first day on the job we are not going to need a pipe snake.

As pastors in the digital age, should we encounter someone who needs a pipe snake, we can buy its equivalent from Logos, and clear their plug, and move on. It is NICE to have everything you can imagine needing in advance. However with the cloud and instant delivery, for a few dollars, one can acquire what tools one needs as one goes.

All that said, I have i think in the neighborhood of 4000 titles.

A good question to ask, is: how much primary texts are needed?

I'm thinking of paying Post-Reformation Catholic Thought and Piety (27 vols.) that I bid on in CP, it's $70. Anyone knows whether it would be good to have? How edifying are these texts? This afternoon I bought a cheap printed book in Swedish that had very brief excerpts and biographies of a few of those. They seem decent. But it's still difficult to decide.
Also wondering whether I should get Worship in the Early Church: An Anthology of Historical Sources (4 vols.) for $99? I have the first volume as printed matter.

Anthologies and select works would save time, I'm just wondering are these good value for the money? I got the first volume in the Worship in the Early Church: An Anthology very cheap as printed matter.

Also, would I have use for this: The Works of Aristotle (12 vols.) It would cost me $40. What could it be used for? I'm not very fond of philosophy, but it seemed a little less strange than Plato.

I have a long-term budget, (Creating a budget and cancelling orders) but have been placing pre-pub and CP orders for too many $ on April 26. 2013 and June 30. - July 9. 2013, and the list of open pre-pub orders is starting to look too expensive at this stage (there may come better works in the future which I would prefer over the ones that exist now).

Those dates I've been placing especially Church History, recent Pauline scholarship and primary texts orders. What worries me about the major Church History pre-pub order, is I regret it if there comes better books in the future! Also: reviews say that it's a bit dry. Another thing that worries me about it, is that it probably doesn't deal enough with "Gnosticism".

(Of all the open pre-pub orders and CP bids I have, many will make it into production in a distant future, so even though I've been placing a lot of pre-pub and CP orders in a relatively short amount of time, they will spread over years.)

I have more questions in: Outdated and expensive.

When it comes to the OP, I might recommend: Catholic Practicum: Learn to Use Logos Bible Software ... it helps choosing among Catholic books! And there's tuition how to use the software. Plus a bit of Gk.
Another bit of advice is that I would wait with buying a base-package, and see if there comes any changes to them in the Winter or Spring, considering that base-packages are changed more frequently than the frequency of major software versions.
I would of course recommend The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha, Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament (3 vols.), A Grammatical Analysis of the Greek New Testament, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Proverbs, The Bible in Human Transformation: Toward a New Paradigm in Bible Study.

Unix said:

Also, would I have use for this: The Works of Aristotle (12 vols.) It would cost me $40. What could it be used for? I'm not very fond of philosophy, but it seemed a little less strange than Plato.

As a reference if you do any studies on ethics and social thought.

Tools for Gk don't seem cheap enough to be included in the $1,000, but I think they (the language) are/(is) necessary.

I had another suggestion which is really good, but I'm not going to make the suggestion as I think people should be clever enough to place the order without it having to be included in a future base-package first (it starts with N), I will have it both as printed matter and in Logos myself:

Mark Smith said:

We're clearly well off focus here, so I'll sign off, but in developed nations (my frame of reference) a good tool-kit is something few pastors would not profit from and I suspect all but a few would desire. They don't need it all at once and probably are not ready to make the best choices just starting out. But they will want it, and I am sure will benefit from it as their congregations also will.

Ken McGuire said:

At best, our Logos libraries give access to knowledge.  But wisdom of how to apply it?  That comes with prayer and experience.

SDG

Ken McGuire

PS - I did just get a new Pastor - and he does have a larger Logos library base package than I (Platinum vs. Original Languages)

[Y]

Unix, your best bet is going to be to make a new thread.

... And I don't mean make a thread that simply has links to this thread, and the other.

Re-state succinctly what you are wanting to know. Give it an intriguing title, and then more people will read it.

Burying it at the bottom of the second page is less likely to get your post the attention that you need.

Kent said:

According to the SBC 40% of their pastors have no college. A program like Logos is their college and seminary.

According to the thesis that I found online the actual number is closer to 10%. We have visited one such SBC church and the pastor is a carpenter by day and pastor by weekend. I know there is a significant number of small rural churches that don't have a pastor with formal training.

Nine of 10 Southern Baptist congregations have the services of an ongoing pastor,
either regular or interim. The typical pastor is 48 years old. The majority of Southern
Baptist pastors have college degrees and seminary degrees. Only 1 in 10 Southern
Baptist pa'Stors has no formal ministerial education. The typical tenure for pastors is 4
years.28

28Phillip B. Jones, "Executive Summary of Southern Baptist Congregations Today, September
2004 [Research Report online]; available from http://www.namb.net/atfi.cf{COA250E8-8866-4236-9AOCC646DE
1534463} Southern _ Baptist_Congregations Today-pdf. Internet; accessed 5 August 2005.

THE ROLE OF THE PASTOR IN SOUTHERN BAPTIST CHURCHES:
A BIBLICAL VIEW VERSES A PREVAILING VIEW

Submitted to Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary

Mark Smith said:

I am sympathetic to those who pastor with what Charles Spurgeon called 'slim apparatus

I find it interesting that today I can find free online resources that are much better  and far more extensive than the library I started out with at the first church I pastored (including better original language tools).  I believe I would have been ecstatic to have the collection that Mark suggested (although I would like to add the WBC to that when it goes on sale).  I also feel blessed that today we are can have library on a laptop that is better than the cemetery seminary library at the school I attended [<:o)]

So, would You recommend me the Catholic Practicum DVD? - EDIT: I'm sad no-one seems to be willing to advice me here!
This morning someone confirmed to me again (after the initial interest) that she wants to be my friend. We haven't talked about denominations, but I doubt she is Roman-Catholic as that's not a large denomination in this country. She lives in a university-town where there is a small Roman-Catholic uni. That's not that far from here, but the train is quite expensive and there are no discounts, so I won't ever afford taking many classes there, I've been thinking of only one class (on the Old Testament, but of course it would be nice to take the next Old Testament class after that there). Instead I'll be taking most of the classes in nearby universities here in the City (ticket is somewhat inexpensive with a discount but it's still a lot of money for me so sometimes I'll be bicycling there).

I didn't misunderstand at all.  

The question is dependent upon what the pastor will preach. If it's heavy 'exegetical', then the price tag is going to go up. So Mark's thoughts.  If the preaching is going to be heavily dependent on litergy, etc, then the price will drop considerably. And if (like me), the Holy Spirit said what He said, then the Bible is sufficient. No budget is necessary.

It's a cute question but one that presumes ones theology.

From my July 9. post:

Unix said:

The Bible in Human Transformation: Toward a New Paradigm in Bible Study.