Our mission is to deepen faith in God through the transformative power of revelatory scripture study.
Our Core Values
- Lifelong Learning: We encourage a lifelong pursuit of spiritual knowledge and understanding.
- Innovation: We create better gospel students through an enhanced study experience.
- Community Building: We strive to create a supportive environment where individuals can connect and share their insights.
- Service Orientation: Our commitment to serve facilitates spiritual growth in others.
Hi, I’m Oak Norton and I’m the creator of Scripture Notes.
I know there is a community of people who love studying the scriptures but are dissatisfied with current tools. They want something more than just an app for reading or marking scriptures.
I created Scripture Notes to be an incredibly flexible and simple set of tools so you have the ability to study the scriptures in powerful ways. My mission is to make the study of the scriptures so engaging and insightful, that people spend more quantity and quality time searching them.
The Story:
Around 2001, my favorite gospel study tool made the leap from a DOS program to a Windows based version, and actually became worse. My ability to do multiple searches and not lose my place with an old search went away, and the power of “Windows” was completely lost on the development team. I was heartbroken and stunned.
I wrote them a lengthy email telling them how much more useful the program would be if we could do multiple searches. It was to no avail. I was informed they had their own roadmap and development board and they wanted to go in a different direction. Unsurprisingly, that software has mostly disappeared.
I complained to a friend of mine about this and started telling him what I thought the application should be and do. Instead of simply agreeing with me, he encouraged me to build it and my imagination took off.
Re-imagining things is powerful. What could something be if you removed the constraints that limit our thinking about how it’s always been?
Around 2003 I had learned to do some basic web programming and built my own version of Scripture Notes from Cold Fusion and a Microsoft Access database. I’ve been using it for 15+ years and it’s astounding how it transformed my scripture study. However, there were features I couldn’t program and knew that I wanted.
I’m going to spare you reading my personal history since that time. It’s the sad tale of a wantrepreneur who tried and failed several times, in part because figurative mountains fell on our family twice.
During these years I lived in panic that someone would discover the idea for my interface, but thankfully, with each scripture product I saw get released, nobody was doing what I planned.
I’m not a piecemeal kind of person. As this first version is released I have to keep reminding myself this is only the start of what I envision for the program and to be patient and let things grow. My vision for this program is quite extensive and so I hope you will try Scripture Notes out and join me on this journey.
Sincerely,
Oak Norton