Here are the consideration for the MyBible project to not gather donations and to even refuse offered ones – as formulated by the project author Denys Dolganenko.
- First of all, the Lord provides for my family abundantly without potential donations.
- Secondly, even without donations I try to do all I can for my brothers and sisters in Christ, to take into account all the incoming inquiries – donations would not change this approach even if they were present.
- Thirdly, since I am the author of this project, I do not want to lose my freedom to decide what and how to do. And I would lose such I moral right, I believe, if I have accepted even a single donation. I know this from own experience – used to donate, apparently unselfishly but deep in my heart hoping that the receiver would pay more attention to my needs afterwards. That did not happen – and I remember being disappointed a bit by this. So I do not want such situations with MyBible.
- And fourthly, and this is the main part, I consider this labour to be my ministrly and do not want to mingle it with money in any way.
There were approximately two years in the history of the MyBible project when we were gathering donations for hosting of modules on our diverse servers. A small fund has been gathered this way (which is being consumed little by little to pay for the mybible.zone domain and our main hosting there). However:
- When we have started negotiations on free publishing of coyrighted texts in our modules, one pastor from Australia, who was leading this effort, had advised us to remove mentioning of donations from this site, so that Bible societies could have no grounds to quesion purity of our intentions.
- So we have stopped gathering of donations (which I was very glad about).
- Allowing the MyBible project to freely distribute copyrighted materials did not work out at all, but I am very content that money is not involved into the Mybible project – just as I have always wanted.