Nearly three years ago, I started Modern Puritans as a hobby project. I loved reading the Puritans, but found the Old English to be challenging to understand.

At the time I thought, "I bet there's a lot more people that would read these old books if we could modernize the old English and make them easier for the average person to read and understand."

Fast forward, the Lord has blessed this project and tens of thousands of people have purchased the books we've updated. God willing, we will continue this work for many decades to come.

Thanks to your support, our ministry is accelerating. In the rest of this post, I'd like to outline our vision for this project and what we are working on next.

Modern Puritans will be called "Updated Works"

In the near future, we are changing the name of this project from Modern Puritans to "Updated Works."

Why?

It's simple. We want to expand our aperture and publish more Christian works over the last two thousand years vs. a narrow time frame.

While we will continue to publish A LOT more Puritan & Reformed works (especially in the near future), our vision is to help you "time travel" throughout Christian history.

To give you a sense of the scope of this project, we'd like to update works from early church fathers (Tertullian, Chrysostom, etc), historians (Josephus), Reformers (Luther, Calvin, etc), and even Matthew Henry commentaries too 😄.

More professional book covers en route!

We are updating book covers to look more professional. So far, we've updated about 30 titles with more on the way. Here's an example of the difference:

Old Book Covers

Compared to the new covers...

New Book Covers

We have refreshed some of our older titles

We use a combination of technology and human review to update our works. This means we are constantly refining our process.

We want to deliver the highest quality modernized translation possible. This desire to constantly improve has led us to "refresh" the following titles over the last few months:

We are thrilled with the results, but if you have feedback, please let us know. We try to strike a balance between the author's original intent/words and something that can be easily understood by today's readers. We need your help and feedback to strike this balance.

Audiobooks coming soon

Lord willing, in the next 1-2 months we will launch our first audiobooks. As many of you have noticed, we publish short snippets of books on our Youtube channel, but we'd like to offer the entire library of books at a low cost. We will be partnering with ElevenLabs publishing to offer these books using AI voice technology to keep costs low.

Let us know which titles we should release first! Drop us a note. We'd love to hear from you.

We will need to increase prices on books under $9.99 (Starting June 10th)

Unfortunately Amazon has recently increased their royalty rate on books under $9.99. Many of our print books are impacted, which means we need to increase our prices on June 10th.

We are letting you know now so you can take advantage of the lower prices. If you'd like to pick up a paperback book under $10, now is a great time to do so 😀

Our goal is to offer these books at a low cost, but we also use the proceeds to fund our work (see more in next section).

Financial update

Our desire for this project is to bless Christians for hundreds of years.

In order to accomplish this task, we believe its important that we self-fund operations through book sales and use all available means and technology to accelerate this ministry in a way that glorifies God.

We are pleased to report that for the last 12 months, we have used book sale profits to accumulate Bitcoin, which is like digital gold. Unlike U.S. dollars that can easily be printed and inflated away, Bitcoin is a superior savings vehicle that allows us to maximize our leverage and accelerate our impact.

At the time of writing, this Bitcoin "savings account" has appreciated by nearly 40%. We currently hold .4 bitcoin and will keep this number updated on our website for maximum transparency.

We believe that the current "non-profit" model many ministries use (raise funds from donors, spend as quickly as possible) leads to short-term thinking. We want to focus on the long term and are willing to explore creative ways to accomplish this goal.

So what's the plan?

Our goal with this savings is not to "build a bigger barn" (Luke 12:16-21), but to create a financial buffer that we can use to explore more capital intensive projects in the future, such as:

  • Higher quality book printing: right now we use Amazon print on demand and the results are mixed. We are exploring doing larger print runs, which would increase the amount we need to invest upfront.
  • Accelerate translations & improve quality: we'd like to translate more books, especially rare ones that have never been published before.
  • Explore different media formats: we'd like to invest more in video, audio, and other media formats. All of these services cost money to use.
  • We may experiment with advertising: partnering with podcasters and others to spread the word.

Wrapping up: Thanks for your support and let us know what works we should update next!

  • To those who have purchased a book from us - thank you! Your book purchases help revive timeless Christian works.
  • If you have feedback or thoughts on this update, feel free to drop us a note. We love hearing from you. It's very motivating!
  • If you'd like to support our work, please purchase more updated works and consider leaving a positive review on Amazon.

Thank you!