About Austin-Sparks.net

Austin-Sparks.Net was created by a husband and wife team in September 2001 in Wellington, New Zealand, with the intention of making available the complete works of Theodore Austin-Sparks on the internet. There are others who also make the works of T. Austin-Sparks available, including Emmanuel Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the Golden Candlestick Trust in the Netherlands. Austin-Sparks.Net is not affiliated with these other groups. Nevertheless, we co-ordinate our work with them to ensure that T. Austin-Sparks material continues to be available through a range of media to the entire world.

Austin-Sparks.Net makes the works of T. Austin-Sparks available in a range of electronic forms. This includes copies of the original A Witness and A Testimony magazines in Searchable PDF format. Most of the original published material by T. Austin-Sparks from the magazines is also now available in HTML format on the website. E-books in ePub and mobi formats are available for reading on portable readers from the website as well as on iTunes and Amazon.com. Please note that on Amazon.com we are forced to charge a minimum fee of US 99 cents each (from which Austin-Sparks.Net receive a royalty of 35%) as they do not allow us to publish titles free of charge. To offset this, in the description section of each book we have drawn attention to the fact that the book can be downloaded for free from Austin-Sparks.Net. We also have over 340 audio messages available in MP3 format.

While we are physically in New Zealand, due to the majority of website traffic being from the USA, the website is hosted on a server in Florida, USA.

We continue to add articles and books from the A Witness and A Testimony magazines to the website, along with previously unpublished works of T. Austin-Sparks sourced from those who have access to his original documents. These have been transcribed from handwritten or typewritten notes, or from audio messages. This process is an ongoing work. Two articles or chapters of books are added to the website each week.

Our approach to editing is straight forward. We endeavour to provide a duplicate of the original text wherever possible. Our "editing" on the website consists only of correcting punctuation and misspelled words, translating Roman numerals (some folk can't read them), breaking long paragraphs or sentences into more than one, and on rare occasions inserting small words if they are obviously missing (such as "the", "and", "in", "is"). If a word is not clear in the original and we have to guess, we put these words in [square] brackets so that it is clear it is an addition/interpretation by us. Some more recent publications are in American English, but where the original was in British English, the British form of spelling and punctuation is retained as this was what Mr Austin-Sparks requested. When the website first began, words in italics were changed to capitals due to italics not showing up in email at the time. We plan to change these back to italics eventually.

Where multiple versions of a work exist, we prioritise making available the final version of a work that was edited by T. Austin-Sparks himself.  As time allows, other earlier versions of the material will also be made available. We will only use material edited by other parties when the originals are not available to us. Where possible we have sourced material edited directly by Mr Austin-Sparks himself. Where only secondary sources are available, the source is referenced. All messages that say "from unpublished manuscripts" are from the Golden Candlestick Trust in the Netherlands and are edited by them before being sent to us. The nature of the material they have is in manuscript form, and therefore often need minimal editing/correcting by them and us, just to make them readable.

The Daily Open Windows messages are an exception as they are excerpts that we took from a wide range of T. Austin-Sparks works. The excerpts are unedited, but the selected Bible verses (from various translations) have been included by us to accompany the excerpts. The selection of many of these verses were made by Austin-Sparks.Net and not by T. Austin-Sparks.

The HTML versions of the A Witness and A Testimony magazines in the period from 1968 to 1972 and all eighteen volumes of the Toward the Mark magazines on the website were prepared by Paul Redin. 

Dating of works on the website takes the following approach:

• Where a work has been published in written form, the date of publication of the first chapter (if known) is used.
• Audio is dated (if known) by the date the audio was first recorded.
• Previously unpublished work is dated by the date that the work was given in spoken form (if this date is known) otherwise by the date the work was placed on the website.

Translated versions on the associated foreign language websites at Austin-Sparks.Net are the responsibility of the individual translators. We are thankful for their tireless and unpaid work in bringing these translations to the website for people whose first language is not English. Enquiries regarding translated works should be made to the email address provided on each of these language sites.

We respect the privacy of our website visitors. The server collects basic information on all visitors to the website, as with all webservers.  This includes your IP number, the country in which you accessed the website, the details of the browser you are using, and records the date and time of all pages that you accessed on the website.  This information is aggregated into a statistical report of all visitors to the website available only to the operators of Austin-Sparks.Net. A cookie may also be used to record whether you are using a mobile browser, so as to prevent issues when accessing the mobile version of the website and returning to the main website. Email addresses which are subscribed to the email lists are not shared with anybody.

We never ask for funds. We are one couple with no staff, one of us works full time on the website, the other works in full time employment through which God has graciously provided for the costs of the website over the years along with appreciative readers who have contributed without any encouragement from us. The website is both a Witness and a Testimony to God's abundant provision and we are very grateful witnesses of this! As TAS wrote: "God only takes responsibility to supply and to carry on that which is essentially heavenly, and in the measure in which a thing is heavenly, and only in that measure (but surely in that measure), God takes responsibility for it. If it is in any way linked with this world, becoming a part of this world system, related to this earth, it has got to take responsibility for itself to carry its own weight, to find its own resources, to see its own way through... Only that which the Father is doing can carry His resource."

We continue to witness the truth of this and delight in our Father's faithfulness! We have always considered this to be His work and not ours. While we offer the messages on the website free of charge, we do ask that you give the messages freely to others without making any changes to them, in accordance with Mr Austin-Sparks wishes as stated in this statement on each page of the website:

In keeping with T. Austin-Sparks' wishes that what was freely received should be freely given and not sold for profit, and that his messages be reproduced word for word, we ask if you choose to share these messages with others, to please respect his wishes and offer them freely - free of any changes, free of any charge (except necessary distribution costs) and with this statement included.

Before we began this website, we sought, and received, permission from those we had received the books from (Emmanuel Church) to publish them on the internet. The advice we have consistently received since then from those that were close to the work at Honor Oak was that Mr Austin-Sparks intended that his works be made widely available to all, but that they should never be changed. He was adamant that his messages be reproduced word for word. His main reason for not wanting his material to be copyright seems to have been so that they could be freely copied and freely distributed. He wrote, "It has always been our desire to make the ministry through this little medium available to all of the Lord's people; not regarding it as our personal property. 'Freely ye have received, freely give' has been our principle." The costs of the magazine were covered by unsolicited gifts from appreciative readers.

Please note that all of Mr Austin-Sparks messages are covered by moral rights under the Berne Convention. For more information on this, please visit the page on Copyright and Moral Rights Please note that this website and its logo are also copyright and may not be copied and used elsewhere without permission.

Austin-Sparks.Net
7 August, 2012