ABS Steps Up Mission to Get Bibles Into Hard-to-Reach Places
by Allie Martin
July 12, 2006
(AgapePress) - - The American Bible Society (ABS), a 190-year-old organization that distributes millions of Bibles every year throughout the United States and the world, has recently stepped up its distribution of Bibles in prisons across the U.S. John Walker, director of national accounts with ABS, says the society's Bibles are making a big impact for God's kingdom behind the walls of America's prisons. He notes that his organization's inexpensive scripture editions have been a particularly big hit with many people doing prison ministry and outreach.
"Over the years with prison and detention center ministry," Walker explains, "because of some of the requirements that chaplains have in these ministries, [the Bibles they distribute] have to be paperback and have to be low-cost Bibles." Of course, he admits, once these volumes are distributed, the Society usually has no means of tracking them.
"Once [our Bibles] get into those prisons," the ABS official observes, "we have no idea what's happening with them. But we do hear a lot of stories about inmates who find them in trash cans, who find them under a seat, who find them in a corner someplace swept up, and who have an opportunity to read the gospel. And God's Word does not return void."
The America Bible Society is part of the worldwide United Bible Societies, which helps distribute scripture to all parts of the globe. Walker says the ABS works with this international organization very closely.
"Oftentimes a ministry will come to us and will be doing missionary work," the Society's national accounts director notes, "and we will refer them directly to [the appropriate] Bible society because the Bibles are available in the language necessary and most of the time ... they'll be cheaper, the shipping won't cost anything, that type of thing."
The Society finds that partnering with other ministries is often the most practical and effective way to get the Word of God to people in remote parts of the world, Walker points out. "So we refer, more and more all the time, people to those indigenous Bible societies," he says.
The ABS has also sent hundreds of thousands of New Testaments to soldiers in the Middle East, Walker adds. And recently, the Society completed its latest translation of the Bible into Gullah, a Creole language spoken by the Gullah, a culturally distinct group of people descended from African slaves, mostly dwelling in the Sea Islands and coastal low country regions of South Carolina and Georgia.
The American Bible Society is committed to making the Bible available to every person in a language and format each can understand and afford, so all people may experience its life-changing message.
Walker says the ABS work is making a big impact for eternity. Through the Society's efforts, God's Word is getting into many hard-to-reach places, finding its way into the hands of people in remote parts of America, in the nation's prisons, to U.S. soldiers deployed in the Middle East, and spiritually hungry recipients elsewhere around the world.
Allie Martin, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
