Bible sales rose 83 percent last year in the UK. The UK was once the bastion of the Christian missionary movement – mounting a global effort to bring the Gospel to all corners of the world. That fervor has been absent in recent decades as Christians have become a minority in the UK. Most of the Bibles in the UK are going to the next generation. There are reports from many corners of the world that this next generation values spiritual matters more highly than our generations.

There is a slightly different story going on in Australia, where in 2022, almost 40% of Australians claimed no religion. In the past 2 years, Christianity has grown, and while a significant portion of the growth is from Gen Z, there is a measurable movement of Boomers and Busters returning to church. A common theme of returnees is that faith matters and something important to life was missing.

In the United States, people claiming Christianity is on the rise after two decades of decline, driven largely by, you guessed it, the next generation. Post pandemic, Christians in America are ATTENDING services less, on average less that twice a month and this is partially driven by the next generation. While that brings challenges to the church, we should be encouraged. We have an entire generation interested in the Gospel.

The global church continues to grow. Most Christians reside outside of Europe and North America these days, so we now live outside of the majority church. While the US still sends more missionaries out than any other country, several other countries now send more missionaries on a per capita basis.

So what of our IBG global Gospel efforts? We are preparing to provide 3800 Hindi Bibles into India in July. I’m not sure IBG has ever placed that many Bibles at one time into a foreign country. I pray it becomes the norm. These Bibles are in support of a church planting movement, so these Bibles are going to mostly new believers.

Another 500 Oromo Bibles are going to Ethiopia in the next weeks. This is the second of 4 such placements we desire to make this year. They need many more Bibles than the 2000 we will provide this year, but as funding comes in, we will be able to fund even more Bibles.

IBG is working with our Thai partner to arrange the first printing of a new Thai New Testament translation. We need to find a funding partner to provide for half of the first printing cost. IBG can cover about 5000 of the NT’s and we need to find a partner who can fund the other 5000 copies of this first run. Again, we’ve never done this before, but the seed funding of $100,000 has been received and is funding these start up efforts.

IBG received Pakistani Bible requests totaling a tad over 101,000 Urdu Bibles this month. We will arrange to provide some Bibles this next month – maybe 1% of the request, while we search for a more cost-effective source Bibles in Pakistan.

We plan to print 10,000 NT’s to support evangelism in the most persecuted country in the world. I expect we will be ready to print these NT’s in the August time frame for fall delivery onto this very unique mission field.

Domestically, the seed funding we received will allow IBG to provide Bibles to ~5 additional ministries each month. This is part of our vision to double the size of our domestic Bible giving ministry.

Finally, Danny McCollor, our International Bible Director for Africa is retiring from IBG. Thank you for your service Danny! I am taking on Africa at the moment but already have a full plate. Would you pray for God’s provision for the right person to take this opportunity and develop our African ministry?

Give Hope! Give Life! Give Bibles!

Chuck Hayes