At our April 24 Bible Giving meeting, the IBG Board would like to host a celebration of giving one million Bibles in the first 35 years of IBG, and to officially launch the new vision of giving 1 million Bibles into hard places around the world while doubling again our domestic Bible-giving ministry. We will, of course, also be handing out Bibles to ministries as we always do, but I want to encourage you to mark this date on your calendar and plan to attend!
We are moving the April meeting over to Constance Free Church – just this one meeting – because they have more space to accommodate a larger crowd. We are anticipating a larger crowd because we would like you to invite others to come and hear the new vision, with the hope that more people, and more churches and ministries, would choose to join our effort and get more Bibles into the hands of people who need to meet their Creator God.
God has answered our prayer and connected us with several church planters in the Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist world, and they already need more Bibles than we can supply today. God has always provided for us, but He seems to increase our “reach” – requests for Bibles - faster than we can supply. I think this keeps us in a posture of remaining dependent upon God and not thinking too highly of ourselves.
We hope to be able to share a few short videos from some of our church planting partners in India and Pakistan, and we plan to have some “Ministry Profiles” available for churches to better understand how they can join us in supplying Bibles to these regions of the world. I will speak that evening to unpack the vision to place more international Bibles during the Celebration.
You have two roles in this. First, please invite your missions-minded friends to join you at our April IBG Celebration. We will have lots of round tables across the room. Consider filling a table! We would also like you to invite you missions Pastor or Director and your Missions team to come join us. We will be sending out invitations letters to well over 100 area churches to invite them to come, but your personal invitation will be a much more effective invitation than my letter.
We hope to have 200 people in the room celebrating with us. Giving one million Bibles over 35 years is an amazing accomplishment starting from 4 retired Anoka-area couples in 1989. They built an incredible ministry which we now have the privilege of stewarding. Giving one million Bibles over the next 7 years will be a great way to honor their founding work, and a great way to serve God in His work of restoration in so many lives here, near and far. Plan to come and celebrate and invite a crowd to come with you!
Give Hope! Give Life! Give Bibles!
Chuck Hayes