China’s Bible Printing Industry
Almost every Sunday, Ge Conghui attends a church where, Bible in hand, she joins fellow Christians to sing hymns, listen to sermons and pray.
In the time that Ge Conghu spends at church, about one hour, the Amity Printing Co produces 1,500 Bibles at its facility in the city’s Jiangning district.
Qiu Zhonghui is the president of the company and secretary-general of the Amity Foundation, which is the world’s largest printer of Bibles. In 2014, they printed 13.22 million copies in more than 100 languages, and distributed them across China, and in more than 70 countries and regions.
Jointly founded by the Amity Foundation, an independent voluntary organisation set up on the initiative of Chinese Christians, and the United Bible Societies in the UK, Amity Printing produced its first copy of “the Good Book” in 1987.
Qiu, who is a Christian, said that “in the 1980s, many believers in China could not afford a Bible, or they had nowhere to purchase one. Some people even had to copy the book word by word, so … the [then] leader of China’s Christians and also president of the Amity Foundation said we should try to provide Bibles to a greater number of people, and make them cheap so the less well-off could afford a copy.”
From 1987 to 2012, more than 105 million copies of the Bible were printed in China, with 60 percent of them distributed within the country, while the remaining 40 percent went overseas. Amity Printing also produces Bibles in 10 languages for China’s ethnic groups, and by December of 2014 it had printed more than 83,000 copies in Braille.
According to estimates by scholars in China and overseas, there are somewhere between 23 million and 40 million Christians in China, accounting for 1.7 to 2.9 percent of the population.
- Give thanks for China’s Bible production and that Chinese Christians have greater access to the Bible in their own language and dialect.
- Pray that, as the Bible is distributed across China, many more will read it and discover the truth of God’s love and His Gospel.
- Pray for protection for Christians in China, who still face real persecution from the government, despite there being a greater freedom for the church.
1 Peter 1 vs 24 -25: “All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass.
The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord endures for ever.’
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk
