Author: Biblica Europe

A Life of Service

At the age of 96, Queen Elizabeth II passed away on the 8th September 2022. As news of her death spread across the world, many have been talking about the impact of her life of service. As church congregations met the following Sunday, many tributes were paid and thanks given for a monarch who often shared her faith in public.

Right from the start, in her first Christmas broadcast (1952) she said:

At my Coronation next June, I shall dedicate myself anew to your service. I shall do so in the presence of a great congregation, drawn from every part of the Commonwealth and Empire, while millions outside Westminster Abbey will hear the promises and the prayers being offered up within its walls, and see much of the ancient ceremony in which Kings and Queens before me have taken part through century upon century.

Pray that God may give me wisdom and strength to carry out the solemn promises I shall be making, and that I may faithfully serve him and you, all the days of my life.

In her 70 years of service, she carried out more than 15,000 official engagements, and gave her support to over 600 charities, and through it all, her faith was a constant. In 2002 she said:

I know just how much I rely on my faith to guid me through the good times and the bad. Each day is a new beginning. I know that the only way to live a life is to try to do what is right, to take the long view, to give of my best in all that the day brings, and to put my trust in God

Platinum Jubilee

2022 brought the opportunity to celebrate 70 years as Queen – one of the world’s longest serving monarchs. At Biblica we were pleased to partner with Hope Together in a special publication highlighting the faithful service of the Queen over these years. The beautifully presented booklet, shares the witness of the Queen’s 70 years of faithful service, and has now become a fitting and appropriate memorial gift for any wanting to give something away to help others grasp the centrality of the Queen’s faith over her lifetime of service. You can order copies by clicking here.

At Biblica, we’re developing and championing the use of smartphone technology to bring God’s Word to places that are hard to reach.

One of our partners created a small, simple Bible study app that is quietly travelling the world.

The Discover app provides Bible passages that cover the big story of the Bible, and asks simple questions about each passage:

• What does this story tell me about God?
• What does this story tell me about people (or myself)?
• If this is God’s word for my life how will I obey it?
• Who am I going to tell?

The structure is easy to teach, easy to remember and easy to replicate. The app allows anyone, anywhere to run a Bible study, even in places where Bible access is difficult.

We are thrilled that the app uses four of Biblica’s modern Bible translations: Farsi, Swahili, French, and the New Arabic Version – along with 10 other key languages in both text and audio formats.

There have been 80,000 downloads so far, but probably many more users than that. We love hearing stories like these…

Sharing Scripture by Bluetooth

“There was one particular language for a country that was really on our hearts,” says Ian, who developed the Discover app. “When we got it added to the app, we literally had no evidence whatsoever that it was being used.

“The app can be shared between phones by Bluetooth – you don’t have to download it. We made it this way for people without internet access, but it means that we don’t fully know how many people are using it.

“I said to my wife one day, ‘I’d love to just know that it’s being used in that country’, and she said, ‘We will probably never know.’ But we prayed about it.

“The very next morning, I went onto my web stats and found that one person from that country had downloaded the app! Then, later that day we had a phone call from a friend of ours who had just returned from travelling there and wanted to stay with us overnight. At the end of the evening, he told us, ‘Oh, I was travelling a couple of months ago and I met these guys and they showed your app to a local faith leader who is now running the Discovery Bible Study with 40 men.’

“Just hearing that was an amazing answer to prayer.”

Listen in your own language

In one part of Scandinavia there is a network of older women (known as ‘Grandmas’) with a special calling. They go to cafes and simply sit and talk with refugees. They are completely non-threatening because of who they are, and form lovely friendships with these newcomers to the country.

They usually talk about faith, and these chats often get to a point where it’s natural to ask if their refugee friend would be interested in doing a Bible study together. When the answer is yes, thanks to the Discover app, the Grandma can put their phone down in the middle of the table and play the Discover Bible Study in the language of the refugee. For the first time, they hear the Bible in their own language.

“It’s great for a lot of these guys whose literacy isn’t great,” says Ian. “They don’t have the embarrassment of trying to read the story, but can just hit play, listen to the story, talk with their Grandma friend about the questions, and just get into God’s Word so easily.”

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If you want to check out the Discover app for yourself, you can download it to your phone from Google Play or the App Store. Who will you share it with?

“I joined a Bible reading small group in year 10, and the Word of God changed my life.”

What age were you when you began to follow Jesus?

Reach4Life is our ground-breaking youth discipleship Bible and app. We developed it specifically for young people (12-25) living in challenging situations around the world – where they are dealing with poverty, discrimination, disease, lack of rights or even imprisonment alongside all the usual trials of being a teenager.

You can read more about it and watch a video here.

This special resource has so far helped over two million young people around the world to read the New Testament in small groups together, and to apply its wisdom to the pressing issues in their lives. There have been clear changes in teenagers’ behaviour and life choices where Reach4Life is being used, along with many finding new life in Christ.

We’re continually adding to the number of languages Reach4Life is available in, being strategic about where the need is greatest. Last year we launched a Russian translation.

This year we printed Reach4Life in both formal and colloquial Arabic for the first time. We found that there is nothing like this for young people in North Africa and the Middle East, offering guidance and the opportunity to grapple with the issues they face like the pressure to be married young.

“I took Reach4Life with me to start a secret Bible reading group.”

Reach4Life takes the reader on four journeys: how to be saved, how to grow in Christ, how to face challenges, and how to be an agent of change yourself. One young man from North Africa told us about the incredible journey God took him on after he met Jesus as a teenager through a Reach4Life discipleship group.

“I joined a Bible reading small group in year 10. I had no relationship with Christ. After four months, the Word of God changed my life, and I committed my life to Christ.

I left behind bad friends and found that my grades picked up. Despite difficulties, I got a scholarship, trained to become a doctor and moved to Cuba.

When I went, I took several copies of Reach4Life with me to start a secret Bible reading group with other young medical staff. I love getting to share about Christ with my colleagues and patients.

I do not think I would have become who I am today if the Word of God had not touched me and changed me through reading the Bible with other youth.

May God’s Word keep shining the light and bringing hope to many kids like it did for me.”

Reach4Life is part of Biblica’s mission to make God’s powerful Word accessible to the Rising Generations who will shape the future of our world.

More than half a million Turkish speakers live in London, having emigrated generations ago or more recently from places like Turkey, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece or Macedonia.

Many of them have never had a chance to hear the full story of the Gospel. Living in the UK, there are more opportunities for them to openly explore the Bible – but reading it in a second language like English isn’t the same. It feels foreign, sometimes confusing and doesn’t speak to the heart.

To help break down these barriers, partnering with others, the Biblica team has recently translated Luke’s Gospel into the simplified variety of Turkish usually spoken at home by those living in Europe – the Colloquial European Turkish NT translation. Our Luke Explained booklet contains some extra notes to help people from this context understand certain words and concepts that may be problematic for them.

This Easter, a group of Turkish children and teenagers shared Luke Explained and their own stories of faith with others in their London community and saw God do something amazing.

God’s Word in the hands of children

Every Easter and Christmas, one of London’s Turkish churches works with Operation Mobilization (OM) to bring over international volunteers to share the story of Jesus with more local Turkish speakers. This year, Covid travel restrictions made it too difficult for volunteers to come from overseas, so OM decided to ask young people from London’s own Turkish churches if they would like to do the Easter outreach instead.

They were very keen! In fact, younger children wanted to take part too, so parents brought along their 8, 9 and 10 year-olds to join the teens.

Throughout Holy Week, the children and teenagers took to the streets of their communities and told fellow Turkish people that Jesus loves them. They freely shared their own stories of why they believed in Jesus, and smiling and excited, offered people a Luke Explained booklet. These happy young people from their own cultural background were very non-threatening and everybody took a booklet away to read.

The kids began to ask people if they would like to pray with them, and plenty did. As the week went on, one person decided to follow Christ right there on the street.

 

New life breaks out on Easter Sunday

By Easter Sunday, the team had seen dozens of people from the Turkish community come to Christ, so they decided to hold an Easter baptism event at the local lake.

20 new believers got baptised that day, with lots of their friends and family coming along to watch and enjoy a picnic. The team set up a book table for those who wanted to find out more, along with a prayer tent.

Dennis, the church leader who led the outreach, was bowled over by the power of God in the prayer tent. He said:
Many came and asked for healing. The glory of the Lord covered that tent. Whoever touched it, whoever was around it, the Spirit of God touched their hearts deeply. When I was in the tent, a Turkish-speaking man came in saying, ‘I don’t think I am worthy of Jesus, I have too many sins.’ I explained that God accepts us all just as we are, that thanks to Jesus you don’t have to be perfect to come to him. I offered to pray with the man, and at the end of the prayer, he accepted Jesus.

His wife came and held hands with him as he prayed. She had come to know Jesus many years ago and had been praying for her husband for a long time. Then his friend came in saying, ‘I want to accept Jesus too!’ He was another man whose wife had come to faith previously and had been praying for him. But that wasn’t all. As we were praying, another two people came into the tent, also wanting to follow Christ!

This wonderful Easter story demonstrates why we’re so determined to provide the Bible in accurate, contemporary translations that connect with people’s hearts. Together, we’re breaking down barriers to God’s Word so that everybody from any background has the opportunity to be transformed by Jesus.

Biblica and partners are aiming to complete the whole Colloquial European Turkish New Testament translation by 2023.

You can give today to help more people access the Bible in a way that connects with them.

In Ukraine, you can live, work and spend your life speaking Ukrainian, but, for many people, only read the Bible in Russian. 

This was a huge issue before the events of the past month. But now more than ever Ukrainians need the scriptures to speak to them in their own heart language, not the language they associate with oppression.

We’d been working on a contemporary Ukrainian translation since 2018 – it was due to be released in print this June. In response to the crisis in Ukraine, we managed to push out the electronic version of the New Testament on the app a few months early. We knew that:

a) God’s people in Ukraine would be looking for comfort and courage from his Word at this time.

b) They would struggle to keep hold of any Bibles they had when taking cover, but were likely to keep their phones with them.

c) They would be feeling especially conflicted about reading the Bible’s words of comfort in Russian while Russian bombs dropped overhead.

In the app’s first few weeks, we saw a much bigger uptake of the Ukrainian translation than we’d expected. On our monitoring software, we could see thousands of downloads by refugees entering neighbouring countries, and over 150,000 downloads by people still within Ukraine.

That figure hit us hard. It means that Ukrainian soldiers, families trapped in bomb shelters, and those who don’t know if they’ll survive are desperately pressing into God at this time. It’s very sobering, but we are glad we’ve been able to do this one thing – give them a source of strength through God’s powerful Word in their own heart language.

We can pray with them too – let’s do that today.

To find out more about the translation project for Ukraine, watch this short video:

Can you support our work to get the Bible in Ukrainian to those who need it? visit our giving page

Biblica has a long-standing partnership with Eastern European Mission (EEM), which began with the licensing of Romanian and Russian translations for children’s illustrated Bibles for schools and churches in Moldova, Romania, Ukraine and Russia.

EUROPEAN EASTERN MISSION

EEM was established in 1961 in Vienna to provide God’s Word in print in the languages of the nations behind the “Iron Curtain”. As times changed, the organisation evolved but continued to focus on its core mission of providing Bibles, free of charge, to the countries of Eastern, Central, and South-Eastern Europe. EEM currently operates in 30 different countries and provide Bible and other biblical resources in over 25 different languages. EEM has field offices in Russia, Ukraine, Czechia, Romania, Greece, Belarus, and Serbia, and partner with hundreds of churches and ministries to distribute the Bible to all who want to read it. In recent years EEM has been distributing over 1 million pieces of literature per year.

Mark Finnie, Biblica Vice President for Europe and the Middle East said “Biblica’s vision to reach the marginalised and vulnerable is shared by EEM… tens of thousands of Arabic and Farsi Bibles have been given to refugees fleeing Iran and Syria and other troubled areas of the Middle East…. At Biblica we love working with EEM as they bring God’s word to new believers and those who have never heard the story of God’s love and forgiveness”.

Bartosz Rybinski is the Vice President of European Operations for EEM. Originally from Warsaw, Poland, he has a background in business and ministry. Bartosz has been a follower of Christ for nearly 30 years and currently serves with EEM in Vienna, Austria since 2007.

BIBLES IN ROMANIAN

Biblica recently provided EEM with Bibles in Romanian, and we were keen to find out from Bartosz how they were being used. Bartosz said “Romanian Bibles are requested by churches, mission organisations, and schools in Romania, Moldova, and Greece. The Bibles are distributed during evangelistic campaigns, outdoor events, door-to-door, as gifts for Christmas or Easter and used in public and private schools for religious education classes. They often go to the most neglected, forgotten, and poorest of the society. Even though COVID-19 restrictions have impacted some of these efforts, the demand for the Romanian Bibles remains high. From the 33,000 copies we produced in partnership with Biblica in late 2020, about 5000 copies remain in our inventory as of end of May 2021. We expect to have completely distributed them by August 2021.”

YOUNG PEOPLE ENGAGING WITH THE BIBLE

Mitru and Ica Doboș are partners of EEM working in Arad County, Romania. They work particularly with schools providing resources for children. A Religious Studies teacher, Poduț Dănuț, in one of the schools said

“I gave out the Bibles as a prize to some of my students. I was surprised when some colleagues asked me for Bibles so they could also give them out as prizes! The following year a teacher asked me if we could give the Bibles to each student in the preparatory class through the eighth grade, which I did. So going from giving out a few Bibles in my classes, I was giving out 680! Then, Religious Studies colleagues from other schools asked me for Bibles for their schools!

We have been very encouraged to hear of grandparents, older siblings, and parents reading the Bibles. I have had many of my students engage with the Bible and other resources and they want to discuss more about what the Bible says.”

The desire of EEM to get the Bible into the hands of more people is clear. Bartosz said

“Our close partnership with Biblica is critical to the success of our ministry and has an impact on access to Bibles all over Eastern and Central Europe. In addition to the recently published 2^nd edition of the Serbian Bible, we are working with our friends at Biblica on new editions of the Russian and Romanian Bibles, Serbian and Romanian Bibles in Large Print, for the older generation and Bibles in Sorani for the refugees in Greece and beyond. Without the long-term vision of Biblica to provide translations in these and many other languages, the work of EEM would be much more challenging and thousands would not have access to a modern Bible text in their own language.”

 How encouraging is to hear about this work to get God’s Word into the hands of those who need it in a contemporary translation that they understand!

Can you support this work? visit our giving page