Smuggle Bibles into China? The More, the Better

Gary Russell, international director for China Harvest, Todd Nettleton, director of media development for the Voice of the Martyrs USA, and Jonathan Brooks, president of the Voice of China and Asia Missionary Society, weigh in on whether Christians should continue to smuggle Bibles into China.

The best way to illustrate the need for Bibles in China today is to share the testimony of a longtime friend, Brother "Han."

Born a peasant, Han came to Christ while in university. While planting churches in urban centers, he found the number of available basic Bibles growing. Getting enough Bibles was not the problem. That need, he concluded, was being met on a nationwide basis.

Soon, Han was asked to help develop a major Chinese study Bible for pastors, and he worked to help pastors use it in every imaginable church setting. Many of those churches—especially rural ones—began asking him for regular Bibles to distribute. He was shocked to learn that they had only very limited access to officially sanctioned Bibles. Han found himself confronted by hundreds of thousands of Bible requests. The number of requests he receives is still growing.

Different areas in China have widely different circumstances and must be approached using different practices. But nationwide, there are just not enough Bibles to go around. Paul Hattaway, founder and director of Asia Harvest, recently compiled a county-by-county report of the number of Christians in China from 2,000 published sources, and arrived at a total of more than 102 million. Taking the loftiest estimate of Bibles supplied from all sources and comparing it with reasonable but conservative estimates of the number of Christians in China, one is left with a deficit in the tens of millions.

Whether working primarily in registered or unregistered churches, we should agree on some common realities.

Every Chinese person deserves access to God's Word, and hundreds of millions do not have it now; the need has increased in the past 30 years.

Amity Press Bibles are legal, authentic, and available in many areas, and have made a substantial contribution to the need. But the Amity route is limited in quantity, variety, and distribution. Editions for children and pastors have barely been addressed. And millions of Chinese still have no regular access to a Bible.

Given these realities, covertly supplying Bibles to China is not only legitimate—it is a necessary element of obedience to Christ. While civil authorities are to be honored and respected, their authority is delegated by and limited under God. Restrictions against evangelizing and providing Scripture are not legitimate, and those who love God and China serve well by increasing the country's Bible supply.

But government-sanctioned and clandestine Bible suppliers contradict the very Bible they are distributing when they attack each other, oversimplify China's context, or otherwise undermine their unity in Christ to appease their own constituents and stakeholders. Both suppliers are appropriate, share the same goal, and are utterly insufficient to achieve that goal working alone.

Supplying Bibles to China by any means is a great contribution to the cause of Christ. All concerned would do well to exhibit Christlike humility, recognizing that we "see through a glass darkly."