Bible Smuggling 101

Bible Smuggling 101 – Legally Saturating High Schools with God’s Word.

In today’s divisive culture-war society, when news stories about separation of church and state thrive with controversy, one cutting-edge Christian ministry is having remarkable success spreading the Word of God. What makes it remarkable? They are doing it by distributing Bibles in public schools—legally.

Carl Blunt is the president and CEO of The Life Book Movement, a Christian mission centered on Blunt’s own contemporary, youth-oriented edition of a portion of the Bible called The Life Book, a unique presentation of Scripture designed to engage high school students with the truth of God’s Word. The Life Book presents a brief overview of the Old Testament and the Book of John using an interactive format with honest student comments and real-life questions in the margins. Readers are drawn into the only story that can change their lives forever. 

Founded by The Gideons International as an innovative strategy to reach high school students with God’s Word, The Life Book Movement works in collaboration with churches throughout the country to provide the books for free to high school students. Blunt’s organization brilliantly threads a separation-of-church-and-state loophole by getting his publication into the hands of Christian high school students and having them pass the books out to classmates at school—a practice that is entirely legal, as long as the books are not distributed by school staff or other adults. Blunt says, “It’s like we’re helping students smuggle God’s Word into a closed country (public high schools) to reach an unreached people group because studies show that only 4% of today’s teenagers are Bible-believing Christians.” The goal is to ensure that every student in every high school in the United States has an opportunity to receive the gift of The Life Book. This approach presents a phenomenal opportunity to impact a generation with the good news of Jesus Christ.

The Life Book Movement is best described to students as a week-long mission trip to their local high school. Local churches work together in targeted areas to ensure The Life Book is offered to every student in each chosen high school. All churches involved receive the books at no cost from The Life Book Movement and provide the books, along with some evangelism training, to the students in their youth groups. The students then spend a week passing them out to their friends and classmates at school. One student who received the book said, “I got one today. I read it in almost every class today. I like it. It’s pretty neat and other people asked to look at it and then asked where to get one.” 

Flying under the radar since its inception last fall, The Life Book Movement is rapidly closing in on distribution of more than 300,000 copies in public high schools across 21 states and even the British Virgin Islands. A quiet success, indeed, but extremely ambitious, The Life Book Movement has an ultimate goal of distributing The Life Book to nearly 18 million high school students when all is said and done. And, so far, the outlook is extremely promising.

www.thelifebook.com

My Thoughts

I think it is great that some organization is trying to reach out to the generation which is falling from the churches.    Honestly, from what I see in this book, it could be a great tool to reach out.  

The book itself is divided in four part.   Part One tells God’s story before Jesus came.  In Part Two the teenager will discover the story of Jesus.   Then there is a section titled What About You?  which will challenge whoever is reading about the impact of what was read in his/her life.    Finally, the last part of the book is a HELP! section which will gives answers to the most common questions teenagers can have.  

Throughout the book, there are notes scribbled everywhere.  These notes comes from four teenagers (two girls and two guys) and one adult.   You can easily know who is writing since all the writings are different from one another.   They would put comments of their reactions to what has been read or how they feel about a specific scripture and so on.  

Having this kind of interaction is fantastic I think as it permits the reader to relate to other people his/her age.

I pray and hope that the Life Book project will be fruitful.   May many students be touched by this initiative.