Are Bibles Needed in China? Simple Math Says Yes!

Amity Printing is the only company allowed to print Bibles in China. Its Chinese facility has printed 41 million Bibles for distribution in China and 9 million Bibles for foreign distribution since 1987. There are those who say Amity's printing facility in this communist country makes the smuggling or secretly printing of Bibles there obsolete.

Yet with a simple math equation it's easy to see Amity's Bible printing amounts to rationing God's word. The equation shows that for the 1.3 billion people living in China today, access to a Bible remains elusive.

The latest figure for Amity's annual press run was 6 million Bibles. Divide that by the 1 billion, 330 million people in China and that means the communist country allows access to one Bible for every 222 people each year. With China's present Bible printing allowance, Mississauga (our home city), with its population of 700,000, would have access to only 3,150 Bibles a year. The difference, of course, is that many are coming to Christ in China and many believers are still without a copy of the Bible of their own, whereas in Mississauga, most churches are not growing significantly and most Christians have multiple copies.

With thousands reportedly becoming Christians each day, you can see that, even with Amity’s best intentions, there is no way that they can meet the needs of providing Bibles to new Christians, to say nothing of supplying Bibles to those who still don’t have one or who may not even be Christians. Christian workers who want to distribute multiple copies find it impossible to buy the supplies that they need. One of our contacts in China says that he has requests for 20,000 Bibles in one region alone. At the present rate that he is able to legally buy Bibles, it would take 18 years to meet that request!

We are grateful China allows Amity to legally print Bibles. And we hope that they continue to do so. But to point to Amity’s press run, as a number of prominent church leaders have recently done, as evidence that Bible smuggling or illegal printing is not necessary or a waste of resources, is to ignore the reality of the need for God’s Word as compared to the limitations on supply that the Chinese government continues to enforce.

Many organizations, including ours, continue provide China’s growing church with God's precious Word. Please support your church or denomination's efforts to provide our Chinese brothers and sisters with Bibles. Pray for the day when everyone in China will have God's Word readily available to them with no restrictions and no barriers.

How many Bibles would China allow in your hometown?

Population of your city, multiply it by .0045 to find the annual total of Bibles that would be legally available for your city if it were in China.