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In the buckle of the Bible Belt last year, Katie Richardson found herself scrambling for, of all things, a Bible.

The World Relief caseworker was shepherding a Muslim Somali family through a refugee resettlement program in Nashville. That's when the family's eldest brother, during his sister's hospital stay after surgery, asked for a Somali Bible.

"I didn't know it would be such an ordeal," Richardson said. Her staff spent weeks chasing dead-end leads before finally sleuthing out an online catalog specializing in non-English Scripture. Richardson ordered 10 Somali Bibles, only to find just one Somali New Testament in stock.

"Many of our refugees come from closed countries where they've never heard the gospel," Richardson said. "It shouldn't be this hard."

The call to "go ye into all the world" spurred a 19th and 20th-century mission movement from North America. But now that the world has moved in next door, some are asking, "Where are the Bibles?"

Often they're concentrated overseas, where Bible agencies hold copyrights to various translations, and where printing and distribution systems are most cost-effective. As a result, a handful of retailers, ethnic ministries, and home missionaries have pioneered their own supply networks to funnel non-English Bibles back to the United States—where at least 12 percent of the population is now foreign-born. But they wonder why, in this technologically advanced, global age, the non-English Word remains so elusive here.

"It's a very significant problem, one the International Bible Society has wrestled with for years," said Steve Johnson, publisher of the International Bible Society, which in March merged with the Christian distributor Send The Light (IBS-STL). "It's a challenge to get these translations we own overseas to indigenous communities in the U.S."

According to a 2006 United Bible Societies report, 1,541 languages now have a printed New Testament. Fewer than 200 of these translations are available for sale in North America, however, and many common languages are difficult to keep in stock.

Some leaders of smaller ministries blame the large Bible operations for safeguarding their copyright investments by limiting reprint and distribution rights. The monopolizing effect, they say, restricts access to God's Word and inhibits its missional mandate. Yet outdated business and mission models are as likely to blame for the bottleneck on foreign-language Scripture.

The Chicago-based Bible League, for instance, has long found it more efficient to print and distribute African-language Scripture from the Ukraine. The immigration wave of the last 20 years is now forcing it—and other U.S.-based ministries—to probe for new ways of operating, said Bible League executive Mike Southworth.

"We're just beginning to ask the question, 'For Nigerians in New York City, how do we make available to them the resources that we already have in Nigeria?'" Southworth said.

Starting in the 1970s, Seattle surgeon Kyle Chapman vowed to give all his patients a Bible in their native tongue. But he felt stymied by U.S. Bible agencies, which were consistently out of stock of the translations he wanted. The agencies also complained that he "strained resources" by placing more than one order at a time. Meanwhile, the better-furnished Canadian Bible Society, citing UBS protocol, refused to ship him orders a few miles across the border.

So Chapman developed his own resource channels through missionaries. He gathered Bibles in 350 languages at his farmhouse, and Bible societies started referring people to him. During the 1990s Bosnian War, the ABS itself called him and requested a Croatian Bible.

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August 2007, Vol. 51, No. 8