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"It started as a hobby. Then I became a source," said Chapman, who at age 81 still keeps several translations on tap. "It's a tragedy that, in this age of jet travel, Bibles aren't readily available here."

Jay Krause knows the feeling. After managing a bookstore for Operation Mobilization, Krause returned to the U.S. to find ministries struggling to serve an influx of internationals with Bibles. "It's like a famine," Krause was told.

He started phoning contacts overseas: publishers, booksellers, and missionaries. In 1985, when his Bible inventory outgrew his bedroom, Krause opened Multi-Language Media, a supplier now based in Ephrata, Pennsylvania.

Krause fields customer referrals from ABS and IBS for hard-to-get languages like Albanian and Nepali. Still, because of the shortage of Bibles, some distributors have seen Russian and Korean Bibles scalped online for as much as $300 each. "Unfortunately, it's sometimes about who you know," said Steve Maxted of MGL Multilingual, a Tacoma-based supplier.

Complaints about Bible societies have caught the agencies' attention—and they've begun responding. During the last several years, IBS has partnered with frontline ministries that work with internationals in the U.S., helping them to raise funds for non-English Bibles. IBS has also created a top-10 list of Bible needs, based on both demographics and spiritual need.

"People need Scripture in their own cultural context," publisher Johnson said. "IBS has a responsibility to re-inject the Word back into American culture, in the languages America is now speaking."

Last year, the United Bible Societies addressed a key element of the problem by relaxing borders between its 141 member agencies. U.S.-based customers, once limited to requesting orders through the American Bible Society, may now contact overseas societies directly.

"Our traditional model was restrictive," said John Cruz, executive director of ABS's Bibles.com unit."But the world has become a much smaller place. Sometimes, a home country is better able to serve a population than the host country."

The offspring of a $1 million cost-cutting move in 2003, Bibles.com outsourced warehouse operations and reduced staff. The result, Cruz said, is more efficient service and affordable Bibles—not to mention a greatly expanded selection of languages.

"We're building up the [ABS language] list, but we have to be good stewards of limited resources," Cruz said. While inventory in Cambodian, Cebuano, Czech, Portuguese, Lithuanian, Russian, and Syriac is improving, languages like Kinyarwanda (Rwanda's main language) remain perennial problems. ABS officials say it's not feasible to warehouse every language, but they note their recent work with foreign Bible societies to better forecast inventory needs, order extra stock, and track immigrant populations in the U.S.

"We're more proactive now," said John Greco, director of operations for Bibles.com. "We weren't as keen on planning before, but [now] we're really seeing where the holes in the [supply] lines are."

Another challenge remains, however. In 2001, the 25-member Forum of Bible Agencies, which includes groups like ABS, the Bible Society, and Wycliffe Bible Translators, set out to create an internet catalog of the world's Bibles. More than 40 million people in the U.S. don't speak English as their first language. Yet as of today, the Forum has been unable to establish an online database, let alone to begin selling Scripture from it. If all goes well, a site might launch later this year.

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August 2007, Vol. 51, No. 8