The Word in the Palm of Your Hand

Back in 1908 when the Gideons started "The Bible Project" it began out of their own context.  Since the Gideons--an association of Christian business men--were primarily travelers, the question arose how they might be more effective witnesses in the hotels where they spent so much of their time.  One trustee made the audacious suggestion that the Gideons furnish a Bible for each bedroom of the hotels in the United States.  It's been over 100 years since the Gideons placed the first Bible in a hotel room in Montana, and since that time, the Gideons have placed 1.3 billion Bibles and New Testaments.  And I can't help but wonder how many billions of "God moments" have occurred where someone alone with their thoughts in a quiet hotel room opened the drawer of a nightstand and searched through the pages.

Now, one hundred and twenty years later, our context has changed.

Lifechurch.tv has a very "wireless" culture.  And, like the Gideons, they had an audacious vision: to make the Bible accessible to anyone and everyone.  The result?  YouVersion.  The Bible application is free via iTunes for the iPhone and last week, LifeChurch.tv just launched the Bible Application for the Blackberry. (Not because Bobby Gruenewald is a BlackBerry user, but because there are 16 million other users worldwide.)  If you are neither an iPhone user nor a Blackberry user, you aren't left out.  You can access from any web-enabled mobile phone at http://m.youversion.com.

The beautiful thing is that, you can select from 13 English versions, three Spanish, two German, French, Swedish, Chinese, Bulgarian, Dutch, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and the list continues to grow.  Switching from one version to the next is also easy. (Which makes it easy for me to find verses I memorized as a child in KJV, then read them again in more modern translations.)  

To date, over 550,000 people have installed the Bible app on their iPhone / iPod and the number continues to grow by thousands each day. And with Lifechurch.tv funding the initial development cost and with limited distribution costs, the possibilities of accessibility are almost incomprehensible.

As for the team at Lifechurch.tv, I doubt the original Gideons could have imagined what they started would take this leap.  But I'm fairly certain they would be pleased.

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