.png)
Making the Bible known to children around the world is the heart and vision behind Bible for Children.
"It started with Jesus who said, 'Let the children come to Me. Do not forbid them for such as the Kingdom of Heaven,'" Greg Stetski from Bible for Children said. "Bible for Children exists to make Jesus Christ known to children around the world in their own heart language."
Bible for Children does that by printing Bible stories and also publishing stories on the internet.
Stetski said there are 60 stories from the Bible available. They were chosen by what he would read to his own kids. "I read lots of Bible stories to my six kids over the years, I think there are 100 languages for all 60 stories."
He said Bible for Children cover main stories from creation to Heaven and the history of the world, along with the Gospel challenge.
As it is accessible in multiple languages, Stetski said the goal is to reach as many as possible. "We're going past all the roadblocks that many outreaches are facing right now. It's going into various countries where the Gospel is not allowed. It's still getting in there through these Bible stories."
While Bible for Children has gone global, Stetski admits it was a bit of a surprise to him. "When we first started, we put our stories up on the internet in English and though that God could use them here. Then we started getting emails. We got an e-mail from Europe and somebody said, 'Could we translate these into French, Dutch, German, and Portuguese?'"
He said they had one request."We said, 'Really you want to do that? Okay, but we want to have the right to put the stories up on our website and give them away freely.'"
Shortly after, Stetski was reached out to again. "We had an e-mail from a YWAM team in Indonesia, they said, 'Could we translate these into Indonesian, and we would like to print booklets with them and give them out.' They printed 200,000 booklets of these stories and put them out all over Indonesia."
The desire for translated Bible stories wouldn't stop. More and more requests were coming in. "Next e-mail. 'I'm a pastor in Bulgaria and there's nothing for children in Bulgarian. Could I please translate these into Bulgarian and print them?'" Stetski agreed under the same request, as long as they could be put up on the internet and given away freely.
Not only are the stories translated, but the pastor in Bulgaria decided to do something different. "He came up with a little magazine idea that you printed. On the back was a CD with all the Bible stories, sixty of them in Bulgarian, which he translated and gave out freely in Bulgaria. Then an email that said. 'Are you interested and think what is that? Go to the attachment.' You opened it up, and there's our Bible story in Arabic. So all stories were translated into Arabic, and we decided at that point maybe God's trying to do something that we have no idea of here."
After someone wanted to translate the stories into Uzbek for Uzbekistan, it was shown in a different way. "We are going to beam in live video to that country by satellite. Our stories were part of the half-hour show that they put together, and that show was shown to five million people a week where the Gospel is not, missionaries are not allowed."
"The Chinese Christians there said we want to print the Chinese Bible stories and give them out at the Olympics. And so they printed out 100,000 and gave them out. They also said we did some big ones for our Sunday schools," Stetski said.
The next goal was to have the Bible stories in every language that had 1,000,000 or more speakers. "That ended up being 450 and we reached that target."
While it has been special to see the big impact the stories are making, one email stands out for Stetski. "One of the first emails I got was from a pastor in Dallas and he said, 'I just wanted to let you know we read one of the Bible stories to the class today, and then three kids prayed to receive Christ.' That was the kind of encouragement."
Stetski said anyone interested can use the stories and resources, such as stories, colouring pages, audio, and video from Bible for Children for free online here.