Bibles for Iraq

One day in November my team had a meeting about a project to raise money to purchase Bibles for Iraqis. I scanned an Arabic Bible cover, enhanced the image a bit, and created some promotional cards to hand out at a missions conference that was happening that weekend at Charles Stanley's church. The effort wasn't extremely successful, but the image & idea stuck in my head. The fact that $2 would buy a Bible for someone with little or no access to God's word in such a closed country was mind boggling.

Christmas time came around, and I was looking for something to give to all of our supporters. I didn't have a huge budget for this, and hesitated to buy some little trinket that no one would want anyway. I wanted to give something meaningful: to "pay it forward."

So I pulled up that card design again, and (with the help of a development colleague) changed it into an honor card. Then I opened up the idea to the entire OM team, to donate money as a gift for their supporters.





The project continued to spread. I heard from one colleague that gave these honor cards: one of her friends was so touched that she went onto the website, donated a bunch of Bibles herself, and also gave to another project featured on our website.

So far, the amounts raised for this project:
Iraqi Bibles E-Blast brought in about $690
Online giving option for this project brought in $1,397
OM employee gifts totaled $2,238
Relatively small amounts in the larger development sense, but (God willing) with "loaves & fishes" potential for eternal results.

The project also lured Urbana attendees to our booth! (You can read about that in our Urbana posts below.)