CRI's Fred Palmerton says these resources will
support a church partner. "Pastor Harley is very excited about the opportunity to send some
of that material on to ministries that he is fond of and knows there's a great
need for."

As the truck
with the Great Crate pulled up to Pastor Ken Harley's church, it was met by a team of people
from the church ready to unload and store the books. 

The distribution began even
before everything was unloaded. Palmerton
said, "A young man wanted to know what they were unloading. The lady said,
'Those are Bibles. Do you know what Bibles are? Bibles are God's Word. The
Bible is the greatest book in the world. [Do] you want a Bible?'"  

Pastor
Harley's church provided books to 20 churches in Hong Kong and
Macau by setting up mini-libraries for these believers.

Many of the
children's books headed out from Hong Kong to the Philippines where there was
great need for Christian literature. Other books went to the YMCA school library. Some were shipped from Hong Kong to pastors in Africa.

CRI receives hundreds of requests each
month from pastors around the world, asking for even one Bible for their
church.

Even as this container emptied,
CRI is readying yet another to send to Africa. "We are anticipating sending another container this year. We
are in the process of raising funds for that container."

What kind of impact does this
have on the body of Christ? Palmerton once explained the effect one single Bible can have. "If a
Bible goes to a pastor and he can use that Bible to deliver sermons to 20 or 25
villagers, and one of those villagers [responds to] God's Word and decides to
become an itinerant pastor, and he takes the Word into another village, how
many thousands of people can one Bible touch?"

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Love Packages founder Steve Schmidt says they want those
materials because they know people who are in desperate need of them. "We try to set up distribution points
in various places of the world with people who are already on the
ground and already doing it. We'll break
a record this year. We'll ship over a
thousand tons of literature this year. To kind of give you an idea of what
that's like, that's enough literature for about 50 million people to read first
time."  

How does it get to where it's going? Most of it is sent in banded boxes or mail
sacks via the U.S. Mail. Some is shipped to port cities in ocean-going containers that weigh approximately 20 tons. In
addition, Love Packages also partners with others using ships or planes who can
fill part of their cargo hold with the resources.

That's one way to ship it, but funds are a major part of
resourcing the global church. Schmidt says they're supported by free-will
offerings from churches and individuals who are concerned about wasting
materials that teach the Word of God. It's really an issue of sharing the vision and letting others see how
they can make a difference.

So that begs the question that if Love Packages is
collecting used Christian resources from North America,
aren't they primarily in English? Will
those English-only materials be helpful in a global situation?

The answer is "yes." Love Packages services nations like Nigeria
and Ghana
which have taught English in their schools for the past 35 years. In India, roughly
a quarter of their one billion population speaks and reads English.

Schmidt says the materials also help train new leaders for
ministry. "We take any and all Christian paperbacks. We take Bibles, in
any kind of condition. There are people
all over the world that have none. We take your daily devotionals,
concordances, commentaries, Bible dictionaries, regular dictionaries, all those
items, you'd be surprised. There are Bible colleges all over the world that
have none of those books."

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