About Bible League International
In 1938, William and Betty Chapman bought 100 Bibles and started knocking on doors in Walkerton, Indiana.
They had a question for each household.
Did they own a Bible?
When the answer was no, the Chapmans offered one—but with an unusual request.
Would they promise to read it?
That small detail says a lot about the ministry that eventually became Bible League International.
William Chapman wasn't interested only in counting how many Bibles he could distribute. He wanted people to actually open God's Word and discover what it said.
More than eight decades later, the scale has changed enormously.
The principle hasn't.
Bible League International equips under-resourced churches around the world with Scripture and training so that people don't merely receive Bibles.
They engage with them.
It Began With a Prayer From a Hospital Bed
The story actually starts two years before those first 100 Bibles.
In 1936, William Chapman suffered a serious heart attack.
While he was hospitalized, an elder from his church prayed that God would restore Chapman's health and direct his remaining strength toward serving Christ.
Chapman initially thought the prayer sounded strange.
But he couldn't forget it.
Eventually, he made his own commitment to God: if his health returned, he would give his strength wherever God led him.
On Good Friday in 1938, William and Betty Chapman began going door to door with those Bibles.
A personal promise made during illness had become a ministry.
A Bible Is Most Powerful When Someone Understands It
Bible League International could have developed into an enormous Bible shipping operation.
Instead, its ministry increasingly formed around Scripture engagement.
The distinction matters.
Someone can own a Bible without understanding it.
A new Christian may begin reading and quickly encounter passages they find confusing. Someone with little formal education may struggle even more.
So Bible League works through local churches and trained Christians who can sit with people and help them understand what they're reading.
The Bible remains central.
But relationship surrounds it.
That's where one of the ministry's most important programs enters the story.
Project Philip Begins With a Question
In Acts 8, Philip encounters an Ethiopian official reading the prophet Isaiah.
Philip asks whether he understands what he's reading.
The man's response captures a problem Bible League still sees around the world:
How can I understand unless someone explains it to me?
Bible League named its primary evangelism and discipleship program Project Philip after that encounter.
Local Christians are trained to become “Philips.”
They lead small-group Bible studies where people encounter Scripture, ask questions, learn about Jesus, and are invited toward faith in Christ.
Those who believe aren't meant to remain isolated converts.
The Philip helps connect them with a local church where discipleship can continue.
Now Bible distribution has become something larger.
The Bible has entered a relationship.
The Church Planter Already Knows the Community
When a new church is needed, Bible League often doesn't begin by sending a foreign missionary.
It trains believers who are already there.
These church planters know the language.
They understand local customs and family relationships. They recognize the challenges their neighbors face because they live among them.
Bible League provides training and biblical resources that help them evangelize, disciple new Christians, and gather believers into sustainable local churches.
Project Philip often becomes part of that process.
A Bible study begins.
People come to faith.
The group grows.
Eventually, a new church takes shape.
The person leading it isn't an outsider who eventually has to leave.
They're home.
Sometimes Reading the Bible Starts With Learning to Read
There's another obstacle that Bible distribution alone cannot solve.
Literacy.
For someone who never had the opportunity to learn to read, handing them a Bible doesn't automatically give them access to its message.
Bible League's Bible-based Literacy program addresses both needs together.
Participants develop practical reading and writing skills through lessons built around biblical content.
That can affect everyday life far beyond the classroom.
Someone who learns to read gains a new level of independence.
But they're also gaining the ability to open Scripture for themselves.
The skill and the spiritual resource grow together.
Make the Translation Understandable
Language creates another kind of barrier.
Bible League International develops Easy-to-Read Bible translations intended particularly for people who may have limited literacy, are encountering Scripture for the first time, or find more complex translations difficult to understand.
The goal isn't merely simplicity.
The ministry says its translators work from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek while expressing the meaning in clear, contemporary language.
Those translations then become part of the larger ministry.
They're used in Project Philip.
Church planters use them.
Literacy students encounter them.
The translation isn't treated as an isolated publishing project.
It becomes a tool for discipleship.
The Bible Can Enter a Prison Too
Bible League also brings this same model behind prison walls.
Incarcerated men and women participate in Bible studies where they encounter Scripture and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The surroundings make the message of freedom particularly meaningful.
Physical circumstances may remain unchanged.
A sentence doesn't disappear because someone becomes a Christian.
Yet Bible League believes spiritual transformation can happen inside those walls.
The same Scripture being studied in a village church or urban neighborhood can reach someone sitting in a prison cell.
Geography changes.
The Gospel doesn't.
Give the Church What It Needs to Carry On
This may be the most important part of Bible League International's model.
The organization isn't trying to become the church.
It equips the church.
Local Christians lead the Bible studies.
Local believers plant the churches.
Local teachers lead literacy classes.
Local pastors disciple their congregations.
Bible League provides Scripture, training, curriculum, translation, and support that strengthen what those believers are already doing.
That creates multiplication.
One trained Christian can lead many people through Scripture.
Some of those people eventually disciple others.
A Bible study can become a congregation.
A congregation can begin reaching another community.
And the Bible that started the conversation continues teaching long after the original ministry materials have been distributed.
The Promise Is Still the Point
More than eighty years separate today's international ministry from William and Betty Chapman standing on doorsteps in Indiana.
Millions of biblical resources have traveled far beyond those first 100 Bibles.
But imagine returning to that original question.
Will you read it?
That's still the heart of Bible League International.
The ministry doesn't simply want God's Word sitting in someone's home.
It wants Scripture opened.
Understood.
Believed.
Lived.
Shared.
And eventually carried by that person into someone else's life.
At the heart of Bible League International is the conviction that Bible distribution reaches its fullest purpose when God's Word becomes discipleship. By equipping under-resourced churches with Scripture, training local Christians to help others understand it, developing accessible translations, teaching literacy, and preparing church planters, Bible League works toward something larger than placing Bibles into people's hands—it wants God's Word to take root in lives and grow into thriving local churches that continue sharing Jesus long after the original Bible was given.
