Six months ago YouVersion hit a milestone of scripture in 1500 languages via Bible.com and the YouVersion apps for Android, iOS, Amazon Echo. Since then they have added over 200 versions in over 160 languages.
The answer to “And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?”, isn’t that they can Google.
Romans 10:15 doesn’t say, ““How beautiful are the phones of those who bring good news!”
Technology is a huge asset but for most people engagement with scripture still involves someone telling them about it. Who will you tell?
This isn’t a long blog post with all the technical details about how this is done, just a short post celebrating progress and encouraging you tell whoever you can. The latest 160 languages added to YouVersion originate in 42 different countries but their speakers may live in towns and cities around the globe. (Did you know that there are over 700 languages spoken in New York, well over 300 spoken in London, and a lot more than people realise in many other places).
YouVersion has an incredible number of versions and languages and includes audio and video for many of these. There are still more to add, and between the various platforms there is now digitally available scripture in over 2100 languages. Another major outlet is FaithComesByHearing.com which has audio scripture in over 1460 languages as well as text and video. As well as these major distribution points there are also an ever increasing number of individual scripture apps and sites.
ScriptureEarth.org is the most up to date site attempting to list and link to scripture across different platforms
Do you or your church know anyone who doesn’t know that scripture in available digitally in their language? Is their anyone in your church for whom scripture exists but isn’t yet available?
Does your church website or facebook page link to online Bibles?
…and since this blog, scripture in another 100 languages have been made available on YouVersion. As of Nov 3 they have 2598 versions in 1765 languages and are gearing up to the 500,000,000th install of the app