Mexico (MNN) — Book of Hope International has been working in Mexico since 2000. Book of Hope is an illustrated harmony of the Gospels for kids. Millions of copies have been distributed all over the world. Even though they've been able to distribute one-million copies each year, something happened this year.
Book of Hope's Richard Luna. "The Lord just decided that it was harvest time. Through various networks, working with over 10,000 churches and working with different NGO's, the Lord has allowed us to go from 1 million to 10 million this year. So that's like a thousand fold increase."
One of the partnerships is with Samaritan's Purse Christmas outreach called, "Operation Christmas Child." Luna says, "They reach out to about 600,000 children every year in the different states. But also for the first time we're going to target about 500,000 children with the Book of Hope visual version, which is the Godman."
During their Christmas outreach alone, they'll be reaching nearly 2 million people.
Luna says young people are turning to Christ, and he's excited about the prospects of discipleship. "In Mexico we have one advantage–the fact that you can't distribute through schools. When you distribute through schools, integration to church becomes a real challenge. It's a great distribution method, but it's not a great integration method."
That's why the church partnership is so important. Many church leaders have taken a pledge. "We call it the millionaires club because each have taken the challenge to reach a million children in their states," says Luna.
Part of the strategy is using friends of each child. Luna says, "If a church has 50 youth, we challenge them to have each of their youth to challenge their friends. Another way they're reached is house-to-house. People get together and say, 'Hey, we're going to get together and cover this whole neighborhood.'"
The increase in distribution has caused an increasing in financial need. It only costs 33-cents to print and distribute a Book of Hope. Collecting money for Book of Hope distribution is a great project for Sunday school classes or churches because each dollar collected puts the Gospel into the hands of three kids.
