Printing of the 50 millionth Bible to be celebrated

The Amity Foundation is celebrating the production of 50 million Bibles by the Amity Printing Company (APC). The celebration will be held in Nanjing on 8 December to commemorate this landmark of Bible printing in China. Representatives of churches in China, the United Bible Societies, ecumenical partners and representatives of government departments will attend the event.

The celebration is highlighted by the signing of an agreement between the Amity Printing Company and the United Bible Societies (UBS) to extend their close cooperation as a joint venture for another ten years. The current agreement runs out in June 2008. A joint venture between APC and UBS started in 1987.

The 50 millionth Bible rolled off the press on 11 September. (By this time, an additional 9 million New Testaments had been printed as well.) 43 million copies of the complete Bible were produced for mainland China, among them copies in Braille and eight minority languages, while the remaining 7 million were exported to over 60 countries around the world. Zhang Liwei, Amity’s associate general secretary, calls this event a “miracle which God has made possible in China”.

Next year, the Amity Printing Company will move to a larger site, where state-of-the-art printing equipment will ensure higher output while quality standards remain as high as before. Qiu Zhonghui, general secretary of the Amity Foundation and chair of the board of APC, said in an interview, “We are grateful for the ecumenical partnership with Christian brothers and sisters around the world forged by this joint venture between Amity and UBS”. He went on to confirm that the Printing Company is ready to print Bibles for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing if orders come in from the church in China. The Amity Printing Company is the only enterprise in China which prints Bibles.

MORE: http://www.amityfoundation.org