From warfare with Spitfires to spiritual warfare: a key global mission

Eighty years ago what is now an unremarkable industrial estate outside Swindon was a hive of activity. Scores of Supermarine Spitfires rolled off the production lines at the South Marston works in the fight to rid the world of Adolf Hitler.

Today a small part of the same site is, its occupiers claim, busily embroiled in the vital spiritual struggle to send to pastors across the developing world the books they need to teach the gospel accurately to their flocks.

Christian Books Worldwide (CBW) was formed in 2009, out of the ministry of Pastor Training International, seeking to distribute good-quality Christian material to pastors desperately needing it to underpin their preaching. Its theology has always been unashamedly conservative, evangelical and reformed. Its founding trustees – Jim Gough, David Ide, Friedhelm Anhuth, and Mike Taylor – began by printing John Blanchard’s Ultimate Questions in Punjabi and Urdu. They then commissioned translations of three further titles: Mysterious Ways by David Kingdon; Foundations of the Christian Faith by Roger Weil; and Walking with God, a simplified version of J.C. Ryle’s classic text, Practical Religion.

Since then CBW’s growth has been phenomenal. In the last 13 years over 770,000 books in 36 different languages have been given to pastors in 51 countries. CBW works with a database of about 1,000 pastors, a high proportion of whom are actively using the books it provides. The ministry now operates out of about 1,000 sq. ft. of basic warehouse facilities. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, the 2020 lockdown proved helpful, because it forced CBW to centralise its operations from the three separate – and far less efficient – book storage areas it used around the country.

Tuesday is the busy day of the week for CBW. Half a dozen or so volunteers gather at the warehouse to make up different packages of books for pastors of different educational attainments and theological understandings. The first, for pastors educated to secondary school level, is the ‘Preacher’s Collection’. This comprises an initial six books including a Global Study Bible, Walking with God and Derek Prime’s Pastors and Teachers. Nine subsequent texts include Roark and Cline’s Biblical Theology, Roger Ellsworth’s The Bible Book by Book and Prime’s Bible Answers. All these books are sourced directly from the publishers – CBW works closely with all the main UK Christian book producers and buys in bulk to keep costs down.

Pastors may then progress to batches of specific titles they themselves request. This requirement is often serviced in an intriguing way – from books or even whole libraries donated by, for example, the widows of deceased church leaders in the UK. This material is also frequently requested by developing world Bible seminaries.

The process in action

It is worth looking in detail at how that process, which is centred on the Swindon warehouse, takes place. Firstly, books are received either in person or by post, prompted by advertisements in the evangelical press or by word of mouth.

Every two weeks a triage area is set up in the warehouse and those books are assessed for suitability and quality. Some are made up into batches for onward delivery. Others, less suitable for one reason or another, are sold for cash on eBay; in 2020 CBW raised £7,000 from this important source. Those relatively few books received which are theologically unhelpful or damaging are unceremoniously dumped in a skip.

The selected books are then handed over to the team of packers, normally four or five experienced volunteers, who mail about 700 or 800 books a week. All books are stamped ‘A gift from Christian Books Worldwide’. They are then bagged up and despatched all over the world through Royal Mail. Typically, they take about two to three weeks to reach the intended pastors and seminaries and, unsurprisingly, CBW’s postage bill is around £15–20,000 a year.

‘Pastor’s Toolbox’ & overseas hubs

Two important new developments are in the pipeline. The first is the creation of an even-simpler ‘Pastor’s Toolbox’. This is a small set of five or six books aimed at pastors educated to the equivalent of UK primary school level. This collection comprises important texts which have been abridged, from which Western cultural references have been removed, and which have been translated into the pastor’s first language. CBW hopes to be delivering the first Toolboxes by the end of 2022.

Secondly, CBW has started delivering books – especially heavier ones – in bulk on pallets to central locations within nations such as Malawi. These hubs are run by senior pastors – many of whom are involved in teaching other pastors – who collect the pallets and distribute the books to others as required. Even at a cost of £500 a pallet this is a much cheaper and more efficient method of disseminating the key texts.

Above & below: A shipment of books from CBW landed in Malawi and were distributed by a team of volunteers to pastors in Mozambique. The borders to Mozambique had been closed due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, but the pastors were granted permission to meet at the Mwanza border to receive their books.

The distribution team continued by road along the border to make a second delivery to another group of pastors at Malaka and then take the remaining books by canoe to their final destination in Phakekera. CBW heard from the pastor in Malawi who coordinated the distribution that all the books arrived safely and that the materials have been a great blessing and encouragement to the pastors who received them.

Translation work

CBW seeks to provide Biblical literature where it is most needed, and to present it there in the most suitable form. That means translation, which is another key part of its activities. The major languages are French, Swahili and Chichewa (Africa) and Hindi, Urdu and Tamil (Asia), for the greatest needs are in the vast areas of Francophone Africa and northern India. As part of the translation process, texts may be abridged, simplified and contextualised for an overseas readership. Translation is done by teams, and separate teams check the theology closely before any new work reaches the press.

E-books and audio

CBW also desires an environment where preachers and leaders in the global south can more easily be effectual readers, thinkers, and speakers. One way to achieve this is through e-books, which can reach a greater number of pastors (and their church members) than would be possible through the printed word alone. So CBW has developed an iOS and Android app to achieve this and has around 180 titles currently available, free, to anyone outside Europe, North America and Australasia. Audio books too represent a major way of reaching this audience and CBW’s first, Walking with God, will be out later this year.

What the pastors think

What do the pastors think of CBW’s efforts? This comment from one in Cameroon is typical: ‘The wonderful books you sent to me arrived. They are really a blessing to my ministry, enriching my spiritual life, and equipping me for the ministry God has committed to my trust. For example, one of the books, True Spirituality by Francis Schaeffer, has redefined my understanding of spirituality, not the shallow spirituality many people profess today. I am also overwhelmed by the types of books you select before sending, rich in doctrinal content and information. They make a good library’.

Another man from Fiji wrote this: ‘All of these books have helped me a lot, not only in my personal life and family, but in my ministry as well. I just want to take this time to thank you and your group for including me in this blessing. I am so grateful and thankful to God for helping me and my ministry through you all’.

Above: In 2021 CBW was able, through the good offices of Roger Weil, author of ‘Foundations of the Christian Faith’, to link up a pastor’s conference with a publishing house, Biblos Alpha, who specially transported over 1,000 books from Kharkov to Kiev. Pictured are grateful recipients. An ex-CBW worker, David Ide, visited Ukraine nearly100 times to preach the gospel and set up different ventures, including Biblos Alpha, which has still a stock of (slow-moving) reformed Christian literature.

Evolution of the organisation

Executive Director James Stileman has been at CBW for two years. Formerly employed with London advertising agencies, he wants to speed its evolution from an organisation totally dependent on a sometimes haphazard network of volunteers to one more professionally, more strongly managed. He also wishes to focus on new products.

The Toolbox is key here, but so is ensuring that developing world pastors read books by developing world authors. One of the major problems faced by orthodox Bible preachers there is the ‘man-centred deception’ of the prosperity gospel. To that end CBW is looking to combat it by distributing Prosperity? Seeking the True Gospel – co-authored by Michael Maura, Conrad Mbewe, Ken Mbugua, John Piper and Wayne Grudem – as widely as possible through its various channels.

Stileman has some trenchant words for those British Christians who allow key texts to languish, unread, on their shelves. ‘I would argue there are too many Christian books in the UK and far too few in Africa. That is because here we regard them as personal possessions, but there they are a communal resource, to be read, explored and shared by the entire Christian community. It means good Christian books, of all ages and types, will do far more good if we can get them from here to there.’

He has a clear agenda for where he would like CBW to be three years from now: ‘The demand from the developing world is huge and will not diminish. So we need to get better at collecting and sorting many more books than we do right now. Now we send a lorry to Scotland to collect books every three months – that needs to be much more frequent. We also need to have more despatch centres – Swindon is not sufficient. And three years from now I would like to have at least 20 hubs in Africa and elsewhere. One of our weaknesses is that there is a certain randomness in how books are received there. Efficient, well-run local centres are key to ensuring the right books are sent to and used by the right people.’

And he is optimistic about CBW’s future: ‘Our greatest strengths are that we are totally focused on the pastor, so our strategy is unashamedly to equip those who lack the necessary resources to serve their churches well. And if you think about it, all we are really doing is sharing our historic, orthodox, evangelical Christian culture with those pastors, through the literature we send, so that errors do not creep into their teaching’.

Eighty years ago the Spitfires that helped win the Battle of Britain were built here. Now a small, apparently insignificant, warehouse on the same site sends thousands of books that bring God’s consuming fire to developing world pastors as they continue the spiritual struggle against the powers of this dark world.