How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

by Pete Greig

The Bible was effectively illegal in mainland China when I lived in Hong Kong, so I took the exciting opportunity to smuggle as many as possible across the border in a couple of suitcases, buried under dirty laundry. Having made it through customs, I deposited the precious contraband (minus underwear) in a series of lockers in a hotel in Guangzhou and mailed the locker keys to an address in northern China. Secrecy was paramount, I was told, because the recipient of these keys might well risk his life, and certainly his freedom, traveling from the other side of China to collect the illegal load. Why on earth was he willing to take such risks for a book considered boring and irrelevant by many in the West? Because the fast-growing church in China was, and is, ravenously hungry for the nourishment of God’s Word. And as a result of that hunger, things are changing quite dramatically. In fact, the biggest Bible-printing factory in the world today—the size of twelve soccer fields, with the capacity to print twenty million Bibles a year—is in China. These are shipped out to a network of sixty thousand churches through eighty distribution centers. And this vast enterprise still struggles to keep up with demand.2