While we are known worldwide for our work with hotels, we predominantly share Scriptures in schools and colleges, prisons and jails, hospitals, and medical offices. To date, we have placed over 2 billion Scriptures. Follow us on that journey as The Gideons partner with churches anywhere, to reach the unreached everywhere.
We appreciate your support. The majority of Gideons live and serve in their local communities, making us very effective and efficient because. Today, we have more than , members—and an untold number of supporters—in more than countries across the globe. These dedicated individuals give their time and money to make it possible for others to learn about the love of God by giving them access to His Word. In fact, we have placed or distributed more than 2 billion Bibles and New Testaments around the world.
Gideons is almost synonymous with Bibles. It has distributed more than two billion, giving them away in hotels and hospitals, as well as at high schools, colleges, fairs, festivals, train stations, prisons, military bases, and on public streets. But now the year-old ministry is changing.
Distributing Bibles in the US has also grown more difficult. The number of hotels accepting Bibles has dropped about 20 percentage points over the past decade, according to hospitality industry studies. The organization wanted to win people to Christ.
Bibles were just a means to that end. Distributing Scripture was partly a service project for the Gideons and partly an activity to teach men how to be a witness for their faith. The Gideons taught him boldness. With that encouragement, he spent more time in prayer, read the Bible more, and grew more confident sharing his testimony. Recently, Heighway gave a Gideons Testament to his ride-hail driver on the way to the airport.
This is the kind of thing Heighway wants the Gideons to focus on right now: encouraging Christian men to say something about the gospel in a Lyft or an Uber. The strong association of the Gideons with Bibles in hotel rooms is kind of a historical accident, according to Paul Gutjahr, an Indiana University professor who specializes in the history of Bibles in the United States.
When the group was founded, it was more like the fraternal organizations—like the Grange and the Rotary Club—that were so prominent in that era. The division forced the Canadian Gideons to do some soul-searching. The Canadian Gideons opened membership to women for the first time, breaking from the fraternal-order traditon.
They also started a program to teach people in local churches to share their faith. After one recent workshop, Anderson said, 15 people became Christians in one afternoon in downtown Toronto. After another, a church of 40 grew to 80 in one week. Sometimes, after these workshops, people from the churches ask to join the Gideons. That makes Anderson hopeful about the future. In both the US and Canada, the Gideons are worried about aging membership and the long trend away from joining social organizations.
Nicholson, Samuel E. Hill, and Will J. They organised with Hill as president, Knights as vice president, and Nicholson as secretary and treasurer. Much thought was given to what the name of the association should be, and after special prayer that God might lead them to select the proper name, Mr. In view of the fact that almost all of the Gideons in the early years of the association were traveling men, the question quite naturally arose regarding how they might be more effective witnesses in the hotels where they spent so much of their time.
One trustee went so far as to suggest that The Gideons furnish a Bible for each bedroom of the hotels in the United States. It is interesting to note that the practice of the churches contributing to the support of the Gideon Scripture program originated with a pastor. Just two months after the Louisville Convention, a state convention convened in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
National Secretary Frank Garlick and Mr. Moore attended a meeting of the Ministerial Union, and after their program Frank Garlick was asked if he could address the ministers on the work of The Gideons. He spoke of the needed Bible distribution, and at the close of his minute address, Mr. Moore's own pastor, Dr.
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