As soon as Ken Bitgood professed Christ as his Savior, his greatest desire was to obediently follow Him. A fellow believer told Ken at the time, “The thing you need to do is read and listen to the Word of God.” Ken took that very literally. He not only read scripture whenever he could, but he listened to it as well. That was in 1978, Ken was in his late teens, and he worked as a house painter. So, he played cassette tapes of recorded scripture while he painted. All day. Every day. When he hired others to work with him, he continued to play the tapes and they listened as well.

“Wherever we went, we listened. It started to get deep into hearts. [It] put a foundation into my heart,” Ken says. “If you do what it says in Psalm 1, there is really something to that.” Psalm 1 says that the man whose “delight is in the law of the LORD,” and who “meditates day and night” on that Word, is “blessed….Like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.”

Ken has found that to be true. That meditating on the words of Scripture, listening to them, obeying them, even memorizing them, does indeed bring joy and peace. Ken married Deborah in 1987 and soon after he became an air traffic controller employed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). His new job required him to relocate to Houston, Texas from his home state of Arizona. What he really wanted was to be a pastor and a conference speaker, but clearly God had His own path—His ordered steps that Ken followed with an ever-growing love for Christ.

These steps included being part of a Houston church, and through it and even in others ways, Ken kept meeting with Christians. A family friend included Amy Sit, the daughter of a Chinese missionary. Amy’s father, Leland Wang, was the man who had discipled Watchman Nee, the well-known Christian Chinese church leader and teacher, responsible for establishing dozens of local churches in China during the 20th Century. God was developing a strong interest for missions in Ken’s heart and introducing computer programming into Ken’s skill sets. He began programming Bible software on his computer—even becoming obsessed with it and how technology could impact spreading the Word of God. All the while Ken was making more and more friends with Christian leaders in Houston. 

One day Amy Sit and her husband called Ken to tell him that they had a missionary to China who was on furlough, staying with them. The missionary wanted to scan Matthew Henry’s commentaries and take them back to China with him. Amy and her husband were calling Ken and wanted to know how to help this missionary. Ken met with the missionary who had been in China for 30 years without Bibles, books, commentaries—without anything! When this man saw the commentaries in his pastor friend’s study, it broke his heart that there was such easy accessibility to such materials  in the U.S. and none in China. Ken, however, wondered why anyone would want to take on such a huge task as scanning an entire set of commentaries. When he asked, the missionary replied that it was better than nothing. 

“Let me show you some Bible software,” Ken told him. It was the year 2000 and Ken just happened to have his laptop with him. “I pulled it out and showed him a PC study Bible.” The missionary began to weep, and continued as Ken showed him hundreds of books available for cost in English. But nothing in Chinese. “I want copies of all your software,” the missionary said.

“There’s no way you could do that,” Ken explained. “We have copyright laws and that is against the law.”

“You’re concerned about your American laws?” the missionary asked. “It’s against the law to distribute Bibles in China. What do you care about American copyright laws? People in China are going to jail for these things.”

Ken says that at that moment he was in a “moral quandary.” He knew the people who had copyrighted their material would care, but he needed to tell this distraught missionary something. “Look,” he began, “I do some computer programming and I know some other programmers. Why don’t we just pray that God will provide resources that you can distribute freely? For free. We’ll put it together on a CD and you can go back to China and copy that to your hearts’ content.”

So they prayed, Ken and that missionary, and within two weeks they began discovering people who were actually digitizing Chinese content. Christian content. They found that there were hundreds of Christian Chinese books, commentaries, and Bibles that could be freely distributed this way. 

This became Ken’s first distribution project. He, with the help of these groups and other programmers, put together a library of books including Chinese Bibles onto a CD and made 1,000 copies for the missionary. The missionary was busy raising funds, and Ken helped with that as well. That missionary was able to go back to China, smuggling the CD’s into the country in baby carriages. He visited all the places he had ever been and handed out the CD’s. He sent back word that he had been successful and could give away ten times more.

“That first project was really crude, but we’ve been getting better ever since,” Ken says. For the first years, we were all volunteers. We started to get some acceptance in the Chinese community by going to conference after conference, three or four times a year. I was also able to solicit the help from my three homeschooled sons for copying and production. I was still programming for my job in air traffic control. My arms started to break down. I started to have major repetitive stress syndrome in my arm. My middle son, Jonathon, who is still with the ministry today, was a nine-year-old at the time and I would stand over him and tell him what to do, what to type, how to do this or that. He was brilliant. A computer prodigy. A genius. After home school hours, he would help me and work with other volunteers.

“The Lord used that time to work in my heart and let me see the heart of a missionary. The heart of someone who sells all, and goes into foreign lands, foreign cultures, and stays and loves and serves and learns their language and translates the Bible for them. It still is endlessly fascinating to me. Those are the real heroes. They give their lives no matter how long they stay. They should be well equipped. Have the resources to be able to distribute them. It just should be.

“There’s nothing that enables this like the digital age. It’s making it easier and most cost effective to multiply on a large scale the Word of God. There’s just nothing like it. It breaks down so many barriers. There’s no reason anymore for people all around the world to not have a Bible in their language. Half to 60 percent of the world is functionally illiterate. Those people should have the same benefit that so many of us have. They should be able to hear the Gospel. In this media rich culture, they should be able to watch or see the Bibles that have been created in their language. There’s just no excuse anymore.”

In 2010, a number of ministries that Ken had been working with asked Ken to make a presentation, to show what he had accomplished in the last ten years by producing digital products for China. During those years, Ken and everyone who worked with him had learned a lot. The growth of the Chinese Church was vastly outgrowing their commitment to produce Bibles. One hundred to one hundred fifty million Chinese had come to know the Lord, and only one to two million Bibles a year were getting into the country. 

Ken shared this information with the executives of the gathered ministries. He talked about his dream of one day doing the same thing as he had for China for the Arabic world, for Iran in the Farci language. “I really think there was a movement of God in that room,” Ken reminisces. This group insisted that Ken move on to producing the Arabic and Farsi libraries. They wanted it to happen in a year, not ten. They wanted Ken to make this a priority and his full-time job. They said they would pay for it. They even asked how much it would cost. A software programmer who worked with Ken had that figured out. $550,000. Ken’s group, who had incorporated and taken the name of Digital Bible Society (DBS) in 2001, had never before received donations that exceeded $50,000 in any year prior. But at this meeting, the executives asked Ken to leave the room. When they brought him back in, they told him they had just raised $550,000.                                                            

Ken explains, “We didn’t have a choice. We were going to do this. We went to work the very next week. We went from using volunteers to actually hiring people. Some of the people in that room who partnered with us, have been our partners ever since.” 

Now, eleven years later, DBS shares Bibles and materials in over 6,000 languages. Their technology continues to advance with the changing times. They have both video and audio content. They have solar powered products so that electricity is not necessary to recharge them. They have products for cell phones. They have kept a good relationship with Wycliffe Bible Translators, so that every time a Bible comes out in a new language, DBS receives it. 

Additionally, over 300 other Christian ministries work with DBS, giving them their new material to distribute. These ministries provide DBS with the material for free because they want DBS to share it. The goal is to get resources into the hard-to-reach places. Places like China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, especially into the countries where Christians are persecuted. Such unique projects as the Jesus Film which is available in 1,850 languages, are being distributed by DBS.

DBS receives the Christian resources, secures the rights to put them into multiple usable digital formats, and then ensures that these products get into the hands of God’s servants on the mission field. At no charge to the missionaries. “We continue to expand,” Ken reports. “We are getting into the mission community, letting more and more people know that we exist. Most people still don’t know we exist. A lot of people now are putting Bible materials on media. We didn’t invent this. I don’t know if people are doing it quite the way we are. The thing that distinguishes us is that we are not into sales. We are into seeing God’s Word multiply.”

Ken tells the story of a movement in Malawi, composed of tribal chiefs who have come to Christ. The chiefs wanted an audio device that they could each use to play scripture recordings to as many as 100 people in their villages. DBS was able to supply them with these, what the chiefs nicknamed “village players.”

Even during the pandemic, DBS was able to help. When hospitals were not allowing pastors or families to visit sick and dying patients, a Houston church requested audio materials from DBS. These encouraging words from Scripture, bearing the truths of the Gospel were placed in hospital rooms so the patients could hear. 

Ken believes that every Christian should be able to receive the Word of God, no matter where they are and whether they are able to read or not. “That has been DBS’s mission since its inception,” he says. “We are not Bible translators. We are not missionaries. We are servants to God’s servants.” Ken extends a call for action to help. DBS is maintained by financial gifts. Churches are the main donors, but more is always needed. 

DBS is also happy to receive proposals for distributing products. “We have access to a lot of content from various providers,” Ken explains. “We put together our own libraries. We are able to provide materials to those on the mission field or going to the mission field that are specific to their needs.” Consider DBS materials for short term missions as well—available in about any language you will encounter. 

To find out more about DBS, see their products, read their long list of partnering ministries, read more stories of how their work has impacted lives around the world, find out how to contact them, and most important of all—to make a financial contribution, visit their website https://dbs.org/. 

Meeting Ken Bitgood, hearing the story of DBS, was a highlight of my recent trip to Texas. I find great joy in bringing to your attention people and ministries like Ken and DBS. Within the sovereign will of God, there is a lot of networking among believers going on. That you are reading this blog is really no accident. Now that you know about the work of DBS, please pray for DBS and the work it does. Possibly even consider doing more. I am captivated by something else Ken said: “Since Jesus came so that all might have life—it goes without saying that all people should have access to His words. There are 7,900 languages. Not all have Bible translations.” Ken says this challenges him. It should challenge all of us, and call us to action.