Why ABH? – ABH

The Crucial Need for ABH Mission Trips

AdminFran — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 23:32:13 +0000

by Fran Geiger Joslin

People sometimes balk at the idea of spending thousands of dollars on a mission trip. Their thinking? $25,000 could feed a lot of hungry people. In our case, we could print a ton of books with the $25,000 it costs for our trip to Tanzania.

It’s true that we could print a lot of books for $25,000, but we travel with bigger goals in mind. We believe printing books and taking mission trips both prove beneficial and productive.

We can, and do, send thousands of books to African countries. Pastor James, our African director in Tanzania, believes that pastors who meet the authors or the people who send them will more likely read and learn from the books they receive. James desires to change the culture from a non-reading society to a reading and learning one. Our visits and conferences help him accomplish that goal.

Rural African pastors typically receive a junior high level of education. They learn to read in school, though they often lack access to books, especially those with biblical content. Limited access to higher education, including Bible college or seminary, leads to less reading overall. We often enjoy the privilege of gifting pastors with their very first book.

Our visits let pastors and their wives know they’re not alone in their struggles. By sharing our own challenges, we show them that even “rich Americans” face problems too. Our stories and experiences encourage them to feel heard and understood.

This May, Howard and I—along with our pastor and another friend—will travel to Tanzania to teach two four-day conferences on the topic of marriage. Tanzania exists as a patriarchal society. Men often treat their wives as property. We will study biblical passages on God’s plan for marriage. We hope to inspire pastors to break cultural barriers by loving their wives like Christ loves the church. We want to convey a balanced perspective of biblical submission and motivate couples to work as a team. James longs to see pastors working together with their wives in ministry.

We plan to model how to closely observe God’s Word in the way we teach. By asking good questions from the passages we study, we challenge couples to find answers in the Scripture. This method of teaching proves effective in teaching the biblical content and how to study the Bible for themselves.

ABH regularly receives requests for books and teachers. We are building a team of teachers to help us train untrained pastors. We can help these pastors continue growing and learning by sending our teachers once or twice a year. We also gift them with books to encourage them to continue reading and learning on their own throughout the year.

The cost of a mission trip accomplishes much more than just sending a book can accomplish. We believe both work together as a crucial part of training, learning, and growing.

Would you consider helping us embark on this crucial journey where God changes lives?

Click here to give.

A Big Vision for Small Books

AdminFran — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 21:01:40 +0000

by Trevor Meers

You need a lot more than efficient shipping to deliver solid biblical training to every corner of the world. Take language alone. Native speakers translate books into their language while editors translate scholars’ words into concepts accessible for the target audience. Sometimes biblical training may even mean dipping into the farming business. At Authenticity Book House’s tenth anniversary dinner, I learned about a ministry that keeps finding ways to bridge any gaps encountered on the way to training ministry leaders.

I headed to the dinner with both excitement and a question in my mind. I shared ABH’s burden for worldwide theological training. But I also wondered: “Does the world really need another startup Christian publisher?” Every year seems like we may have hit “peak Christian publishing,” but the feeling goes back much further than that. In the stylus-and-scroll days, the writer of Ecclesiastes already noticed that “of making books, there is no end” (Ecc. 12:12).

But Howard and Fran Joslin didn’t take long to convince me that ABH fills a very real niche ignored by big publishers who need scale to make a profit. Ten years in, ABH proves that thinking small can actually create big results. Key ideas I heard clearly at the anniversary dinner include:

Clear writing isn’t lesser writing.

Most ministry books pile on words like “perspicuity” and “immutability” when the writer could just as easily say “clarity” and “unchanging.” Maybe too many pastors (and authors writing for pastors) feel haunted by the thought of an old seminary professor popping up and deducting points for talking too much like a commoner.

ABH writers aren’t talking to the academic world, so they keep their books simple and actionable. Editors coach writers to speak understandably to a rural pastor who probably has a Bible, a roughly 7^th grade education, and little else in terms of training or resources. First, ABH writers produce English sentences that deliver meat-and-potatoes truth for hungry church leaders. Then the translation to Swahili, Spanish, and more begins.

Smaller travels better.

A key moment of truth for ABH came when Fran traveled to a major conference and saw herself surrounded by bigger players already doing what she attempted. Then she and Howard found the courage to reimagine ABH’s core offering. The answer lay in realizing that less truly could be more. The team dropped the original concept of regular-size books and started producing pocket-size books. These bite-size books are cheaper to produce, simpler to read, and easier to transport around the world and across borders. ABH landed on a model purpose-built for spreading biblical resources as widely as possible around developing nations.

Books aren’t always enough.

Wisdom calls for doing one task well. But sometimes you need to take an extra step before you can even get started on that one task. ABH’s mission is training church leaders. But in Tanzania they realized that people suffering from hunger struggle to study the Bible. So ABH provided a shipment of single-furrow plows that let pastors ramp up their agricultural production from around two acres to seven or more acres. Producing more food in less time gives pastors extra energy and capacity to use ABH books to grow their skills and make disciples.

My own travels show the clear need for ABH’s work. I’ve worked with church leaders in developing nations on three continents. And in every country, I’ve found leaders with a sincere desire to teach the Bible accurately but almost no training or reference materials to guide them. In ABH, I see a ministry committed to a simple proposition with the potential to transform churches. And with a network of African pastors in place, ABH has the local connections to get their books into the right hands.

ABH convinced me that the world does have a place for another Christian publisher with a very specific target. And I’m looking forward to helping wherever I can.

Hope in a Refugee Camp

AdminFran — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 16:02:16 +0000

by Erin Ensinger

Sometimes ABH books sprout wings and fly farther than we dared dream. We may never know how a copy of Shepherding God’s Church travelled from Tanzania to Malawi’s Dzaleka Refugee Camp, but Pastor Jacob prays for hundreds more books to follow.

A refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Pastor Jacob is one of over 50,000 people crowded into a camp designed for 10,000. Refugees from Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, and Somalia have called this former political prison home since 1994, according to www.dzaleka.com. The camp sits forty-one kilometers from Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital city, according to unhcr.org.

Five hundred churches also make their home at Dzaleka. But few of the pastors know Scripture or understand their pastoral role. Some participate in adultery. Pastor Jacob possesses a generous vision but few resources to help them.

With a PhD in theology and church planting, Pastor Jacob has already planted the Berea Pentecostal Mission Church in various regions of Malawi. Classes began in September at his Berea Pastoral Training Institute of Africa. He plans to teach—and feed—thirty pastors for free over the next two years. Each pastor will receive a certificate at the end of their training course.

But what is school without books? In a series of text messages, Pastor Jacob pleaded with ABH President Fran Joslin to send books for his students.

“I have seen your books are very good and can help pastors and church leaders here in Malawi,” Pastor Jacob texted Fran.

Without a printer at the camp, the project of supplying books seemed doomed. Pastor Jacob could ask his students to download the books to their phones—if only they had a good Internet connection. Hope dawned when a pastor in Tanzania offered to get the books printed and send them on the bus route to Dzaleka. He also agreed to make his location in Tanzania a printing hub to send ABH books throughout southern and eastern Africa.

Within days, 250 copies each of Shepherding God’s Church and Discipleship: Following Jesus rode the bus to Malawi. Pastor Jacob announced their arrival with a text to Fran exclaiming, “”Praise the Lord, Fran! I received books. God bless you. I am very grateful.”

Future shipments will include A Walk with the Wounded (a book about pastoral counseling) and Widowed, since Pastor Jacob said many widows live at the camp. He also hopes to use ABH books at a conference this fall for 300 pastors across Malawi.

“Our God is great! We continue to pray for Satan to be defeated in Jesus’ name,” Pastor Jacob concluded in a text to Fran.