A new bible for miners and others in the resources industry has proven a hit, with more than 100 Bibles personally taken by workers over the space of a weekend.

The new Bible, containing prayers for miners and testimonies from people who have been a part of the industry, has been produced by the Bible Society and Out of the Pit, a ministry to the mining industry. It includes the whole New Testament and the Psalms.
Bush Church Aid mining chaplain, the Rev Peter Palmer, who also contributed some of the material, has seen first hand the impact the new bibles have had on the people that he meets.

“A couple of weeks ago I was part of the SA Mine Rescue Challenge, which is rescue teams from different mine companies coming together and pitting their skills against each other,” he says. “I had 120 bibles and I left with none. I’d only just got them, and they were actually supplied and donated, bought for me by one of the contract companies.”

Mr Palmer also says he deliberately decided not to give the Bibles out individually – instead, he let people grab one if they wanted to. The response was enormous.

“I gave them a spiel about it, what was in there, and people just grabbed it, brought it up, and said, ‘Look what’s inside this for me, Rev, this is great stuff’,” Mr Palmer says. “A lot of these people aren’t Christians, most of them aren’t Christians, but the whole idea was to give them a gospel in a bright orange colour. We’ve got them out there, and people were really excited to be a part of that.”

That excitement even extends to local contract companies, who wanted to be involved and even grabbed some copies of the Bible for themselves.

“They [Giacci Brothers, a  Perth-based contract company specialising in trucking and transport] thought it was a good idea. I approached them and said, ‘I’d like to buy some bibles’, They said, ‘How many do you want?’ I said ‘Aw, maybe a couple of hundred?’ So they gave me the money. That’s the rapport I have with all these sorts of companies that’s been built up in the six years I’ve been doing this.

“Anyway, I put a little sticker in the bibles saying ‘Generously donated by Giacci Brothers’, and the manager of the company sent one back to Perth – and they loved it so much they wanted some more, just for their office.”

Mr Palmer says that he puts the success mostly down to the fact that the new packaging for the Bible shows it has something to say to them personally.

“One of the teams asked me what my favourite passage in the Bible was. I said I didn’t know about my favourite passage, but I think the passage that spoke to me for that group [of rescue team workers] was ‘No greater love has man than this, that he should lay down his life for a friend’. I showed them where it was in the Bible, and they all looked at it up. I saw one guy dog-ear the page.

“They came up to me later and said, ‘That was very, very profound, I thought about that’. I also said to them that when they hear that alarm, and they’re out on a rescue, they’re putting their life on the line for someone else. This person came back to me and said, ‘I’m going to think about that a lot more, and about where I stand’.”