Background

After several years of pastoring a church, Steven (Fanie) Loots became involved in itinerant evangelism and in 1994 joined a mission organization. While serving with one particular organization, which organized short-term outreaches into Southern Africa, he became convinced that a different approach to African missions and evangelism was necessary.

A model, out of Africa, and for Africa seemed vital to stem the flood of hit-and-run evangelism which left large areas “evangelised”, but with little change in people’s lives. After extensive research into the ripe harvest in Malawi and Zambia, Harvesters International Ministries was born in 1998. Each element of HIM’s saturation church-planting model was designed to be both biblical accountable, and practically relevant to the needs of African evangelists, pastors and church planters.

Within months several churches had been planted. With the help of short term volunteers who helped train locals in evangelism, many more churches were planted in the next few months and by the end of the first year it became apparent that the model worked. By the end of 2006 over two thousand new churches had been planted.

From the start, discipleship has been the central focus. By 2005 the desire to become more involved in discipleship at local church level with the many newly planted churches resulted in a paperless discipleship model being introduced. While highly effective, this new discipleship model called "the Gift and the Prize" exposed the huge need for Bibles.

Steven Loots founded Bibles for Believers to meet the need for Bibles amongst believers who cannot afford to purchase a Bible for themselves.