Scripture Booklets Produced

During 1982 Ernie decided to produce a 16 page Scripture booklet entitled “The Way of Salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ”. This booklet consisted of scripture verses under subject headings - the booklet commenced with Creation, The Fall of Man, The Ten Commandments, The Birth of Christ, Teaching from the Lord, The Death and Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, a little teaching from the Epistles and finished with the Lord’s Return.

After it was published in English, requests began to be received from various missionaries requesting it to be printed in their language. Some of the early languages were Swahili (Kenya and Tanzania) Bangala and Congo Swahili for Congo. Eventually this booklet was produced in over 40 languages and millions of copies were printed.

One of the first requests was for 50,000 booklets - one of the difficulties at that time was each booklet had to be manually opened and stapled. This was very time consuming. After a lot of thought and effort Samuel developed a machine that was inserted into the folding machine - which stapled the booklets as they were being folded - this made a huge difference to the number of booklets being produced. Below - Paul Roberts stapling booklets on the manual machine.

At that time we realised that we could not post all of the literature that was being produced so we started to pack the literature into tea chests and then built these on pallets ready for shipping - this kept the literature secure and dry while shipping. There was a lot of work as the tea chests had to be painted, literature packed into bin liners inside the tea chest, and then a lid placed on top and nailed down. This became the standard way of shipping for quite a few years.