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After 197 years, Massachusetts Bible Society looks to embrace Internet era

The Massachusetts Bible Society, a 197-year-old organization that distributed Bibles to seamen during the war of 1812 and welcomed 19th-century immigrants to Boston's docks with free Scriptures, has sold its downtown building, is about to close its wood-paneled bookstore, and is trying to reinvent itself for a world in which the latest theological treatises are just a mouse-click away.

The venerable society, which claims to be the oldest ecumenical organization in the state, has distributed more than one million Bibles, in more than 200 languages, over the last two centuries, to soldiers and inmates, to people arriving in Massachusetts and those leaving for new frontiers. Once distributed by horse-drawn carts, handed out door-to-door by volunteers called colporteurs, and taken overseas by missionaries, the Bibles are now shipped in response to grant applications, mostly to prisons, hospitals, and start-up churches. Last year, the Massachusetts society gave local churches and charities 8,939 books, including -- in a development that could not have been anticipated at the organization's founding -- 106 copies of the Hebrew Bible and 77 copies of the Koran.

But the organization is now struggling. Foot traffic into the bookstore, which has offered unique items such as a Bible in Apache, as well as the latest spiritual bestsellers, has plummeted. The executive director for the last 19 years is retiring. And the name of the society evokes a fustiness that seems, to some, irrelevant.

So, as it prepares for its third century, the society is rethinking its role, even as it continues to distribute sacred writings.

An organization that at one time oversaw five bookstores, it will now have just one -- at Andover Newton Theological School -- and will move all other sales operations to its website. The five-story building it purchased on Bromfield Street in 1893 -- now adjacent to a storefront psychic healer -- is in the hands of a developer, and the society is renting a small office suite on Beacon Hill.

The extraordinary society archives, a unique collection of first-edition foreign-language Bibles, including one whose galleys were smuggled in and out of a Burmese prison by being sewn into pillowcases, and a now-missing set of 1940s Bible stories published by the editors of DC Comics, has for years been housed at the Boston University School of Theology.

The Bible Society is placing a renewed emphasis on its educational programs, which include a variety of lectures and workshops and study groups about theological issues aimed at clergy and laypeople, and is hoping to move some of its programs online.

And, more significantly, after decades as a manifestation of the staid religious establishment, the society is now articulating a theological stance, adopting a new slogan, "a voice for progressive Christianity," and attempting to position itself as an alternative to what it describes as the "religious right." The development comes as a variety of liberal religious denominations and constituencies, including some evangelical Protestants, are increasingly attempting to counter the dominance of conservative voices in discussions of faith and public policy.

"The radical right knows how to use technology and the media, and we want to be sure alternative voices are raised on issues relating to the Bible in the public square," said Donald A. Wells, the executive director of the society. "We want to see alternative views out there, in terms of justice for people, and care for the poor. And we want to open up the reading of the [Biblical] text to women, and to people from the two-thirds world, and to people of all sexual orientations -- all people around the open text but hearing it in different ways."

The Massachusetts Bible Society -- the third such group formed in the United States, after Pennsylvania and Connecticut -- was formed at a time when the population of the young country was growing, and Protestantism was seeking to spread. Over the years, it has shipped hundreds of thousands of Bibles to soldiers; in more recent years it has shipped Bibles to people in areas devastated by disaster, and to victims of church burnings, in the American South and in Jamaica Plain. Although current officials say they have no idea how many Bibles they have distributed, in 1959, when the society turned 150, officials said they had distributed nearly 13 million copies in nearly 300 languages. Just last year Bibles were shipped not only in English and Spanish but also in Cambodian, Chinese, French, Haitian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Vietnamese, to congregations and organizations that hear about the Bible Society and fill out grant applications.

"One thing about the rise of Protestantism was that it was a religion of the book, and if your theology is Biblically based, and you're making a break from the idea of an inherited authority telling you what to think, you need to empower people by giving them the text in their own language," said Dana L. Robert, a professor at the Boston University School of Theology. Robert said the first Bible printed in America was published in Algonquin, as part of an effort by Puritan John Eliot to evangelize Native Americans.

"The Bible societies were a handmaiden to evangelization, as people moved from place to place and the population expanded," Robert said. "And since the first American missionaries went out from Massachusetts, it was natural that the Massachusetts Bible Society would have been sponsoring their work -- the missionaries would send [translation] manuscripts back on the boat, and the Bible Society would print the Bibles and send them out."

The Bible Society, which lost $60,000 on its bookstore last year, garnered $1.3 million by selling its longtime headquarters building, at 43 Bromfield St. , to a developer for $1.3 million last month, a transaction which will help build up its endowment to nearly $6 million. It is preparing to close the bookstore, in the same building, at the end of December, and Wells will retire at the end of January.

As it tries to imagine its future, the society has hired a search firm to find a new director, has rented an office suite across from the State House in the so-called Congregational House, a building housing a number of Christian and nonprofit groups, and it is preparing to overhaul its website, massbible.org. The society is also discussing whether, in a return to its roots, it might travel with books in a vehicle like a bookmobile.

The society was founded at a time when being diverse meant the inclusion of Unitarians as well as Anglicans, but now, "We would like to see some new blood, some younger blood, that talks the current language and that's familiar with iPods," said Cathy Minkevich, the first Catholic and the second woman to head the society's board. "What the society is trying to do now is to be a counterpoint to the religious right as far as interpretation of Scripture, to hear the hidden voices, to hear the voices of the downtrod ; where there is resistance to tyranny and empire, to be a voice for peace and justice, all based on scriptural grounding."