Yesterday Today Tomorrow

Inseong J Kim: Hello, this is Inseong Kim from Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, and happy New Year. We have a special guest with us with some good news: EEM surpasses two million Bibles delivered to Eastern Europe. Dirk Smith is with us today. Thank you so much for being with us.

Dirk Smith: Good morning to you, Inseong. It's great to be with you again.

Inseong J Kim: Yes, and you are Vice President of EEM. Please share with us a little bit about yourself and EEM, what it stands for, so our audience can know more about you.

Dirk Smith: EEM used to stand for Eastern European Mission. It began with seven couples in their 20s back in 1961 who went to Vienna, Austria, and enrolled in university there so that they could go behind the Iron Curtain and tell people about Jesus. They got there and quickly realized this was an impossible task.

One of the team members, who I really credit with being the entrepreneur for Jesus, came back from one of these trips and told his wife, "Gail, this is an impossible mission. These people don't have Bibles in their language, so how do we tell them about Jesus?" That really turned the ministry on its head back then. Since 1961, we have been printing, publishing, and distributing Bibles.

In 1989, of course, the Wall comes down. Now today, we publish, print, and distribute Bibles. Last year, we were in 36 different countries and in 32 different languages, all free of charge. Those are based on requests that are coming in from our more than 3,000 partners on the ground who are teaching people about Jesus but who obviously need to have God's Word in the people's heart language to be able to effectively share Jesus with them.

Inseong J Kim: Wow. So that includes Ukrainian, Russian, Romanian, Polish, Hungarian—all of those nations.

Dirk Smith: Yes, all the former communist bloc nations we are still in: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, all the Baltics. But we have expanded to many of the "Stans"—Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan. We obviously continue our work in Greece, as that tends to be a crossroads for a lot of refugee activity. In Cyprus, we distribute 11 different languages on the island of Cyprus alone. Our work is very extensive.

Inseong J Kim: Wow. So just remind us one more time how old this organization is.

Dirk Smith: It started in 1961 and has been around for quite some time. It has grown rapidly. I've been with the organization for 15 years. My background is not ministry; I had a for-profit career in healthcare consulting and then management consulting in New York and Philadelphia.

But God got ahold of me and said, "What do you want to look back on your life and say you did?" When I was working in Philadelphia and New York, I could say I was making people a lot of money, and I thought, I don't know if that's what I want my legacy to be.

So I came to EEM 15 years ago. The year before I came onboard with EEM, they had distributed 200,000 books and they raised about 1.2 million to do that. Last year, we surpassed the two million mark, but this year, we surpassed it early. We went over two million at the end of November, so we will have a record distribution of about 2.16 million this year. We will have raised a little over nine million to do that.

Inseong J Kim: God is working in a really mighty way. That's incredible good news. You shared that when society is unstable, people search for the truth, and probably they're hungry to receive the Bible.

Dirk Smith: It's an age-old truth that Scripture speaks of. When Jesus tells the Parable of the Sower—or really, many of us would probably say it should be called the Parable of the Soils—he says that as the seed falls on good soil, you're not going to be able to stop the growth. We are witnessing that.

But we see that over and over and over again. This part of the world that we're blessed to work in is good soil. It's been churned up over and over and over again. There have been wars in and around this part of the world for a long time. We have the ongoing war right now between Russia and Ukraine that is really causing people to look around and realize this world is a mirage.

If I put my faith in anything earthly, it's going to fail me. At some time, it's going to fail me. When it does, then people begin looking for solid ground to stand down on, and they are searching for God. We see it in our country. You think back on our country during 9/11 or post-9/11. When 9/11 happened, I was actually up in Philadelphia and working in and out of New York at that time.

When 9/11 happened, I would tell people to watch how our country changed. If you went into New York City post-9/11, held out your phone, and acted like you were lost or looking for something, there would be five to six New Yorkers who would quickly run to your aid and ask, "What do you need? What are you looking for?" If you do that today, I jokingly tell people you'd better keep your right hand on your wallet and hang on to your phone very strongly because one or both are going to get snatched away from you.

It's just very different. But post-9/11, after our country was attacked, we were unified. We saw unity in this country like we have never seen. We saw our church buildings full. To engage with someone in a spiritual conversation happened very quickly. Welcome to the part of the world that we're blessed to work in.

If you can imagine if Mexico were the superpower that Russia is. Just imagine if Mexico now has invaded Texas, and they're sending drones as far up as Dallas-Fort Worth, and people begin fleeing. In Ukraine right now, you have six million refugees—people who have left the country of Ukraine—and you've got another three and a half to four million who are internally displaced or IDPs.

If you can imagine this is happening in Texas, and you've got all these Texans now fleeing—six million fleeing Texas and coming into Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, surrounding states—with their firsthand stories of atrocities, of death, of bombings, just all these tragedies.

And then you've got another three to four million who are internally displaced, they're moving around Texas. It would be very real for us, and that's what it is for the people of this part of the world. You've got Poland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Moldova, Bulgaria. If people look at their map, these are very small countries and they have Ukrainian refugees now there. They are nervous because you've got drones coming over Poland, and you've got drones coming over Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia. So it's soil that has been churned up, and they are looking for hope.

Inseong J Kim: So you said we don't push Bibles into the communities, but they request them.

Dirk Smith: That's exactly right. We're not out knocking on doors and saying, "Hey, would you like a Bible?" These are requests that are coming into us, and we always have more requests than we can fulfill. This year, we have just finalized our budget for 2026. Unfortunately, like every year, we're going to leave on the sidelines about 400,000 books that we are not going to be able to fulfill those requests.

Stepping out in faith, which we do every year, is one thing, but being fiscally irresponsible is a whole other topic. So our budget this year is going to reflect a 35% increase in distribution, which thankfully, because of our efficiencies, will only translate to about an 11% increase in funding that we're going to need to be able to do that 35% increase. So our budget this year, we're looking at distributing about 2.75 million books.

Inseong J Kim: It will be very interesting to see after the seed is planted and then we see the fruits years to come, and not just spiritual growth, and even all the fruit from financial growth because it affects every facet of life. The truth will really change their lives. I'm very excited about watching them growing.

Dirk Smith: And that's the Bible, isn't it? We see that in our own lives. I'm going to assume you may be familiar with the Center for Bible Engagement, CBE. They did some research that they originally ended in 2009, but then they continued the research until the end of 2024 and they re-released it. They called it "The Power of 4."

Our tagline is that: "The Bible. We want everyone to get it." It doesn't mean just get it in their hands; it means engage with it and get it in their hearts. What CBE found in what they rolled out and called "The Power of 4," they showed that if somebody read their Bible one day a week, it really made no change in their life at all. If they read it two days a week, little to no change.

If they read it three days a week, they began seeing some changes, but not much. But if they read their Bible four days a week, anxiety dropped 35%. Depression dropped 36%. Anger dropped 36%. On and on these aspects go. Viewing pornography dropped 59%. Having sex outside of marriage dropped 59%.

On the flip side, sharing your faith rose 224%. Discipleship rose 226%. So we see the effects, but of course, as a believer, I really don't know why we would be surprised at that because Paul tells us that. What's the Fruit of the Spirit? When I invite the Spirit in to live inside me, which those of us who claim to be believers, that's the gift we get. We get the Spirit.

What does he say the fruit of that Spirit is? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Those are all the things that the Center for Bible Engagement saw with "The Power of 4." They saw more love, more joy, more peace, more patience, on and on it goes.

So that's a natural result. We're dealing with a population at EEM who are not just engaging with their Bible four days a week, they're in it seven days a week. As a result, the people who are requesting Bibles are people whose lives have been and are being transformed by the power of the Spirit through God's Word. They have the cure for anxiety, the cure for fear, the cure for depression. It doesn't mean that these life experiences they like, but they have the Spirit of God that they are relying on who is navigating that with them and giving them this unexplained peace, this unexplained joy, this unexplained happiness that they can engage with each other in a community that they can be with. They want to share that. They want other people to have that, so they're saying to us, "Please give us Bibles so that we can share this good news with everybody around us."

Inseong J Kim: Wow, that's a powerful testimony. I remember when I was in high school, I was so hungry and I read the Bible three times. Without even theological training, it really changed my life. Even just holding the Bible and starting reading, and Holy Spirit really teach us too how to read a Bible and understand. It change life really, literally.

Dirk Smith: Absolutely. So often we try and make it more difficult than it is. The bottom line is God gives us his Word. If we trust the Spirit as people engage with God's Word—and there are so many stories I could go to of people who just sat down with a Bible who had never read God's Word before—their words to us were the words consumed me and I couldn't put the book down.

As I continued to read, as in your story and your testimony, I began changing. I couldn't explain the change. Isn't that the power that so often, unfortunately, here in the West, we deny that power? We don't like the mystical. We want to be able to explain everything.

Frankly, there are so many things with God that are unexplainable. They just are. That's where our faith comes in, and it's faith-building. It's honestly very faith-building for us at EEM to see the countless stories and to read the countless stories of the change. It's a fun work to be involved in because, as I tell our team, it's not about any of us.

None of us get the credit for any of this, but we've been invited into this and we get to have a front-row seat to see what God is doing and to witness the power, the transformative power of his Word in so many people's lives.

Inseong J Kim: Even in the church, like a non-believer comes and then they start reading a Bible, and then we were able to see people's lives changing. Like, "Oh wow, look at that person." And then we actually saw that God is blessing their personal life too. So it's very exciting to watch that once people grab the Bible, start reading, and then the word jumps out from the Bible and change—it's living Word truly.

Dirk Smith: Yes, very much so.

Inseong J Kim: So you said Eastern Europe is at the crossroads, the need for hope and clarity in the Gospel is greater than ever. We are humbled to play even a small role in that mission. How exciting to be a part of the God's mission.

Dirk Smith: It really is, and it is very humbling. Again, back to—and I tell people, "What is EEM?" People ask, "Tell me about EEM." It's very easy: we publish, we print, and we distribute Bibles. As I tell people, we're in the Parable of the Sower business.

When you look again at that parable, the one character or the one entity in that parable that gets very little attention is the sower. All Jesus says in the parable is he went out and sowed the seed. That's us. We're the sowers. Often times we want to rewrite that parable, and we want to make us the main character rather than the seed being the main character.

The seed is the main character of that, not us. It's not about how I present it, how I share it, or whether I've tested the soil. "Oh, I don't want to put the soil over here because I'm going to evaluate and deem that this is not good soil, so I'm going to be a good steward of God's seed and I'm going to make sure I put it in good places." No, no, no. That's God's to decide.

We're just told to go sow the seed, go spread it. As a result of that, there's absolutely no way, and Jesus knew this, there's no way that any of us sowers could pat ourselves on the back and say, "Hey, look what I did. Look at how great I am." It's not about me. It's not about any of us. It's about the power of God's Word and our task is to just share it.

Share Jesus. Share that hope with people. As they read, and if their hearts are good soil, Jesus tells us—it's a promise—it's going to grow. You can't stop it. You can't keep it from growing. It's going to expand. So yes, it's very exciting for us. It's very humbling, very, very humbling as we see what God does over and over and over again and as we see the requests just continue to grow.

It's very fun, Inseong, and I know you've experienced this too. I know some of your background and some of your history. It's very fun to be involved in and engage with authentic, all-in disciples of Jesus. Because when you encounter them, you see them recognize their gifts and talents, and then they come up with bizarre creative ways on how to share Jesus and how to share God's Word.

We see that over and over and over again. I'm continually surprised when I'm over there and I'm called into meetings and I meet a new partner and they begin sharing how they're going to share God's Word. I find myself going, "That's brilliant. I would have never thought of this." But they are using their gifts and talents, but with an all-in, excited, passionate approach to making sure they get Jesus out to people. It is fun and very encouraging and very challenging for us at EEM.

Inseong J Kim: What a good news from the new year that we need to hear. I mean the growth for two years is incredible, and for the new years to come, the vision is incredible too. I hope it happens in here because I'm so glad that you share about the different soils and Jesus didn't say, "Okay, you just plant the seed only on good soils," but Jesus clearly demonstrated the seed was sown in every kind of soil.

Dirk Smith: That's right. That's our job. We did something this last year that just because of requests from so many people, finally we took a lot of our stories—and we've accumulated so many stories over the years—and we put them into a book.

The book is called *The Impossible Dream*. The subtitle, which kind of goes back to Gwen Hensley who went behind the Iron Curtain and came back and told his wife this is an impossible task, but the subtitle is *The Unstoppable Journey of God's Word Behind the Iron Curtain and Beyond*.

We would love for people to check it out. They can go to impossibledreambook.com or on Amazon. Every book that is purchased provides a Bible to somebody. So would love to have people... it's got 64 stories set up as a daily reader, very encouraging, very challenging for people. We would love to send one to you, Inseong, so you can have that and get it to your people.

Inseong J Kim: Oh, that would be awesome because immediately I was thinking, oh, I'm going to grab that book and read because it's real stories that God is changing lives. Very exciting story, and I believe that God can work over there and behind the Iron Curtain. I think God can do a mighty work in the US as well. That's what I'm hoping.

Dirk Smith: Yes, very much so.

Inseong J Kim: Thank you so much for being with us and thank you so much for what you do for the Lord. Thank you.

Dirk Smith: Thank you, Inseong. If people want to find out about EEM, they can just go to our website: eem.org. But thank you for all of your work and what you do.

Inseong J Kim: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening from Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow and Happy New Year. Thank you.