A Swedish church is preparing to drop thousands of tiny electronic Bibles into ISIS-controlled areas of Iraq.

The Word of Life (Livets Ord) church, based in the town of Uppsala, said it planned to release the devices from drones flying at high altitude.

The Local reported that the church’s mission director Christian Åkerhielm told a Swedish broadcaster: ‘Our ambition is to pass on the hope and love of the Christian gospel to a population living in closed areas where they are being denied human rights.

‘The Bibles are the size of pill boxes and have a display. They require no electricity, but work on their own.’

He said: ‘We start our project in a few weeks and hope to drop thousands of Bibles.’

Livets Ord is the leading evangelical church in Sweden and is closely aligned with the Pentecostal movement in the US.

A spokesman told Mail Online the Bible drop was not intended to be provocative and he equated it with the smuggling of Bibles into the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Christian Today said Livets Ord was founded in the 1980s and is often criticised for being organised like a ‘cult’.

The leader of Sweden’s Christian Democrat party, Ebba Busch Thor, attended one of the church’s evangelical schools.

Livets Ord is also known for funding the building of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

The church says on its website: ‘We believe in an unfailing and never-ending love, given to us by God. And together we try to spread that love to as many people as possible.’