Answers to Important Questions

Q: What kind of a salary does your General Director receive?

A: Like other mission agencies, he receives exactly the same salary as the newest, youngest staff member.
Q: You talk about people becoming Founders' with a single $15 gift. Why then do you ask for $15. 95?

A: The 95 cents pays for the materials we send back to the donor. None of the $15.95 is used for operations, nor for promotion.
Q: How can you say you never ask for more then one $15.95 gift? I gave my $15.95 a year ago and ever since I have received a deluge of mail asking for money.

A: Not from us. However. we wish we knew how to prevent people from interpreting our monthly reports of God's progress in this place as requests for money. But since our policy is so unusual, we are almost inevitably misunderstood. In any case, our consistent plea is not for more money from those who have already given. We do not ask previous donors to dig down, but rather to reach out and share the vision with people who lack interest in frontier missions. We also ask our donors to pray for us and to follow things carefully so they can intelligently tell others about the great need and opportunity here.
Q: But, don't you accept second and third gifts end gifts larger than $15.95?

A: Yes, we do. However, we certainly do not encourage people to give a second time or more than $15.95, risky though that may seem. (The risk to the entire mission cause is much greater if we fail to arouse a million believers to the final frontiers.) Many wonderful friends have given us large gifts, sometimes in the thousands £ of dollars and sometimes several times, We freely admit that with out these gifts we would have gone under. But like Hudson Taylor, who never asked for any money at all but accepted whatever was offered him, we ask only for a onetime, small gift, and instead urge people to spread the hope further.
Q: Just how do you expect people to help you pay for the campus and spread the hope further?

A: You can "give" $50 to $150 simply by getting a Touch Ten packet (see pp. 1 6 32) and mailing out ten of our Founders Invitations to ten people on your Christmas card list. You can give $500 to $1500 in addition if you invite 10 people over to your house to do the same. Through your hospitality they can not only share about the frontier challenge, but also become small one time gift contributors. In order to help you in such a house party, we can send you an audio or video cassette, a slide set, or other materials to enable you to present the challenge.
Q: Whet really is the special urgency beyond your property needs of 'touching" a million people?

A: We estimate that 25,000 missionaries (now receiving $700 million per year) will retire or return in the next ten years. With them will retire most of their donors. In other words, this massive donor base will shrivel up, and at the present rate only about 5,000 new missionaries will he going out. This is the greatest risk to the cause or Christ, not our property.
Q: Whet happens now that you could not pay the $6 million on September 1st?

A: We have entered automatically into an extremely more difficult interest rate and a series of larger payments. If our Touch Ten effort receives God's gracious blessing, we may be able to pay off the campus in the next 30 to 60 days, depending on the number of churches and individuals who volunteer to help, and the rate of return of the Invitations, But it now becomes much more urgent to do so, due to the higher interest rate (not known at this writing)
Q: Why don't you go on TV with a telethon and raise the money you need in a few hours?

A: No doubt Pat Robertson and other TV personalities can from time to time raise money in a few hours from their own audiences, to whom they are well known. We don't have such a TV audience. Periodically various other Christian organizations not normally on TV put on a telethon. In such a case, they do so knowing that the money they raise will barely cover their costs. But for them it is worth doing because the new donors they find will through the years continue to give, often on a regular basis. For us, this pattern will not work because first of all we do not have the hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for TV time, and secondly, we do not operate on the basis of soliciting repeat gifts, as we have explained above.