October 01, 1983 by

Here are the remarkable statistics What could possibly have produced such a burst of additional Founders and gifts  One letter. On July 25th we 'railed out a single letter to all 28,000 on our mailing list. The Lord moved more than 400 people (now 500) to accept.

Hope' Chests full of 100 little packets. These friends, in turn, encouraged hundreds of others to pray and annotate and mail out our little blue "invitations." Almost IO, 230 new Founders have become involved for the first time.

Question 1: What do you believe God did for you when you paced your big payment?

Answer: We had been praying to our Father in Heaven tong before Sept. 1st, believing that all things are possible with Him. We willingly acknowledged that we must let Him do his will, not ours. So...

We therefore feel that God must have decided that our attempt to reach out to 1,200.000 people was only the beginning of the reaching out He wanted us to do. Of course there were probably several reasons why He did not want us to make that $million payment. I'm sure He did not want to tempt us to relax, Also, He did not want to allow us to believe that our "Touch Ten" plan for spreading the vision was going well enough yet really to reach cut and touch the lives of a million people.

Most embarrassing of all He knew we were not even physically or spiritually prepared for an influx of new one time gift founders.

Question 2: You were unprepared for a large response?

Answer: Yes. To make this clear to us, God has, by His control of major forces beyond our reach, forced us to face a difficult fact: if we are really serious about getting out the good news of His mighty acts around the world, we need to recruit more trained laborers just to handle the mast of intermediate human con tacts that will result. We are working through people such as yourselves who are reaching out and touching other lives also, to paraphrase 11 Tim 2:2. This is not a rapid process in the early stages. It is a good, normal process whereby Good News spreads. It is solid, because no one plucks the vision out of the TV screen with no in' termediate neighbor or friend who also believes. That is, this approach creates a sort of grapevine network that has staying power.

Question 3: Why do you persist in so strange an approach to your financial problem?

Answer: We persist in believing that the money we need is no more urgent than the vision others need. We thus discover ourselves in the process (tough, exciting, lengthy?) of trading large vision for small gifts and making this exchange with thousands upon thousands of people.

For this reason it seems clearly more important for us to learn how to give vision than to get money. And we must enlist others to help us in this task.

However, even if this indirect way of paying for this campus is very much more difficult to accomplish, is it not far more valuable than merely getting more money in by whatever process?