January 1988

ãWe've got to realize that we are now outnumbered. Our Îstaffâ is mainly not here. Our network of workers, if God permits us to carry them with us now, are in the majority . . . . They have this country in their hands to an extent that we here never have had and never will . . . .

ãSo let's ask God to make us ingenious in the development of a generic local mission promotion mechanism which has not been in existence for 80 years in this country. . . . There was a time in this country, between 1906 and 1913, when there were 3,500 local groups of workers who were promoting the cause of missions, and those people in a four-year period quadrupled the giving to missions . . . .ã

I hope you don't think I'm just being crazy here, but do you realize what our goals really are? . . . Our goals are to generate a billion dollars a year for missions. The thousand workers who have joined us for the campaign could readily increase the flow of money to missions by an additional billion dollars a year. . .

ãOur need and our fundraising drive is, in a sense, like the cap that explodes and detonates the whole dynamite stick . . . . We hope that this Îcapâ of the campaign, followed by Regional Mobilizersâ Workshops and the Vision Network, will really explode into something truly significant. Will it? That is the billion-dollar question . . . .

ãI almost think that God is saying to us, ÎLook, I tricked you. You thought I wanted you to go after $8 million, and I really wanted you to go after a thousand local workers. You tried every other scheme to get the $8 million, and you were finally forced to go and recruit a thousand local people. That's what I was really after, but I didn't really think you'd have the faith to do it. So I tricked you.â

ãI say that playfully. But God's ways are higher than our ways. All I can say is that we don't always know for sure what His plan is. We have to be very, very open day by day. We need to be open every single day to the nuances of His will as we understand them."

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