On Fire for the Work!
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This Christ-led Church is absolutely on fire for the Work of God, and the amount of our current material, ongoing and future projects prove it! And, as explained, we have material available in English, French, Spanish, German, Afrikaans and Dutch.
Every day, we receive a great many inquiries from people hearing God’s truth for the first time, and these are from around the world. And we hear from former The World Tomorrow listeners, Plain Truthsubscribers, co-workers and ex-WCG members, hearing Christ’s voice through our literature, broadcasts and sermons. We continue to grow at a steady and rapidly accelerating rate.
But remember to keep in mind that this is the Laodicean age. It is no longer Philadelphia’s time. Because of this, and because time is growing short, I have previously explained that it is not possible to do the same kind of large Work—meaning number of conversions—that occurred under Mr. Armstrong.
Contents
Exploding Income
All that follows in this chapter is a direct byproduct of one fundamental reality that The Restored Church of God enjoys year after year after year: Our annual income continues to rise at an unprecedented level probably throughout the history of God’s Church—in this century, the last century or any other century.
Our regular income grew over 90% IN 2011 above 2010 (and did this during a terrible recession)! This continues a pattern of increase:
- 2002—over 45%
- 2003—a bit under 3%
- 2004—over 42%
- 2005—almost right at 23%
- 2006—over 41%
- 2007—over 77%
- 2008—31%
- 2009—over 19%
- 2010—over 37%
In nearly every case, these numbers were well above projections. Of course, and this is the oft-forgotten factor of sustained growth over multiple years, each year’s percentage is derived from a much larger base figure—meaning the long-term raw number growth becomes much greater, now the case with RCG.
While the splinters and slivers ALL struggle to outpace inflation—others seem unembarrassed to trumpet only single digit growth in income against an inflation number that reduces it further. Other groups see no growth or are even declining.
It has been gratifying to see increasing numbers of people cut through the misinformation to see plainly where God is working!
Most among those who are even a little bit awake comprehend there cannot possibly be more than a handful of years remaining to complete what God intends for His Work to accomplish!
We now look more closely at our Great Commission Operational Plan—at some of what must yet be accomplished. We are already employing severalmethods of doing the Work, including our three mammoth websites, Internet advertising, and an expanding Real Truth Newsstand Distribution Program. While we will talk about further plans for television, there are other vehicles for doing the Work that are in place or under consideration.
Giant Websites
One measure of the growth of the Work of RCG is the number of downloads from our websites. In 2011, we had almost 13.5 million downloads. For comparison, in 2006, we just exceeded 8.5 millionitems taken against a little over 3.7 million in 2005. By every standard, this is SPECTACULAR GROWTH!
The reason we now reach so many millions of readers, viewers and listeners with even more millions of pieces of literature and broadcasts is that we have a large and rapidly growing budget for Internet advertising. This budget is revisited every month.
Success Guaranteed!
Here is where our Operational Plan for the Great Commission grows exciting—and I mean REALLY EXCITING! It should now be clear that our plan—God’s Plan!—must produce the biggest short-term impact in religion the world has ever seen. In fact, prophecies you have studied in this book reveal in advance this will happen—so we need only to figure out what God is leading us to do and then watch it come to pass.
Think of this in the following way: Imagine we are General Motors Corporation early in its existence. Now imagine that we were told early on that we will become the largest automobile manufacturer ever, and this will also happen over a short period—and that it was certain—it was GUARANTEED! Then imagine we were even told that if plant laborers or leaders were negligent or became disloyal and left to join the competition, faithful replacements would be provided—in other words, we would still achieve our goals, no matter what. All that remained would be to pursue the right strategies and tactics to bring this certainty to pass. But even imagine that these would be shown to us by God.
We have described the Work of The Restored Church of God!
Recall again that Mr. Armstrong said God’s people should always ;pray as though it all depends on God, but work as though it all depends on us—and also that ;the Work of God moves forward on its knees. Therefore, instead of falling back to cruise control, because we understand prophecy, we are using God’s end-of-the-age Master Plan as motivation to try even harder at innovation and use of creative ingenuity.
Website Strategy
Developing colossal websites requires a carefully designed STRATEGY—and employing a variety oftactics—as well as recognizing that regular postings on our sites must continually occur. Regarding The Real Truth site, for instance—try to think of this as you read—in addition to (1) producing ten magazines annually instead of six, we are also (2) posting regular special news alerts, and (3) broadcasting The World to Come, which are posted daily in audio and weekly in video on a third site—worldtocome.org.
What you have read in just the last paragraph has meant that a significant number of effective new writers have had to be trained to meet expanding editorial needs. This has been another of our internal training programs that was able to yield skilled writers to keep up with the demand of our editorial needs. We know God will continue sending additional effective writers, or those able to be trained to help the Work.
Finally, and this is now obvious to the reader, the sheer awesome size of our websites brought us to a point where we had to bring in a large, outside company to remodel them. These sites needed to stand ;at the top of the world, so to speak. This meant extraordinary attention needed to be brought to their appearance, functionality, usability, internal mechanics and capability to maximize overall impact.The Real Truth was completed first.
New Television Studio!—Videocasting The World to Come!
Mr. Armstrong began announcing the gospel in the 1930s on The World Tomorrow radio program. By late 1967 most of his public preaching had moved to television. This program slowly built a giant audience of regular listeners, millions of whom went on to read The Plain Truth and other literature. Of course, many thousands became members after first hearing Mr. Armstrong’s voice. This established the successful pattern used today.
Before our plans to move to videocasting, we produced 112 World to Come audio broadcasts. Of course, these are all available 24 hours a day on The World to Come website—and will remain so indefinitely—which means there exists a system of archiving programs that Mr. Armstrong could not have dreamed of 25 years ago.
Recognizing that we live in a largely image-driven ;video world, we understood the need to begin videocastingThe World to Come program. The first step was to find space in our building to construct what must be a ;world-class—state-of-the-art television studio. Necessary sufficient space was secured and construction was completed.
The World to Come Program:Following the pattern of Mr. Armstrong, Mr. Pack regularly records broadcasts. Each one is posted and archived on the Internet, allowing the gospel of the kingdom of God to be preached around the globe 24 hours a day.
These are regularly produced, and the length, set appearance and style closely resemble Mr. Armstrong’s telecasts. One of the virtual doctrinesof the past was that we serve a God of quality. Therefore, these videocasts reflect excellence, and are absolutely professional in every way—using high definition cameras, beautiful studio, sufficient and super-quality graphics, news footage, powerful statistics, effective music, all of this brought together by cutting-edge software.
All of this came together and was possible through use of a team of outside professionals. We were also blessed to already have highly trained professionals—very hard to find—in place on our staff. It took very little time to perfect the level of quality we achieve.
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