The sermon transcript discusses the importance of meeting people where they are, including businessmen who may be busy. The speaker emphasizes the need for honesty and open communication when it comes to financial support in ministry. They also highlight the importance of prayer and action, urging for tangible steps to be taken rather than just talk. The transcript mentions the need to mobilize laypeople and not solely rely on full-time workers for fundraising efforts.

I've taken down some notes so I won't go wandering all over the place. I don't want to repeat things that I have said before, though most of you I don't think I've spoken on this subject before, so you may not even be aware of some of the material development, God's Way, resourcing God's work, and a number of other tapes that I've done, just to try to really contextualize all that people are saying about money into really where OM is, and was, and is going, and to try to keep the unity, especially in a movement where brothers and sisters have been used to working with a certain set of terminology and a certain ethos, and that has changed, and we don't want to lose people for the sake of semantics, and we want to be very, very sensitive to the fact that different people pray and think about these things in different ways. The first thing I had on my agenda was to just again emphasize how thankful we are to God for all that he has done, and thinking in the context of Britain, and my mind jumps back to being with a couple of businessmen in Manchester. Valgary wasn't yet involved at that time, but his close friend Norman Alexander, and one or two other men, a man named Mr. Hooghly, after my Sunday meetings, this was 1962, they said, you know, you need to organize, you need to do things properly. Hooghly, British, of course, was good at doing things properly, and suggested that I get a board of trustees, and they helped put together that original board who now represent a number of sub-boards and boards overseeing the whole of OMUK with all of its international implications, and as I look back at 30 years of work here in Britain, I just thank God that I could have just even a small part in it, because we've seen amazing things happen, and we've seen amazing amounts of money come in, in phenomenal ways. We would tend to think, and to give God the glory, that this money came in in answer to prayer, and that is part of the picture. But the money came in also because people worked hard, because people sacrificed, because people took more meetings to talk about the vision and the work than perhaps anyone could ever count. And we know that the Bible emphasizes the importance of the whole council. Paul said, I shall not declare unto you the whole council of God. And if we're going to do that, which we've been learning how to do, we're still learning, then it has to include basic biblical understanding about money. As we think of this subject that we're gathered here especially to talk about, releasing finance for the work of OM and the work of God in general, a few very basic things I just want to reemphasize. Number one, we want to be a work of integrity. Absolutely. Our spiritual father, my own spiritual father, Billy Graham, has managed to keep going straight all of these years despite many pitfalls. There's another 500-page book out about Billy Graham. And I tell you, if there was any skeletons in the closet, they have nailed him on a few issues, especially his Nixon link-up. But basically, he stood out as a man of integrity. And as I was reading that review of that book, that message again came out. Integrity. And we want that far more than we want another million pounds or another hundred thousand pounds. Integrity touches every aspect of our Christian life. And there's no challenge in some ways greater. Moral integrity, financial integrity, integrity in terms of what we say. And it's just so beautiful when we can meet people and work with people of integrity. And in God's grace, he has given O.M. a testimony, generally in the Christian world after all these years, many mistakes and sins and failures, he's given us a testimony of being a movement of integrity. And we're going to have to fight with every inch in us to maintain that. I'm not saying it's perfect, but that's a word I especially hope we can allow to go very, very deep. As we move into the area of being more open about finance or as sometimes it's referred to, fundraising, the minefields are many, the pitfalls are many. But the last thing we want to do is what so many people have done, overreacting to manipulation, extremism, all that kind of thing, things we see on the television, overreacting to that into a position where basically they're just not going to do very much. Surely there is something more biblical than that. The second principle I want to just lay as a foundation is spirituality. I know we live in a day when people even mock spirituality. The very word, you know, spirituality, people make jokes about it at Bible college. People have funny ideas about spirituality. I found out recently someone I know quite closely thought I had a particular view on spirituality, which I didn't have at all, but obviously I miscommunicated. But I think spirituality is something bigger than perhaps some people define it, and I believe the bottom line of spirituality is knowing God, knowing God and walking with God. Though we're here to focus on a particular subject, we need to remind ourselves that that's only part of the equation. We didn't come here for a general overview of the Christian life. Spirituality, we do that all the time in OM. All the time. We've come here to focus on one particular area which is crucial and which we feel sometimes we've neglected and to be quite honest where we as full-time OMers need desperately the help of people who are thought of as laymen or as people outside the work, and we'll get back to that later on. But the pastoral care of our people, evangelizing in the best possible way. In other words, how can we improve our work among Muslims? How can we be more effective in church planting in Pakistan? How can we do better in Jordan? We have a big meeting in Jordan starting in two days. They won't be talking that much about finance. I certainly hope it comes up a little bit. They'll be there dealing with everything connected with that work, which is in a time of crisis by the way. So try to do our work in the Middle East. That's the Middle East leaders meeting in a better way. Thirdly, I personally believe that if we don't have real love and concern for people, we're disqualified from this aspect of Christian ministry. I'm not sure what aspect you are able to get into. If you don't have a love and concern for people. We have a problem in the United States, much more acute than here in England. You have it here as well, in that everything is professional. Here's a guy that was doing this kind of thing all of his life, and he never really was interested that much in people. And suddenly because he gets a job, he just seems to be so interested in people because his job is to get those people to put their money into the box. I'm not judging that man because he may have went through a quick conversion. But I personally don't like to see people just totally green in their Christian life. Going into the whole area of development and financing, resourcing God's work with all that that involves, especially in terms of relationship. Because we need to understand that though initially, initially we may get involved with a person because he is a potential supporter of the work, it never ends there. It doesn't end there. Because as Christians we're bonded together, there's relationship. People that once supported our work financially are actually broke right now. What do we do? We drop them, forget them, don't pray for them anymore, don't phone them. It doesn't work like that, not in Christian ministry. But in oftentimes very professional, hard sell kind of Christian fundraising, that's the name of the game. And though people may pretend otherwise, the bottom line is shown where people spend their time and where they spend their efforts and their energy. So I hope that all of us who go into this, and I don't think you'd be here if it were otherwise, do have a real love and concern for people. Fourthly, I've just written down the words so famous in O.N., prayer and faith. We're reminded of the scripture that says the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty unto God to the pulling down of strongholds. Some of you read that old leaflet that has to be revised, I wrote it 15 years ago, releasing finance through prayer. And I still stand on almost everything I said in that leaflet. It needs a few adjustments, that's why I guess it's not reprinted. But to have only a few adjustments over 15 or 20 years might be somewhat miraculous. That leaflet has been reprinted actually in magazines in different languages all over the world. And in many ways, O.N. has always had a very strong emphasis on money. From the beginning, when I first walked up to a businessman in the parking lot of a new church in my town shortly after my conversion and more or less hinted to him or said to him that I wanted some money for Gospels of John for my high school. From that very day to this day, there's been a phenomenal emphasis on money. And I think we have to admit that in our old days, at times there was almost a neurosis. There was almost a neurosis about money. And it got too important. I think too important more in the older days under the older policy than actually our newer days where there's a little more freedom, a little more humor, a little more reality and honesty than perhaps we sometimes had before. My uneasiness about our older policy which has now been changed goes back 25 years. I didn't change easy. And there's a lot of pressure on me not to change even though very little of it came from the Bible. It came from peer pressure. It came from people patting me on the back, giving me the idea this was the best way and we weren't like others. Owen was different. We weren't like others. That creates a very interesting vibration. Of course, here in England, we found more fellow travelers with our old policy than we did in other parts of the world. And perhaps the Lord knew we needed that to get the roots that we needed in this unique country that has more emphasis, even though it's much smaller now, on that particular style and approach. But we in no way are turning away from the prayer and faith approach. And anything we say, that's got to be as the foundation. And then number five, we are not here just to look at one little aspect of God's work, though that's important, but we are also here to try to honor God, to try to honor His Word, and to develop a more biblical view of resourcing God's work and even a more biblical view of wealth and of work. Now, I hope we're not going to have to go into all the philosophy of this, because we've been doing this a lot for the last few years. We've got Mike Strachur's booklet on fundraising, God's Way, which I think most of you have. We've had papers at the General Council. We've had documents by various people. Forgive us if we haven't got those widely circulated. O.M. is great for producing all kinds of things. Don't let them drift out of print. So I know different people here who have had different amounts of foundation thinking in terms of the biblical view of money, faith, wealth, and work. One of the books I've been pushing a lot lately is a Navigator book, Your Work Matters to God, because a lot of God's people have a negative view of work. I'm finding it everywhere, and I'm having the joy of trying to set some people straight, that Christian work is first class and secular work is second class. I'll tell you some of the people who helped propagate that view are people, of course, who worked in secular work and found it very rough, wanted to go into Christian work, and when they went into Christian work, the way they share that wonderful experience in their life makes it sound like the secular work was more or less of the devil, but this stuff I'm in now, this is the real Christian work. In O.M., you have people going in both directions. You have people who have been in Christian work a long time, and some of them want to get back in secular work. Mike is a person that went in that direction, was in it, and has come back, which I think has given him some experience and skills we greatly need to know him. So we have people going in both directions. The general situation right now in recession is that people, more people want to get into Christian work than ever before I've ever seen in all my years of ministry. Those of us in so-called Christian work, especially when the money does come in, we almost feel a little embarrassed as some of our people are losing their jobs. One of my best prayer partners just talked to me on the phone two weeks ago, just lost the top job of the big company in the United States. And I noticed he's just gone for an interview with a Christian Bible school. He faxed me today. He wants to meet me, meet two hours and talk about becoming a full-time worker in a Christian Bible school. In no way am I saying that's wrong, but it does present a unique challenge. And certainly in OM, we are hoping that some people will stay in their job and help produce the resources to carry all this on. And that is something I'm sure we're all going to be faced with more in the future. Moving from the foundation, what does the present need? And where are we at present? God has given us a great ministry. I think many of us as OM leaders are almost too aware of our weaknesses. I live in a perpetual state of consciousness of OM's weaknesses. Even when I'm introduced in a church and the man introducing me pays a wonderful tribute to OM. It doesn't seem to impact me. It does a little bit. I'm thinking about the weaknesses, the problems. Why aren't we doing better in this? And even in my own life, maybe in God's grace that's good. I've had people tell me they thought that was good. I guess it's an area where it's hard sometimes to find a balance. So God has given a great ministry. I find it a great challenge to work with the people that I'm privileged to work with, both my own team throughout Britain and throughout the world. We just come from the international field and country leaders' meetings in Germany. And though meetings in general of that style, that's not my particular first thing as a preacher, and with other things that I'm really motivated to do, I do find it a very important and valuable time. And when I see, and then I visit a lot of these people on the field, I see the work they're doing. The sacrifice, because many of these OM leaders are sacrificing. Time, money, personal desires. That doesn't mean there's never any blessings or any benefits or even things that minister them as human beings, but it does mean that most of our leaders are people of tremendous integrity, people we can trust. If we give them $25,000 to buy something for $500, we're going to get the right change. We're going to get the right change. And of course, that's going to be an ongoing battle as the work gets bigger. And I've written here at point one under this thing of where we are at present and what is the present need, that OM's greatest asset are all of our friends and prayer partners. And one of our purposes in this area of ministry is to more highly esteem the people who are praying, giving, helping, and supporting this work. And a lot of the things we want to do are in the area of being a servant. And the response we get from our prayer partners when we give out a challenge is quite awesome. When we lost that ship and gave out the challenge to get Lagos II for a couple of million, the response was overwhelming. And we saw through that experience that there was a lot of credibility out there, a lot of friends, but that they weren't always faced with the opportunity of doing something specific. And Lagos II provided that and it also awakened us to a number of things. As Lagos II and the finance of Lagos II very much came in linked with our new policy, whereas the money for Lagos I came in under the old policy, though there's hardly anyone apart from myself that knows the true story of the financing of Lagos I because in those days I didn't talk about those things. And that was considered to be more spiritual. Even film strip is in error because it gives the idea that finding the crew took years, but finding the money, it all came in in... Do you remember that film strip? That's totally false. The money was coming in over a period of seven years, but through the old field credit system it was all out in literature projects all over the world. But I tell you, when we went to buy the ship, the word went out, get the money back! And all that money flowed back and then God brought in the remainder from gifts at the time and we didn't have enough. We did not have enough to buy it when we signed the contract. In fact, people came into the early ship ministry under the pressure and the challenge of our teaching back in the early 70s. I can think of even crew members. They gave everything they had. I think of one captain. Everything he had. Thousands. That was five years before we ever had a ship. So from those earliest days of the ship ministry it wasn't just manpower. And that kind of lopsided view that the manpower and getting the people, that's really important. The money, that's nothing for God. It's a distortion. It's a distortion that also leaves the people in the secular world feeling that their part isn't really much. When it's both. It's not either or. It's both. And the sacrificial giving to that first ship and then 1977 Dulos is quite amazing. So that friendship, those prayer partners, the credibility in thousands of churches, which all needs ongoing work. One of the reasons, try to get this, that we need people from outside of the work to help us is that we are short staffed and most people already have too many jobs and if we then, on top of there's already too many jobs, say you are also the fundraiser, which we are saying. We are saying it. It gets sometimes almost to the point of the ridiculous. Now miraculously in this room we have Paul Ingram who I think's primary focus is actually finance. Is that not true? Though I know his boss over here, Chris Papworth, certainly has that as a good chunk of his focus and I know that Tony as the leader of the whole work in Britain has that as a focus as well. But when you take a man who's the director of a whole field like Tony and get him all jazzed up for finding finance, you can be in the danger of heaping burdens on people too great for them to bear because already the pastoral care of the people, the strategy, the relationships of all kinds makes it difficult to put a lot of time into this challenge that we're talking about here during these days together. Now it will all tie together especially when we talk about friendship, credibility, church relationships. An example is one day I went out of here for a Sunday morning meeting to a church not far from here where we had friends, where I knew the pastor, we had credibility so I got the Sunday morning service. If you don't have the Sunday credibility and acceptance you're not going to get the Sunday morning service. Even in Britain, in America it's even more difficult. And I talked a little bit about money in that Sunday morning service and so a businessman who I guess must have felt somewhat relaxed came to me at the book table and said I'm amazed that groups like you need money. And you can imagine we had quite a good conversation. And within five days I had a 20,000 pound check from that man. So it all ties in together. If you don't have the credibility and the linking you're not even going to get in the meeting in the first place. You wouldn't be here tonight if you didn't believe that somewhere God had his hand on Operation Homilization. I simply wouldn't be here. Number two under this segment is what I call the challenge of the personal support battle. Now we could start a debate whether we should even operate this way. Why don't we just pay salaries like the Southern Baptists? Then you only have to argue about how much you should pay. Southern Baptist missionaries are pushing up 40,000, 50,000 a year. They aren't seeing a huge amount of growth. There are a number of missionaries, but I don't despise what they're doing. Their lifestyle is very upsetting to a lot of people on the field, but there are still some very good people. An interdenominational faith mission that started from nothing in our generation, we're only 30 plus years old, doesn't easily start making quantum leaps and talk about just paying people a salary. When I talk about a salary I'm not talking about paying back a man money that he has raised. You may call it a salary. When I talk about a salary, I'm talking about the way the secular world talks. They don't bring you into a job at IBM and then say, now go raise the money. We're going to pay you a salary, but you go find the money. So the key is not the word salary. The key is the concept that these people have to find basically their own finance. Whatever form we give it back, big lump, small lump salaries, they basically have to find most of it. If you know the O.M. system, you know that we also have the general pool so that if someone is short, they're not just asked to leave. We somehow put more milk, more water in the soup. We pray and general gifts have been absolutely vital in maintaining staff support within O.M. because that helps the thing keep going while the person continues to work on their support battle. And I think in our brainstorming together, we certainly will want to spend a little time talking about personal support because it is the largest single chunk of O.M. income, personal support. And we have phenomenal opportunities to increase it. Can you imagine a movement of 2,000 people if they all increase only 10%? You're talking about a lot of money. And all these 2,000 people have their friends, their relationships, their churches. And as we even teach them how to do a better prayer letter, as we teach them how to use audio cassettes for communication, how to have a better furlough, all these things we're working at in various ways. You can imagine the impact. It's quite amazing. Three, we're not concerned just about having people on the mission field. We want them to have the tools to get the job done. This is one of the reasons we are committed to finding bigger sums of money. David Hicks is doing a thesis on the internationalization of missions with O.M. as his case study. It's a brilliant piece of paper, a brilliant thesis. And he's gone back into our history and our roots. And he asked me for a copy of a book that I hardly ever show anymore that influenced me when I first went to Spain. It was written by a Spaniard. One of the chapters in that book about doing missionary work God's way, something like that, Samuel Vila, he was an old man at that time. He's now moving toward 100, still alive. One of my very first contacts. He wrote this book urging missionaries not to just come to the field with support only, but to come to the field with money to get the job done. Did you read that book? That brought into the work and into the first leadership manual a term that somebody said later was grammatically incorrect, producing faith. And if you've seen that in our old literature you may say, well what is that? What we're talking about there is faith not just to get there, not just to get there and feed our children and live in a house, but money to buy literature, to get a bicycle, to get a cassette recorder, to get videos, tools to get the job done. And I think one of the very encouraging things has been OM's ability to supply our missionaries with the tools to get the job done. Hundreds of bicycles, hundreds of vehicles, millions and tens of millions of pieces of literature. And I'm sure one of the reasons people don't give, and we'll have a time of questions in a little bit, is they don't realize how much their money can do in world missions. They don't realize what that money can do in world missions. I must confess that when it comes to saving money and the use of money, I haven't really changed much, though I have more grace and more balance and I know how to spend money a little bit, even for recreation. It's always the hardest thing for me. But one of the reasons is I've just seen what even ten pounds can do. What ten pounds in the right place can do. We're not just talking about big gifts. And I think OM, even under our older policy, often had that ability, without asking anybody to point out what that money could do. Certainly that's what I was doing all the time behind the scenes. And I used to pray with all my heart, oh Lord, put it on their hearts to ask the right questions. Under the old policy, nothing was more important almost than for the people to ask the right question, which was, how do you get your money? Of course, some of the dumb answers that OMers sometimes gave when that question was asked could make up really one of the Christian joke books of this century. And some of you know some of those stories like this lady that wanted to give you a huge amount of money but heard it was a faith movement and certainly didn't want to interfere with that. And some other person whose pastor asked him, well, how much money do you need to go? And almost in an insulting way, the OMers said, well, this is a faith movement. We look to God alone. And of course, some pastors there are just thrilled because they've got lots of things they can give their money to much less this OMer going to the field. So we're not just in a personal support battle as big as that is, but we have that desire and that goal to see the tools to do the job done. And that involves a lot of literature. I don't know if you realize that one of our goals in the early days of OM was gospel advertising. I ran ads in India in New Year's Digest. We had massive response. I eventually gave up. Of course, some other groups were doing that. God led me to a millionaire named Mr. Sherrod. And just to keep the record state, in God's providence, he's let me fellowship with people of all financial spectrum. And OM has always had a few very, very wealthy people who were linked with us. They say to have a lot of wealth you've got to be a little eccentric. I don't know. I've also been accused of being eccentric, so maybe that's why I get on with some of these people. But this man, Mr. Sherrod, and I'm not going to mention many names this evening, was one of the few that as a multimillionaire wanted to have no money by the time he went to heaven. And so he was spending all of his money. As far as I know, he's now broke. We never hear from him anymore. He's lived a lot longer than he expected. I don't think he's suffering. He's from Texas or Arizona. This man had this vision to put hundreds of thousands of dollars into advertising the gospel. Some of his ads were very blunt. He wanted us to put these gospel ads in the Hindu newspapers that were absolutely hard sell. Gospel, and we had some difficulty with that. And I think he bypassed us eventually and ran them all over India. I don't know if you noticed in Newsweek or Time recently, Moshe Rosen, the founder of Jews for Jesus, is one of the great fundraisers of America and has a great organization, is running full-page ads in Newsweek. Do you know what kind of money that costs? But do you know how many people see that? How many Jews read that? Now somebody may say, well, I don't think that's the most effective way to reach Jews, but there's no group in the movement in the world that's hardly read more Jews to Christ than Jews for Jesus. And it, I think, is a great work. And then I've written here that our burden is not, again, a small burden. It, in fact, is a very large burden and is to reach millions. OM is a movement that has always sought millions. God has given us the privilege of giving the gospel face-to-face, counting literature and personal testimony, upward toward 500 million people. And we, considering population explosion, want to continue to reach millions. People with a small vision, they only need small money. But if people have a big vision, they need big money. And I think with a 30-35 year track record of handling money carefully, of having men and women of integrity, of being based on the Bible, that God, in His sovereignty, wants to commit large sums of money to us for World Evangelism. Now He already is. We have our annual accounts. That also was a mixed, somewhat of a mixed blessing. It should have been done in pounds. I wasn't, I'm afraid, involved in that and caught it after it went out into print. And some, as most things in OM, some people didn't particularly like it. I have some copies there. But other people felt it was very, very helpful. But certainly some people, when they see the total amount of money that goes through OM, they get a bit of a shake. There are some people who give smaller sums of money that these days would prefer to give to something else other than OM. It's just too big. One man wrote me and said, I used to pray for you, but the work has become very big and very complicated and I don't feel I can give anymore. Could you please take my name off the list? Well, what was he praying for over the years, that we shrink? So we lost that prayer partner. I don't think we should be intimidated by a few people that we lose in the process of going forward with a greater vision and with greater steps of faith. With the people that we have in leadership in OM, the area leaders and the field leaders that they work together with, I don't think OM in the next decade is going to launch anything bizarre. I don't think Tony would put up with it, the engineer. OM is not a movement that's launching bizarre things, even the way British people think. Now the way Americans think, you can be sure we're not launching bizarre things. Our goals toward the year 2000 are considered quite obtainable. That was boring to some of the goals being launched more by people in other countries. We're a movement that's committed to growth, growth that we can keep in balance with the pastoral care of the people and with all the other things that we have to do. But at the same time, it's going to take millions. And with recession hitting us, with so many other factors, I can't go into detail because of the time. I tell you, it's going to take a lot more work and effort just to keep up the existing budget. Just to keep up the existing budget is going to take more work. I kept my ICT budget up last year, but I worked 10% harder than the year before. So it all looks nice at the end of the year, but you can ask my wife about my lifestyle. And I could have never done that if my children weren't grown up and out of the nest. I couldn't do it years ago because my children had a big esteem and your scheduling has to be around your children. So I've been able to work harder because you don't get involved with a lot of people and a lot of relationships and then just leave them. It just doesn't work that way. I listed also under this section just two other points. Not only are we trying to reach the millions of Christ and of course the priority now isn't literature, it's church planting, it's every kind of evangelism and every country is different. But on top of that, my next point, we have a burden to respond to the church in need. The church needs the kind of books and teaching materials that we have on our ships, that we have on our shelves, that we have right on this table. That takes money. I was with Jack McAllister. Jack McAllister last week pioneered fundraising on television in America, which unfortunately later on was misused. He launched it 40 years ago and he launched Every Home Literature Crusade, which probably gave out more tracks than any other movement in the world, certainly one way ahead of us because they specialized in tracks. He later went through some difficulties and was removed from his own organization and I just praise God that we went into the desert. He fought his way back and Jack's main ministry now is intercessory prayer. I know no one that follows me as closely as Jack McAllister. He seems to know more where I'm going than sometimes I do. There's a phone call ahead of time waiting for me to call him back so we can pray on the phone. I just had a time of prayer with him and his wife and he said to me because this is in my morning meeting and I had this book table on a donation basis and he said to me what few say even homers, he said with that book table you have doubled the impact of your visit to this church. Now here's a man 77 years of age, in fact I was with him on his birthday and praise God I think most OMers do see that. The printed page. Right now almost every OM field is asking for money for literature projects and a lot of it is going to be turned down. Love Europe, there's the thing I think right on the table was given to me today. They need money for literature. I've got written requests but I don't have the money and we know that the money is not the only thing when you have a literature project that you then got to get it printed and delivered and a few other things. So we don't just have this burden of reaching the millions with all that costs and all that involves but we have the burden to be partnership with the church, work with the church, supply them with literature, cassettes, books. It's not just like the old days we came along with books now we come with cassettes, video cassettes and a few other things thrown in. Your church also is crying out for evangelistic tools and India, which is our largest field as far as literature distribution, we've had the privilege of providing hundreds and hundreds of churches with literature. Some of them are more than happy to give it out but they've got to have it and it's amazing what can be done as we supply churches and individual missionaries. Exoemers are constantly wanting more literature to give out and then thirdly under this subsection sorry probably the notes are not very clear if you're trying to write things down is we are concerned about the physical needs of people and we want to be involved. Some of our own young people reared in this work all they're asking for is to go on OM. All they're asking for is to go on OM. Should we not have a scholarship fund, some money, whatever we call it, we don't have to announce it but we have to propagate it if it's even by word of mouth so that we can put our own young people. I mean we live in a culture where people in the secular world are paying tens of thousands. I know it's not so much in England as America. Tens of thousands that put their young people through college. Can we not trust God for the finance to give our young people an OM experience or help them through Bible college. We have an amazing number of OM teenagers now headed into Bible college or university or Christian college and it's put a lot of strain on parents. We have some cases where parents for 10 years were putting 80% of their money into the work. 80% into the work, 10% living on it, 20%. Now they're needing some money back because they've got children going to expensive universities and when they in some cases try to get any money they got, they ran into a brick wall. This is where sometimes Peter and I with special projects and other funds which are very limited try to come to the rescue and a lot of other interesting things are happening in OM because of pressure, increasing tendency for people to get wheeling and dealing to make money on the side. Some of which is acceptable. Some of which OM leaders are very naive and some of them are going to end up in court because I tell you a mix in business with full time Christian work has proven in the past to be very, very tricky. I know I launched a company in Bangkok with my friend Everett Lange and it didn't result too good personally. We did stay out of court. Some people can do it but it's not everybody's thing. And then the reality of the recession. I'm still under this main category the present need. Just giving some basic things about the present need. The reality of the recession, there's two R's you can remember, and it's effect on Christian work is awesome. Not just in terms of lack of money but in terms of pushing further apart the rich and the poor. So I can go to a particular city in the United States where they are raising $50 million for a building and where there's hundreds of Christians unemployed who are barely having food on the table because of course this particular church has 35-40 millionaires in the church. So for them to raise $20 million is not such. It's still hard work but it's not so difficult. The division even of wealth within the churches is quite amazing. In America wealthy people usually start with Episcopalians and then they're Presbyterians. Baptists are more middle and then you get out of the poor they're usually Pentecostals. That is a wide generalization which has changed significantly in the past 20 years. There's still a factor. It's amazing how many churches that we are involved in are just barely keeping up their own budget. Now how are we going to get good amounts of finance from churches that are not keeping up with their own budget and that includes their missionary budget. I could be full time just taking missions conferences in churches that think George Verwer is one of the keys to get their missions budget back on target. I go, preach my heart out. This Sunday I preached eight times in one Sunday. That's not the norm and basically, of course, OM isn't going to get much out of it because they're already 50% under in their budget and they've got existing people. It's not that they wouldn't like to give to us, but if they've got missionaries out there who they're having trouble supporting that has got to be priority. I'm just trying to learn how to communicate with these churches so that maybe we can have both. We can increase their budget, but that OM could come out with some money for the Muslim world. That's what I usually talk to these people about. It's interesting what they classify by the way as missions. In some churches it's another whole story. I thank God for the occasional time I'm still learning when I have the courage to ask, look, do you think you could take in the middle of this weekend one offer for operation mobilization in the Muslim world. Fortunately, occasionally they do take the initiative on this, but you'd be surprised how many times there's no way you're going to get the offering. The offering is for their program and what they're doing. You come in as a speaker, they'll give you your expenses, a little on top and you go your way. How do we get a little more honest, a little more open so that we can get some balance in this? I think I took what I felt was the more spiritual approach. Esteem the other organization, esteem the existing missionaries, just go in and praise the Lord you even have the privilege of preaching. Part of me is still there, but isn't there a better way? Can't we just be a little more open that though we have a burden for the whole work of God, we have a mandate from the Lord for Central Asia, for Turkey, for Afghanistan. We believe strongly in what we're doing and so we're not afraid to say, look we know this whole weekend is geared toward your own mission program, but do you think there's something that we could do for OM's work in the Muslim world? And I'm finding when I talk, quite good response. But if you don't say anything, often it's just bypassed. The reality of the recession especially hits us when we see key givers to OM out of work and unable to give anymore. We also are greatly affected by increasing numbers of people who gave to the work, financially supporting individuals, but through their contact with those individuals, they decide they want to become a missionary as well. This is happening all the time. I've never heard anyone even discuss this more than 15 minutes. What happens to a brother on the field who's supported largely by a person who now decides to go into ministry himself? Well, who makes up the difference? And this is why honesty and speaking about these things is so important. Now moving on to my fourth main point, if you're able to follow me, how do we respond? I've written here prayer and action, and that's a bit of a generalization, but it is my prayer that people are But this will not be one more 15 hour period of just talk because though you may be new to OM talking about this, some of us aren't. The hour has come, we've got to have action. And one of my burdens for this, and you can bounce this back, is that some of that action has to be men outside of OM and women taking the initiative without too much backup from us. We'll give the backup, but we're limited. At the Quinta we're limited, on my team we're limited, and is there a way that we can go forward in which we're giving, especially men who are in what the world calls the retirement sector, a few of you are in that, hardly retired from watching the way you're working and going at things, who could really be out there doing the job. And that has been my challenge to some of you, I have not challenged all of you personally about this, though I notice almost everybody here I have talked to about money in recent years, even Alec Gordon, I think I may have surprised Alec with some of our new views the last time I was up there, but he's pressing on, he's got so many irons in the fire, I'm not sure he can all count them, but we need a few people who are going to actually go out and do the work. What do I mean by that? Phoning people, sitting down with people and talking to them, because it's that personal contact that is the greatest need. Now we've got videos, we've got audios, we do have back up, we've got more literature about world missions than almost any group in the British Isles, we're handling the money properly, Mike Blight's going to make sure we continue to do that, but we don't have especially people who know how to talk to business people. It's not every O.M. that knows how to talk to a business person or even get an appointment, but if you've been in business, you know the language, you know how people think. Some of you have actually been in fundraising. Doug was major in that with the Louise Palau campaign. I think you both helped Louise Palau find his money and help those campaigns. So I just long that we'll go from here, even if we don't get full agreement about every detail, our time here is short, we'll go determined to do something. I'm very thankful that when we were talking about it for several years, my friend David Olst picked up the ball and organized a fundraising dinner, for lack of a better term, in Merseyside that I think went relatively well. It's still early days and our approach, even in any event like this, is always fairly conservative and laying foundations, building relationships, rather than coming down on them with self-addressed envelopes. So my prayer is that there will be a lot of prayer and action. I've written here, I believe the Holy Spirit wants to lead those of us committed to the right people at the right time and the right place. And my life is as exciting as it's ever been, even when I was a missionary in India, because the Holy Spirit just keeps leading me to the right person at the right time and the right place. I'm sitting on a plane, I get talking to the stewardess, or she heard, overheard a conversation, we befriend her, we say if you're ever in London, phone, she comes to visit us, now she's giving us free flight coupons to the United States. Now she has just retired from TWA, just gone bankrupt, and she's moved from Wheaton down to right next to Peachtree City and she's hinting on the phone, maybe we want her to work in the office. God, in the whole area that we're talking about, the Holy Spirit, if we're available, the Holy Spirit will guide us. But I believe we have to be motivated, we have to be available, and we have to be aiming. If we're only mainly aiming at recruits, we will only mainly get recruits. What can an organization do that gets recruits and doesn't get money? In fact, we're losing recruits all the time because we're so weak in finding the finance for the recruits. Do not go out any longer after this weekend, and we're also learning together, and say that the greatest need is for workers. Please do not say that anymore because it is workers and finance. We can't even finance the workers we have on OM, much less just go around and say, come all and sundry and join OM, especially families, the number of families that want to join OM right now. It's becoming quite an enormous burden. They all want to meet with you personally, don't they? They all want to talk. You can correct me on this, but nine out of ten is a dead end. It just doesn't work. Do you know how much time is consumed? People like us, it's very to get involved. I'm not asking any of you to do what I'm not already doing and want to do more of, but I can tell you what I can do is limited and also what we can do in partnership together is huge. For example, if you know anybody in the British Isles that is interested in giving finance to a land and for some weird reason wants to talk to George Burr, I will tell you that is no problem. You live in a small country because I'm ready to go the length of the whole country just to talk to one man who is willing or woman to put finance into the work of God. I flew to Vermont over Christmas for one meeting. That's ten thousand miles for one meeting and it's not for money, it's for recruits. See, recruits is still bigger in my own ministry than finance so I'm trying as you can guess to put it in balance. We've got literature, we've got now some tremendous videos, we've got, well I touched on the whole credibility, I don't want to repeat that again, tremendous prayer letters going out from La Quinta and other places and I just believe we've got the basics to really do something a lot greater in this area of releasing finance. I've just written a couple of other things, one is under this main four, how to respond, we've got to mobilize the laymen, it can't be done by all full time people. What happens in the states, they basically hire fundraisers. The fundraiser may be raising a hundred thousand and his salary is twenty five and they think that's doing pretty good. We've got people now fifty percent of the money is for the fundraising, fifty percent of the dollar fundraising, others it's twenty five percent. That's when they really analyze it properly, not play games, as some people do in their annual reports. I'm not even judging that. Finding finance for the work of God is so difficult. I'm not about to point fingers at anybody, but I think the example of Wycliffe Bible translators who launched Wycliffe Associates is a tremendous model that they mobilize the laymen, they give the laymen freedom, by the way Wycliffe is now more conservative than us, we just in the last general council passed them up. They're still arguing over it. What do I mean by that? I mean that we now through the last general council accept the terminology fundraising, though no one in OM is forced to go into it, right down to the individual in his prayer letter, and we accept that there are times and situations where there's nothing wrong by the guidance of the spirit to ask somebody for money. Now to tell you how good we're doing at that, I can assure you that we're doing very well because we've got a cloud over us of 30 years, but there is that freedom, and just to have that freedom has relaxed the movement and I'm just thrilled with it, but it's got its problems, as I'm sure you can understand. Anything we can think about, brainstorm about, to help us mobilize other people to find finance would be great. Someone already in our pre- discussions mentioned how the Bible Society seems to have their man or their woman in almost every church. What an incredible thing if a system like that could be worked out right across the country. I'm not saying we should do this. We had people who really were in there battling for finances. It would be exciting. Some wonderful things have been done here in Britain long before we even launched a new policy. There's very little that's new. Breakfast meetings, supper meetings, pastor's meetings, but in the midst of all the things we're attempting to do, it's impossible to keep all these things going, especially if we're limited to full-time staff. We've got to get the lay people mobilized. One of the things I'm most excited about is totally informal one-month notice. I go to somebody's house and he's brought 15 or 20 people. I just talked to Ken Taylor. I'm the founder of Tindale House on the phone three days ago. I said, Ken, I'm going to have one day in Chicago in the whole of 1992. I said, I want to come to your house. I wonder if you can bring some people in because Ken is happy about our new way of going. Will you bring some people in who you think might be interested in financing? At this point I had to explain to Ken, Ken, most of my meetings because of who I am seem to be with young people and in the area of recruiting. This meeting is the other side and I share some of my reasons including the fact that another major donor whose close friend just died on Friday, Peter Gunther, and that this meeting in his home is aimed at the other side, finding support for these young people. Why is it totally legitimate to have meetings for recruiting? It takes so many meetings for recruiting but it's not legitimate to have a meeting in which we are really looking for donors and prayer partners who will give. All kinds of meetings we can engage in the next 12 months in some experimentation. If there's a businessman who's busy, he only has an hour in Heathrow, that's me. Maybe one of you guys has a VIP lounge I think in Heathrow. Let's meet these people where we are. I tell you, I'm not big into food. I only need a little bit but I enjoy food. But I'll tell you, if I have to go to a really nice restaurant in central London to meet with somebody, I will do it. And I think as we do a little experimenting, as we try to understand a little more about where some of these people are, some of these people are who are holding all this money. I'm sorry to say that that is all there is of this recording.