April 4, 2013 Member Letter

April 4, 2013 

Dear Brethren,

By now you should have received your copy of our new booklet and a letter from our office here in Allen, Texas. If for some reason you have not received your booklet, please call the office at the number listed in the footer of this letter so we can get one out to you right away.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this first booklet on God’s plan and the holy days. Within this current year (2013), we are planning to produce several more booklets of this type to cover the core aspects of the truth (as well as many more articles we can offer as downloads from the website). All of them will be produced as e-booklets, but they will be print-ready so that we can easily have them printed and mailed. The greatest obstacle to printing more material isn’t the cost of printing itself, which is relatively inexpensive, but the cost of postage. Even using our nonprofit status, postage is still expensive. To print each 46-page, full-color booklet cost about 88 cents, but to mail it costs an additional $1.52 if sent first-class from the office or about 35 cents for the nonprofit bulk rate (which we used). The cost of postage will continue to be our biggest hurdle for distributing more literature.

We are convinced that printed material will become more important as new people make contact with us. On my recent trips to New England and South Florida for the spring holy days, I met two new couples who found us on the Internet a few months back and began attending services. One couple was looking for a group that kept the holy days, and the other had prior Church of God background from the 1990s. It was refreshing to see new people actually attending! I am reminded of the words of Christ to His disciples in John 4:35: “Lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already white for harvest!”

Having grown up on a cotton farm in northeastern Arkansas, when I read this verse I relate it to fields of cotton. At least that is the mental picture that comes to my mind. I realize that Christ was not talking about cotton fields, but it is easier for me to picture fields being “white for harvest” by thinking of harvesting cotton. If you have ever seen a cotton field that was ready for harvest, you know what I mean. I also found it interesting to think in terms of agriculture when considering the great spiritual harvest spoken of by Christ. The care and attention that must go into planting the seed, plowing the fields, weeding the crop and then harvesting the crop compare to the work that is necessary for new people to come into the Church.

Every step in the agricultural process must be carefully thought out and planned in order to have the best opportunity for a good crop. When I was growing up on the farm, we took great care in selecting the best cotton seed we could find. On our farm we often saved the best seed from the previous year to plant the next spring. We also took great care in the planting, to make sure we did not have any grass seed somehow mixed in with the cotton seed. Once the cotton began to sprout, we carefully weeded out plants that could get in the way of the developing cotton crop. We then plowed the field to loosen the soil and make growth possible. And if we received the necessary amount of rainfall during the growing season, the cotton would become truly white sometime in the fall of the year. Normally we finished the cotton harvest just in time to depart for the Feast of Tabernacles.

If you think about it, we have embarked on a similar process in the spiritual arena. When we began as a new organization in December of 2010, we had no tangible assets. There was no plan, and there were no funds. We couldn’t pay any salaries for several weeks. From the date of our beginning in December 2010, we have been convinced that to reach this world we must use the Internet. It was really the only affordable tool available to us.

We began building slowly and carefully. We wanted to measure our steps in developing the Internet as our primary medium for preaching the gospel. We launched a new website dedicated to preaching the gospel to the world (lifehopeandtruth.com) in June of 2012 at the international ministerial conference. It began slowly, with only 200 views in the first few days, mostly from the ministry gathered for the conference in Dallas. Now, after 10 short months, we are seeing thousands visit our site to see what we have to offer, and the numbers are growing monthly.

We have added hundreds of short articles. We believe that when writing to an Internet audience, you must keep your material relevant and short. We have added dozens of short video commentaries on biblical and social themes. We have also begun using Google advertising to bring more people to targeted pages on our site. As we continue to grow, it is our fervent prayer that God will call new people and that He will use us in “bringing many sons to glory” (Hebrews 2:10).

It is humbling to see a world with a population of over 7 billion and compare that number to the size of the Church today. How many will God yet call? We simply don’t know. What impact will we have on this world? The honest answer is that we don’t know exactly what our impact will be. It is truly in God’s hands. What we can do is pray that God will help us be the type of people that He can use—people filled with humility instead of arrogance, men who are yielded to God and not interested in titles or position. And as a Church, we should pray for more laborers (Matthew 9:38) and more opportunities to preach the true gospel of God’s Kingdom.

Our plan is to reach the world primarily over the Internet, but we will not abandon the “old-fashioned” methods of booklets and magazines nor will we ignore other media opportunities. We are committed to being careful but not fearful. We will live within our financial means and promote the work of God at every opportunity. And we will pray for God to open new doors for us, according to His will.

The holy day offerings during the just completed Feast of Unleavened Bread were very good, with an increase over last year. Thank you so much for your generous support!

Sincerely, your brother in Christ,

Jim Franks