November 1977 - February 1978
God's Arithmetic
One month after our down payment deadline, we were still on the mountain top, rejoicing in God's miracle, confident that the road ahead would be smooth. God's miracle power on our behalf was reconfirmed when a $25,000 check came in from a church in Tennessee. We used it immediately to start paying back our loans.
Then, all of a sudden we descended into the valley, so to speak. In reality, it was dry wilderness where nothing seemed to change.
It was hard even to remember that we were supposedly the campus owners — at least on our way to being so — because the main part of the campus was still off limits to us. Women in pastel colored robes and men in light blue suits still roamed the grounds or sat glassy-eyed on its lawns, palms up, as they chanted to a "sea of energy in the cosmos." Summit's lease, signed before we had begun negotiating for the property, gave them still another year. It would not expire until July 31st, 1978, just a month before the remainder of our down payment was due.
On our side of the street we occupied the same rooms; we didn't even have enough money to rent more office space. Everything was the same except the volume of mail!
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Back in September we had received a huge stack of letters and thousands of dollars every day. Now, two months later, only a trickle came in. We had millions yet to pay Point Loma besides the three $100,000 loans. Everyone, it seemed, assumed that our crisis was past, and the giving stopped. The well was dry. Confused and weary, most of us felt dry also. It helped to remember that Elijah felt the same way after his major victory on Mt. Carmel (1 Kings 19:4).
Then, too, it seemed as if Satan was attacking us on all fronts — using anything that would discourage, distress or divide us. Ralph's diary (and mine) recorded various struggles — over finances, management decisions, staff assignments. Sometimes the hardest things to bear were the cutting words of associates and friends. Ralph wrote in his diary, "Oh God, I feel more lonely in this project than ever!"
Over and over again, well wishers would send professional fund raisers to see us. One of them chided him: "You're crazy to try to start big. Everyone knows you have to start small." Ralph commented in his diary: "He told us, essentially, that we cannot do what we are doing. It was not very encouraging." And he added, "I wonder what Hudson Taylor felt like?"
Our project was a challenge to these fund raisers. They were not accustomed to raising millions of dollars for an organization that had essentially no mailing list. Worse still in their eyes, Ralph insisted that we had to do things in such a way that it would not put us in competition for funds with our chief "clients" — the mission agencies. "Many feel there is only a certain size pie of available money," he told them. "It is not surprising if they're afraid that more organizations will mean smaller pieces of pie for everyone. But we're determined not to raid their sources of income. Rather, we want to enlarge the pie by increasing the number of people actively supporting mission agencies. We are here to help them, not hurt them."
"The main reason mission agencies have trouble getting
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the funds they need," he told our staff later, "is that the churches have basically lost interest in missions. Oh, they may have a missions conference once a year, or maybe even a week of missions. But the missions committee is the only group really concerned, and all too often they spend their time figuring out how to raise and spend their budget rather than praying and strategizing how to win the world for Christ."
"If we are ever to reach the two and a half billion unreached in our world, this has to change. The American church desperately needs a renewal of mission vision. At least a million of the forty million American Evangelicals must catch this vision."
A million evangelicals!
A million square feet of property!
Fifteen million dollars!
I can't say it came as a flash of light, but the day we idly worked out the arithmetic, we were astounded. Could this be God's way for us — a way where we could raise the money without competing with the mission agencies?
We set aside January through March to pray about limiting ourselves to asking each donor for only $15 apiece. To do so seemed suicidal when we needed millions. Everyone told us so. And yet it met all the criteria which we felt God had given us.
We remembered that a hundred years ago when he started the China Inland Mission, Hudson Taylor, aware of the anxieties of existing missions, had felt that God didn't want him to ask for any money at all. Yet God had supplied his needs. On the other hand, there were far more examples of wonderful Christian leaders who asked for large sums of money, and God honored them too. What did God want us to do? That was the question.
The more we prayed about it, the more we became convinced that God did want us to honor the agencies by not competing with them, and to also honor Him by truly trusting Him to provide.
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By following the small gift approach, we wouldn't be a threat to the agencies. We could be forced to reach out to thousands and thousands of people, thereby spreading the vision of unreached peoples far and wide. By so doing we would help the agencies as well as, hopefully, survive as an institution.
But how do you reach out to a million people with a vision they do not possess and may not think they need? If we were truly hearing God's voice in this decision, then He would have to lead, we told ourselves. But we sensed that our faith would be sorely tested again and again before we were through.
