Co-Worker Letter – April 25, 1985

I am sending to you this letter ahead of the semiannual letter I send out to all subscribers to The PLAIN TRUTH – several million of them.

I want to bring you up-to-date on the progress of God’s Work which you are helping us to carry on.

Since the first of the year we have been breaking all records in responses to the television broadcast. Six times since the beginning of the year more than SEVENTEEN THOUSAND telephone calls have come in from a single broadcast. It requires 500 telephone operators each weekend, most of these brethren are volunteers, to answer those thousands of calls.

I have been working since the first of the year on the new book Mystery of the Ages. Writing, updating, and re-editing of the book was completed yesterday, and it is now in the hands of the printers. Complete copies will be ready, God willing, by or before the Feast of Tabernacles, and I hope you may obtain your copy at the Feast. It is the largest, and I believe the most important, book I have written.

Our ministers are being swamped with calls for counseling about baptism by prospective new members. This is becoming a problem, because as Jesus said, the harvest is plenteous, but the laborers are few. We now have 583 ordained ministers worldwide serving full time, but they are much overworked. Mr. Tkach says there is an urgent need for money to put more ministers on the payroll, but Mr. Neff our treasurer says that either the co-laborers who supply the money through God’s tithes and their special offerings are too few, or are not sending in enough.

The income percentage increase is not keeping up so far this year as well as last year.

I have always said that God causes the income to come in according to how well we please him in our personal and collective lives. This indicates we need to pray more often and more fervently, and check up on ourselves as we should have done at Passover time to see if we are progressing in our Christian lives, and keeping close enough to God.

I know you will take this to heart and pray urgently.