—MOJanuary, 1976DFO—No.382

Copyrighted Feb. 1976 by The Children of God

Dear Children, Family and Friends:

1. HAPPY NEW YEAR'S GREETINGS in Jesus' Precious Name!—And it will indeed be a happy New Year if we continue to do as well as we did last year!—And we're expecting you to do even better, God willing—and I'm sure He's willing if you are!—Amen?

2. FOR 1975 WAS INDEED A RECORD YEAR according to the latest stats which have just come to me in record time—only three weeks from the end of December! Thanks for your tremendous help, cooperation and promptness in spite of some last minute changes in addresses‚ administration and mailing procedures. If you do this well on such short notice, how much better we're going to be doing as we become adjusted to these new changes! God bless you and thanks so much for your continued faithfulness and loyal support and obedience to His Word!

3. WE NOW HAVE 725 COLONIES IN NEARLY 70 COUNTRIES AROUND THE GLOBE! PTL!—Thanks to your faithful obedience to His Word in "forsaking all" to follow Him to become "fishers of men" and going "into all the world to preach the Gospel to every creature"! Looking at our new and smaller and more scattered Colonies, our enemies say we are "falling apart" and our "organisation is crumbling"—Ha!—If so, I wish every Christian domination or church would fall apart and crumble as ours has "into all the world unto every creature"!—Amen?

4. WE NOW HAVE MORE MEMBERS THAN EVER BEFORE‚ 4,598—4‚215 fulltime missionaries plus 383 catacombs missionaries who are underage so that they can't leave their families for schools, and some who are still bound by jobs and family obligations and others who are actually in prison or the military. But these catacombs disciples are some of the liveliest and most on-fire witnesses that we have, setting their families, schools‚ offices, factories and prisons and military camps on fire with the Gospel, the Good News of God's Love in Jesus!

5. FROM NOW ON WE WILL COUNT AS CATACOMBS DISCIPLES ANYONE WHO RECEIVES AND DISTRIBUTES OUR LITERATURE AND REPORTS THEIR STATS AND RESULTS TO US OR THEIR LOCAL COLONY although they cannot yet live in one of our Colonies full time. Although Jesus had only 12 to 70 fulltime Disciples who followed Him around almost continuously‚ He had many thousands of others who received His Words and believed and spread them to others, including a great company of the priests and many secret believers amongst the Jews. His fulltime Disciples were His above-ground Church, while His part-time Disciples were His underground Church reaching many that the fulltime Disciples could not reach and with more far reaching results and indigenous permanency.

6. WHEN THE FULLTIME DISCIPLES WERE FORCED TO MOVE ON BY PERSECUTION or were even martyred, the underground catacombs Church took over and carried on where the others could not, and the work continued to grow, even as it has with us. Where our fulltime Colonists have been forced out and their witnessing and litnessing forbidden, our Catacombs Disciples have carried on with even greater results than ever before and more outstanding miracles of God's blessing and protection!

7. TO US, THESE UNDERGROUND CATACOMBS DISCIPLES ARE ONE OF THE GREATEST HOPES FOR THE FUTURE OF HIS CHURCH—The Children of God in every tongue, tribe and nation throughout the world‚ more than our Colonies could ever contain! It is therefore a disappointment to us to see how few of these you have been winning to His Cause‚ and we are sure that some of you are forgetting to count them in your statistics as you should on the new simplified Report Form.

8. REMEMBER: A CATACOMBS DISCIPLE IS ANYONE WHO RECEIVES AND DISTRIBUTES OUR LITERATURE AND REPORTS the results or their activities to you or us in any form, whether by word of mouth, testimony, letter or actual Report Form—young or old, family or friends, every follower of our teaching is a disciple!

9. THE NEW BRIEF AND SIMPLE REPORT FORMS ARE ALREADY REAPING TREMENDOUS RESULTS AND STATS and we couldn't have made some of these recent changes so easily without them! They've helped you to remember many items which you otherwise might have forgotten, such as credit for your Catacombs Disciples, and speeded up your reporting, so that most of your reports were in by the 10th of the following month and your stats actually in my hands within another 10 days! This is a phenomenal record thanks to you and the Lord and the new reporting system, and so much better than the two months it used to take! Praise God! Thank You Jesus!—And God bless you!

10. JUST PLEASE REMEMBER THAT CATACOMBS DISCIPLES DO NOT HAVE TO MEET COLONY REQUIREMENTS such as size, new disciples, giving, lit quotas, etc. But they do count on your own new disciple minimum quota‚ and the lit they distribute counts also toward your own colony minimum lit quota, if they report directly to you and not separately to us. So win those Catacombs Disciples: —They're a help to you and the hope of the future of your work in that area after you're gone!

11. I'M SURE WE'RE GOING TO BE HEARING OF BETTER RESULTS IN WINNING CATACOMBS DISCIPLES‚ these new bottles of the future! From now on, I'd like to see recognition made in every NNN of the Colonies with and winning the greatest numbers of Catacombs Disciples along with those Colonies gaining the greatest numbers of live-in disciples—Amen? So there's the challenge!—Go to it! God bless you! (Just remember we can only give them GP & DFO Letters because of security.—Any others you think good for them they'll have to read or be read at the Colony only—under supervision—Thanks.)

12. THE NNN (GOD BLESS THE ZEEZ!) IS TO CONTINUE TO BE OUR EXCITING BI-WEEKLY NEWS MAGAZINE coming out every two weeks with all the latest thrilling testimonies and startling statistics and those beautiful pictures of the joy of Jesus on the faces of those of every language and nationality! There was apparently some misunderstanding amidst the new moves and changes, and we note the NNN has only been coming out once a month although enlarged with even more news and better illustrated and classified. But we'd like to see it come out in the same size and format at least every two weeks until we're able to make it weekly wouldn't we?—Amen? So don't wait for your monthly report to send in those news items and pictures—we need them now for that mid monthly edition!

13. OUR MONTHLY LITERATURE DISTRIBUTION IS STILL HOVERING AROUND THE 5-MILLION MARK!—And our total worldwide witness at close to half a billion for the month of December alone, the highest in our history! As a result, we're still winning over 40, 000 converts per month and making a steady gain of nearly 200 fulltime workers per month, most of them men but over a third of them women, plus nearly 600 couples with nearly 800 children!

14. THE VAST MAJORITY OF OUR POPULATION NOW LIVE OUTSIDE DANGEROUS NORTH AMERICA with over 4/5 of us scattered all over the world! But that 1/5 of us who still live in doomed North America greatly concerns us, and the Lord has given us many warning messages for you to get out within the past few months. In fact‚ He has been warning us to get out of doomed America for ten years and particularly for the past five, and I believe these are His last warnings recently, so you are without excuse!

15. WE APPRECIATE YOUR FAITHFULNESS‚ NORTH AMERICANS, YOUR RECORD STATS AND GIVING‚ BUT YOU ARE IN GRAVE DANGER! We'd rather lose some of those stats and support than lose you! We need you to help us win the rest of the world. North America has had more than its share of our witness for many years‚ and there are many indications they are not going to be willing to receive it much longer. Please get out and join us now while you still can and help us reach the rest of the world with the Gospel of His Love.—"Why will ye die, O Jerusalem!"

16. YOU STILL REMAINING IN ENGLAND ARE ALSO IN GRAVE DANGER! We have been warning you to get out now for over two years! We have saturated England with our doctrine, passed our days of popularity, reaped the peak of our harvest there and there is now a rising tide of vicious persecution making it very difficult for us to litness or witness or even remain in the country.

17. SO WE BELIEVE THAT IT IS PAST TIME TO GET OUT AND LEAVE ENGLAND TO HER FATE for rejecting the words of the Lord, like her ugly sister, the United States! Both will be prime targets for the bombs in the soon-coming most devastating war in all history, and there is no need for you to waste your lives any longer on a people who don't want to hear what we have to say!

18. WE NEED YOU, NORTH AMERICANS AND BRITONS IN SO MANY OTHER COUNTRIES WHERE THEY ARE BEGGING FOR HELP, glad to see us come, and where they receive the Word with joy and the harvest truly is plenteous but the labourers are so few! Why waste any more time or effort—much less your life!—on areas so saturated with the Word, so indifferent, so unresponsive and even so hostile, when there are so many other areas praying for you to come over and help them! What excuse are you going to give us and God for your continued disobedience? Will we have to reclassify you as Associates to persuade you to obey and to protect the security of God's Work? Please come now!

19. WHY NOT MOVE FURTHER SOUTHWARD AND EASTWARD NOW WHERE IT IS SO MUCH WARMER AND FRIENDLIER AND CHEAPER TO LIVE AND HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS MORE ARE WAITING TO HEAR HIS WORDS OF LOVE! The doors are open by the thousands and you'd be so much happier obeying His and our commands to go into all the world! We know it's hard to move—we do it frequently—but it's worth it!—A new fresh field, new friends, new scenes, new fruits and new horizons!

20. WHY NOT LEAVE NOW DURING THESE COLD WINTER MONTHS THERE IN THE NORTH? It's summertime in South America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand and always Summer in the Tropics of Central America‚ the West Indies, Central Africa‚ Southern India, Southeast Asia, the East Indies and the tropical islands of the Pacific!

21. WHAT A LIFE!—THE KIND YOU ALWAYS DREAMED OF IN THE TROPICAL CLIMATES YOU ALWAYS LONGED FOR IN THE MOST EXOTIC PLACES YOU COULD POSSIBLY IMAGINE WITH THE SIMPLEST, FRIENDLIEST PEOPLE YOU'LL EVER WANT TO MEET! You can't beat it! There's nothing like obeying! "Go ye into all the world" and these are some of the most neglected parts of the world who have been begging for your help for years! Just remember that some of them are so dangerous where litnessing is forbidden, so look before you leap!

22. GO TO THOSE AREAS WHERE YOU KNOW THE DOORS ARE OPEN AND THEY'RE BEGGING FOR LABOURERS! You've seen and read about them in the NNN and Far Flung Fields and even the Pub Bulletin (easy newsy reading now!) and their own local pubs. Let them know you're coming if you can, and bring as much financial help with you as you can‚ as most of these are very poor areas which are not even self-supporting and need money for printing lit which they almost have to give away.

23. BUT IT DOESN'T COST MUCH TO LIVE IN MOST OF THESE WARM TROPICAL COUNTRIES where you need no heat, no heavy clothing‚ not much food and very little shelter. So why not go native like the other 2/3 of the world and enjoy life in a climate created for man to exist, with as little effort as necessary?

24. SOME OF THESE FIELDS ARE EXPLODING RIGHT NOW AND BEGGING FOR HELPERS! So why not now while litnessing is difficult in the frozen North? Ask your Shepherd about it. Maybe your whole Colony could move together! Just be sure you've got your fare and plenty of landing money and some idea of where to land! Don't expect the local Colony to always be able to take care of you. Small hotels and hostels are usually very cheap in those poor areas, and if litnessing is allowed, you can soon be on your own if you have lit in the language!

25. DON'T FORGET, YOU MAY HAVE TO LEARN A FEW WORDS FROM THE NATIVES, but it'll warm their hearts to hear you try, so don't get discouraged. After our first few weeks in our first foreign country we nearly gave up, but we soon began to pick up enough to get by and win their hearts with their help, and now we're thankful we didn't quit too soon. So if at first you don't succeed, keep on sucking until you do! You'll be amazed at what even those few golden seeds you absorb, will do for you in a strange land! Praise God!

26. THANK GOD YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO STACK UP ANY BIG DEBTS IN THOSE POOR COUNTRIES as we have been astonished that some of you have for your lit printing in the rich frozen North! This is strictly against the rules and very offensive to us‚ especially when some of you have done it to increase your stats while not paying your bills in spite of your good income! No wonder we've had to make some drastic recent changes in the administration of some areas, particularly in some of those bragging of the best lit stats, such as Northern Europe and North America. May God help you never to do this sort of thing again!

27. UNPAID BILLS ARE THE WORST KIND OF WITNESS and no credit to any officer or Colony‚ and any such officers or Colonies, whoever they are, should be put back on the streets themselves at fulltime litnessing until they're paid, and never again be given such a position where they can run up debts in our name! This is absolutely forbidden! Pay as you go!

28. THE POPULATION OF THE AVERAGE COLONY IS NOW DOWN TO ABOUT SIX‚ which is just about perfect! You can fit six in almost anywhere in normal family housing without attracting a lot of undue attention or making yourselves a neighborhood nuisance‚ and six adults can easily support that small a Colony with even a minimum of litnessing as well as effectively reach almost any size community if they are diligent and faithful. So thank the Lord for your obedience in this regard as well.

28. A YEAR OF ANTI-BLOB LETTERS AND A YEAR OF THE NEW REVOLUTION HAVE SMASHED THE OLD BLOBS TO BITS AND SCATTERED YOU THROUGHOUT THE WORLD IN OVER THREE TIMES AS MANY COLONIES as at the beginning of our Anti-Blob Campaign, so both have paid off, thank God! In fact, we now nearly 20 times as many Colonies as we had only five years ago with only three times as many disciples! That, Beloved, is real decentralisation and scatteration, thank God!

29. IN SIX YEARS WE HAVE GROWN FROM TWO BLOBS OF ABOUT 250 EACH INTO 725 COLONIES OF AN AVERAGE IDEAL SIX EACH! I would consider that quite an accomplishment, thanks to you and the Lord and my constant insistence that you obey His Word!—And as a result we are litnessing more and wining more and growing more and witnessing more in more places than ever before! If this is "falling apart and crumbling", for God's sake let's keep it up!—Amen?

30. IN THE LAST ONE YEAR OF 1975 ALONE OUR POPULATION INCREASED 53% AS OUR COLONIES TRIPLED IN THAT ONE YEAR! Has it paid to break up the Blobs and scatter? We more than halved the average Colony size in that one year alone! As a direct result, our net gain of over 2000 disciples in one year is our highest on record! Our total witness was also half again as much as the previous year and is now over eight billion, or more than twice the population of the Earth which means a lot of people are hearing more than their share when others have heard very little! Let's quit repeating! Go now!—Amen?

31. OUR TOTAL LIT DISTRIBUTION IN 1975 WAS NEARLY 60 MILLION—A CIRCULATION OF OVER A MILLION A WEEK! This is nearly three times as much as five years ago, with the biggest jump in '74 and a steady increase in '75, which we believe will be topped by the new quotas in '76!

32. THE NUMBER OF NEW CONVERTS IN '75 SKYROCKETED TO OVER 377 THOUSAND!—Five times as many as the year before and more than all the previous five years combined! That's the payoff! That's the kind of results we like to hear! That's what it's all about!—Amen? I'd like to see any other church or denomination top that! In fact‚ they can't because they're nearly all losing members‚ including the biggest churches in the world like the Catholics and the Methodists, and only the little upstarts like the Seventh-day Adventists, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and us are really gaining!

33. EVEN OUR PRESENT BIRTH RATE IS EXPLODING WITH ABOUT 258 IN '75 more than double those of '73 and '72! Doubling every two years, what'll it be in '77?—Over 500 that year or a total of 1500 in seven years? That is a baby boom, Brother! Keep at it! At this rate can you imagine what our other stats will be by then?—

34. THOUSANDS OF COLONIES WITH TENS OF THOUSANDS OF MEMBERS "IN ALL THE WORLD"! Hallelujah!—And millions of disciples or followers—amen?—God willing!—And I'm sure He is if you are! That's our goal to reach the whole world before Jesus comes! Are you willing to try? Then leave that comfortable rut you're in and strike out into brand new fields that never saw our lit before!

35. BUT YOU'D BETTER HURRY!—Untouched new fields are getting harder and harder to find!—So start today! Get on your way!—And it will pay—on the Milky Way! God bless and keep you all and continue to make you a blessing to millions!—And thanks for all those thoughtful cards and helpful gifts you sent to help make it all possible!—We love you!—Your M&M!

Copyright (c) 1998 by The Family