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February 21, 1952
Dear Family of Co-Workers:
GREETINGS, again, to you all, in Jesus' name, from your
pastor and fellow co-worker, called by will of God to be used in
the most important work on earth.
The great work of God IS AT THE CROSS-ROADS! It's my
duty to tell you the true FACTS! We have reached the supreme
crisis of the entire history of this tremendous activity. Either
this mighty work of God must launch out greater, in multiplied
power and scope, from this moment---or it must sink back, and
down,---and OUT! WE HAVE REACHED THE SUPREME TURNING POINT!
So listen! What I have to say to you now is of greatest
importance. The great final Mission of God on earth cannot stand
still. Nothing God does stands still. God causes trees to grow.
But a tree must grow, or it must die. God Himself is dynamic,
energized, moving, all powerful! If this is His work---and it is,
---then you and I are mere instruments in His hands. We are the
work of His hands. He works in and through us. He, the Great
Power that works thru us, then, is vital, dynamic, fully energized,
active mightily!
For more than 18 years this work has grown, and grown,
and GROWN! It has met every opposition, obstacle, discouragement,
and set-back. But always God delivered His work, hurled it on
forward with increased power, enlarged it to ever-widening fields
of service and influence.
Last fall, we more than doubled the power of the radio
broadcast. All thru the fall and winter we have been reaching
perhaps twice as many people with GOD'S MESSAGE as ever before---
the MOST POWERFUL TRUE GOSPEL PROGRAM OF WORLD HISTORY, reaching
some 12 to 15 millions of people every week!
Now we are facing spring. Soon radio waves will not
carry out so far or so clear or plain. The mail from new listeners
will begin to drop. This past fall and winter it has been a day-
to-day, and week-by-week struggle to hold our heads above water,
meet the enlarged expenses of this mighty program, and keep the
work alive. NOW COMES THE BIG TEST! We dare not turn back!
Instead we have reached the point where the work now must LEAP on
past the boundaries of the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
WE MUST NOW BEGIN TO LAY DEFINITE PLANS TO CARRY THE TRUE
GOSPEL IN ASTONISHING POWER TO EUROPE, BRITAIN, and then on to
other parts of the world! We can, ---we MUST, ---WE WILL! --in and
thru the power of God operating in us! Plans are being laid to
send two of our graduate students to England, Europe, and the Holy
Land this summer, to lay advance plans, and to obtain necessary
information. They are Herman Hoeh, executive editor of The GOOD
NEWS, whose many splendid articles you have read, and my son
Richard David Armstrong. Dick, as we call him, has studied French
eight years and speaks it like a native Frenchman. Mr. Hoeh speaks
and teaches, German; and he also speaks both Spanish and French.
These are both talented and able men, now college graduates, and
Mr. Hoeh will have earned his Masters' degree before leaving.
To lay plans for the enlargement of the work, they will
see and discuss matters with men whose acquaintance I have made in
the British Foreign and Colonial offices, and top government
officials of Arabian and Syrian governments whom I know. They will
study conditions in Europe, Germany, Italy, Palestine, the Near-
East. They will seek, and I know they have ability to obtain,
inside information and facts about this "BEAST" power in Europe
which you never read in newspapers or hear in newscasts.
Plans are being made to put one or both of these men ON
THE AIR in Europe, on a station reaching ALL EUROPE, as powerfully
as XEG, XELO, or XERF reach all America! Between them they speak
English, French, German, Spanish. They can reach 80% of all
Europe! My son has my radio voice. You'll be hearing him on the
program a little later. Mr. Hoeh has already had experience
preaching over the radio, and he, too, will soon begin to appear
with me on The WORLD TOMORROW program. Other equally fine,
talented men are coming along in the college, soon to be out there
in the firing line in our GREATLY ENLARGED WORLD-WIDE CAMPAIGN!
Thru Ambassador College God has been training for nearly
five years the most unusual group of consecrated, Spirit-led,
talented young men in the world. I have no hesitancy in saying
that, and all who have come to know then have the same conviction
---there is just NO GROUP OF YOUNG PEOPLE LIKE THEM! And that
statement goes for the fine young ladies in college, as well as the
men! Often people, in astonishment, ask me, "How on earth did you
manage to get such students?" I merely reply, "GOD SENT THEM."
Just at that point I was interrupted by a long distance
telephone call. A man wanted to come to Pasadena tomorrow to be
baptized. By the HUNDREDS people are being converted thru this
program, their lives completely CHANGED, given to God, taken over
and lived by HIM. Co-Workers, THE MONEY YOU SUPPLY makes this
possible! Yes, precious souls receiving eternal LIFE as God's gift
thru Christ, FOR ALL ETERNITY! The dollars you place here are
working harder, going farther, accomplishing more, producing more
PERMANENT benefits than any other places those dollars could go!
Let's praise God for the opportunity---and the PRIVILEGE!
ANOTHER THING! May I take you into my confidence! May
I let you in on a secret? WHY is it that people are always so much
interested in romance, and young people falling in love and getting
married? Well, two of our fine young men have found their wives
already here at the college, and I did announce some days ago over
the air the engagement of "our Betty," as we call herMiss Betty
Bates, the first student to enroll, and the first to graduate and
receive a degree, from Ambassador College, to Mr. Gene Michel of
St. Louis, one of our fine upper-class students. And,
confidentially, just between you and me, I suspect there will be
more and more such engagements announces as the months and years go
by. I tell you truly, I had no thought of this sort of thing in
starting the school, but it seems just natural that it's happening.
Girls come here to college, and in almost no time they say to me,
"Why Mr. Armstrong, I never knew boys like these before. The
fellows I had dates with back home weren't like these. Back there
they just wanted to seek entertainment or necking (as young people
call it today). But these fellows are intelligent, make a girl
carry on an intellectual or spiritual conversation, spend a date in
a sparkling, interesting time really learning something and
improving our minds."
The fellows tell me they never met such girls. The girls
back home wanted fellows to spend a lot of money on them in
amusements, and if they didn't put their arms around the girls and
start kissing on the first date, the girl would make a lunge for
them or drop them, and seemed never able to keep up their end of an
intelligent conversation. As one girl student remarked to me about
a certain very intellectual male student and the girl he was
dating, "He certainly has met his match in her she can keep up
her end of any subject he wishes to discuss."
Don't think by that our students are four-eyed book-worms
or proverbial intellectuals. They are just normal, He-men, and
feminine girls, and they like fun as much as anyone but they
realize what life is all about, they feel a sense of MISSION in the
world. I think they realize God has called them and feel the
responsibility, and they plan their fun in a way to IMPROVE mind,
body, spirit, not destroy it. When a fellow like that meets a girl
like that, and each has that "something" that attracts the other
and leads to love well, dear Co-Workers, we here see GOD'S HAND
IN IT, and that God is bringing it all about.
Now that brings me to what I want to say.
THIS IS IMPORTANT! Many of our girl students, I'm
beginning to realize, are going to become minister' wives. Now
that's entirely DIFFERENT from being the wife of a farmer, a
mechanic, a doctor, lawyer, merchant, laborer, or clerk. A
minister's wife is PART OF HER HUSBAND'S MINISTRY. Mrs. Armstrong
has always been a very definite PART of this ministry, from the
first. It was thru her God called me in the first place. If she
had not had just the right personality, just the right abilities,
the depth of character, the insight and understanding, the
judgment, the complete yieldedness to God and His Spirit and His
leading to hold up her part of this work, so that we could work
together as a perfect harmonious team, my part of the work could
never have been accomplished. We have been instruments, TOGETHER,
in the hands of God these many years.
I have know many ministers whom God could not, did not,
use, because of unfit wives! The training of these girls is JUST
AS IMPORTANT IN AMBASSADOR COLLEGE AS THE TRAINING OF THESE FINE
YOUNG MEN!
We MUST add now the long hoped-for Course in DOMESTIC
SCIENCE. (I prefer that name, rather than Home Economics we want
to teach the real science of being a wife and making a home).
Look at the condition in the world today. Most girls
today receive no training at all to really fit them to be competent
wives and mothers to be their husband's HELPERS, to know how to
inspire, encourage their husbands, lift their morale to the heights
of supreme accomplishments; few know how to really make a HOME,
how to keep a house, how to plan menus according to dietary laws of
health, how to cook NATURAL foods in delicious, appetizing, eye-
tempting manner, how to properly decorate and plan and keep the
home. They know nothing of child bearing, and the care of babies,
and the rearing of children and the teaching of children. They
seem to feel these things will somehow "just come natural." Well,
they don't. Today girls want to work in offices, stores, and such
places not in the homes.
WE MUST TRAIN OUR GIRLS TO BE HOME-MAKERS, inspirational
wives, competent mothers.
That's going to add to the expense of the college. But
Co-Workers, in sheer FAITH, I propose now to plunge on into this,
for I know it's the will of God. I am taking steps to try to find
the most competent woman in the United States for this position, to
head this department. I think possibly one or two of our own girls
will work into this faculty after another two or more years, but
none is ready yet.
FINALLY and MOST IMPORTANT! It is a struggle, daily,
to meet our daily quota of money to pay the expenses of this great
and mighty work. We have effected such economies we have learned
how to make a dollar go SO FAR, that every single dollar put into
this work is carrying the same Gospel Jesus preached, for the first
time in 1800 years, to MORE than TWO THOUSAND PRECIOUS SOULS!
Where in all the world does a dollar go so FAR! Where does it do
so much GOOD?
Post-cards are now 2¢. Figure what it would cost you to
write just a few words on post-cards to 2,000 different people! It
would cost you $40, beside all the time and effort---about 50
words. But for each single dollar you place in this work, more
than TWO THOUSAND people listen a solid HALF HOUR to Jesus' Gospel!
Put it another way. For $1 you can buy 50 post-cards,
and send maybe 50 words to 50 people. The same dollar in this work
reaches FORTY TIMES as many people, a whole HALF HOUR! And, in
addition, several of those 2,000 receive and read The GOOD NEWS and
The PLAIN TRUTH, other booklets and literature, the college is
operated and maintained, and hundreds a year are visited in person,
counselled with, and baptized! But it's hard to keep ENOUGH of
those dollars coming in, day by day, week by week.
Listen! Couldn't YOU send in your tithes and offerings
a little more often? Couldn't you now manage your affairs so you
could start sending in LARGER AMOUNTS than you have been? We are
entering our real period of TEST. The question now is whether,
with the days growing longer and radio reaching out a little
poorer, we can keep enough dollars coming in each day to keep us on
the air!
We DARE not slacken, or drop back. Instead, the work now
must LEAP ON AHEAD, increasing gradually and steadily in power. We
do not plan to actually begin broadcasting in Europe this year
just now laying preliminary plans, which must be made far in
advance. But, God willing, we do hope to open the campaign in
Europe full blast by NEXT year!
Yes, dear Co-Workers, the work now needs more money. It
faces a supreme test the great crisis of its history so far. We
won't expand it too rapidly. But it must keep GOING, and growing!
THAT IS YOUR PART, WHICH GOD LAYS ON YOU! Pray earnestly over it.
See if you can't find a way to send in a really LARGE amount. See
if you can't increase your regular offerings. GOD WILL BLESS YOU!
You are thereby LAYING UP TREASURE IN HEAVEN, for all eternity!
You are helping SAVE PRECIOUS LIVES FOR ETERNITY! You
are helping CHANGE THE WORLD! Yes, you have your partÄÄyour
responsibility! God bless you, I know you'll be willing to make
the sacrifice for Christ to do your utmost!
Sincerely, and URGENTLY, in Jesus' name,
Herbert W. Armstrong
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