What’s Happening?

This month we determined it would be timely to inform you what our work entails in some detail.

Firstly, we are pastoring the Baptist Church of Waskish, Minnesota.

A typical service will have ten or twelve people present. They love our music, so we always do two special numbers. Usually, Lorraine does a trumpet solo, in which I accompany her on guitar. Then I do a solo, singing with my guitar. Next Lorraine reads part of a psalm while I play guitar softly in the background.

Lorraine has introduced a short time for the children. We have four young children; the oldest is eight. She does a short Bible story with pictures to be colored. Then each child gets their own box of crayons with the pictures.

Then I bring the message, whatever the Lord has told me to preach. Lorraine says my messages are unique because I include stories of my experiences in ministry, reaching 40,000 people through outreach events and stories of living by faith, God providing money at the last minute.

We are informal. Members of the congregation pipe up with a comment during my message. Occasionally, with visitors our attendance reaches up to 24.

ON THE AIR

A few years ago, the Lord asked me to go on the radio with stories of “great Christians from our past.” We have now launched on Q107 out of Bemidji, Minnesota and Grand Forks, North Dakota. This last week was our seventh week on the air.

I am on every week-day with a two-minute segment. Each week features a new “great Christian from our past.” So far, we have covered F.F Bosworth, Oswald Chambers, George Washington Carver, John Newton, St. Patrick, and Father Daniel Nash.

You can listen by googling “Your QFM” and choosing “listen live.” We are on about 2:35 each week-day afternoon. You should tune in at least by 2:30 to make sure you catch us.

You can also go to our website georgeandlorraine.com and choose George’s Radio Spots. All the segments are there. When you push the play arrow on any spot, you will experience about a 4 second delay before the segment begins playing.

When we brought the program to Phil Elke, the station owner, he said, “There isn’t anything like this out there,” and referred us to AMB-OS in California. Ninety-five percent of the programming distributed to Christian radio stations in the United States is distributed by AMB-OS.

This is an opportunity for us to share this material nationally. Our contact at AMB-OS, recommends we launch nationally the first week of January.

God is giving us a strong “green light” to proceed. We don’t know how many stations we will get . . . a few, or a hundred, but our audience could potentially be millions.

INCREASED WEB TRAFFIC

 A few weeks ago, God asked me to increase our effort to teach via our website. I had gotten slack in posting my teaching segments, so I promised to try to post an article every week. As a result our web traffic has more than doubled. In the last couple weeks hits from China and Malaysia have surpassed the number of visitors from the United States.  

MY NEW BOOK

Distribution of my present book, Is This The End . . . Or Just The Beginning?, has gone exceptionally well. Upon completion, the Lord began immediately urging me to write the next one. With the move to Waskish, that project has fallen by the wayside, but I must now find time to work it into the schedule. It is a tremendous amount of research and numerous source books must be purchased.

“How am I going to do all this?” I find myself asking the Lord.

The radio show takes me about 20 hours a week. Then there is preparation for Sunday . . . preparing the music and the message.

Posting articles on the website takes longer than one might think, and after the post I send out texts to the contact list, which takes a considerable amount of time.

The hard copy mailing list takes a lot of time. You might wonder why I hand write the addresses? “Because the Lord told me to,” is the answer. In this world of automation and depersonalization, a hand-written envelope sticks out. Everyone on the mailing list is very important to God, so why should I not take the time to hand address our letters to them? To those who contribute, I make every effort to write a hand-written thank you note, and I have found our supporters do so appreciate this.

One older lady showed up in our service one Sunday. I had not seen her in two years. After the service, she came up and gave me a hug, exclaiming, “You are so good to me. You write to me every month!” The personal caring touch is so important. I hope that we can always sustain that level of care and effort to those who support us through prayer, encouragement, and financial support. Before we mail the letters, we lay hands on them and pray for the recipients.

LORRAINE’S CHILDREN’S BOOK

The move to the Waskish Church basement has brought many adjustments including showering and washing clothes at my brother’s house. We find the necessities of life now take more time. . . So, Lorraine has made very little progress on her children’s book. The illustrations take prolonged blocks of uninterrupted time. Pray with us she will again be able to engage in this important project.

SCHOOL ASSEMBLIES

The last thing I will mention is we are working on booking school assemblies. These are crucial. In order to book an assembly, we must travel to the school and meet personally with the principle or superintendent. Nothing else works. So there is travel, and some of these schools are a good distance away.

WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT

It took considerable time and effort to acquire the funds to pay for my last book. With perseverance we reached our goal.

We must always meet our monthly operating budget, and for “God’s Projects,” it takes all the more time and effort to raise the needed funds.

We are not paid by the radio stations for our program. It is a vast opportunity to minister to people. Our cost for AMB-OS to distribute will be $195 per month for a year. That is not to mention our travel expense to Minneapolis to record the spots . . . a minimum of $300 per trip. Why Minneapolis? I have been working with Kerry Leibelt from Praise FM for over twenty years. We have a chemistry. He is extremely good . . . and he donates all of his time to us!

We have another project which sadly has not been funded . . . our music CD project. It has been sitting for 5 years. All the songs are recorded, and we need to pay the expense of the studio and packaging for the hard copies. That is approximately $6500. People are greatly blessed by the CD I did in 1972 that we still sell. We must get this new CD out there to bless God’s people.

We Thank God For Our Veterans!

Thank you for your service and sacrifice. Our country and world is a better place because of YOU!

Thankful For You!

George and I want to thank all of our contributors not just for supporting our work for our Lord and Savior but for your love, care and prayers.

We are blessed and thankful. We wish you all a blessed and safe Thanksgiving.

Photograph designed and taken by Lorraine