In this day of shrunken operating funds, the problem of making our evangelistic efforts self-supporting is a pressing matter. We recently held an effort in the capital of North Carolina, using the auditorium of the Woman's Club. There were only three white Sabbath keepers in the city when we began the meetings, so we could not depend upon our own people for material help on the expenses.
The Lord blessed us so abundantly that we were able to make the donations cover all the expenses—the rent of the auditorium and the advertising. We followed a plan that I feel confident may be followed with advantage in all evangelistic efforts.
During the eleven weeks of the every-night services we followed the plan of passing out special offering envelopes every Friday night, asking the people to bring a special offering on Sunday evening that would be sufficient to pay our rent for the week just beginning. We told the people exactly what the rent would be for that week, and in a tactful way laid the burden on them—if they wanted these meetings to continue, we would be pleased to see them bring in an offering on Sunday that would be sufficient to pay the rent for the entire week.
We did this every week during the entire effort, and distributed special offering envelopes each Friday night. The people responded nobly. The result was that every Sunday we received a large offering that almost covered our rent for that week. We also took an offering each week night, and those offerings enabled us to pay for our advertising and the large initial expense of getting the meeting started. In this way we were able to meet all the expenses with the offerings taken at the meetings.
As a result of the effort the Lord has blessed us with a new church of 100 members, and this new church has led the entire list of churches in the Carolina Conference in tithes and mission offerings each month of 1933 up to this time. This is the time for every worker to stress intensive evangelism.
Raleigh, N. C.
