There is a limit to what the Voice of Prophecy can do on the air.
Over the years, as the broadcast has built up a witness in hundreds of cities and tens of thousands of homes across America, we have always tried to do more than just teach the facts of the gospel to our listeners. Through our field service department we have, for years, referred the names of interested people who have completed enough phases of doctrinal study through the correspondence courses to local pastors.
Local pastors are busy! Sometimes they just cannot find the time to follow through on Voice of Prophecy contacts, so when I first joined the broadcast staff several years ago, I began immediately to hold Voice of Prophecy Bible crusades reaping meetings.
The problem we faced, however, was simply one of time: my father just did not have the time to preach at all of these crusades. Many of us were concerned that people would not come to the meetings with out him as speaker, the radio speaker, not someone else. But this proved not to be a stumbling block. People did come, regardless of who was the speaker at the crusades.
This Bible crusade method has proved to be the most effective way of following through and getting decisions and changed lives from the broadcasts and the correspondence courses. After considerable experimentation and the combined experience of the entire broadcast staff, we now have organized the Voice of Prophecy Evangelistic Association.
The job of the VOPEA is to work with the local conferences and local pastors in specified target areas to bring together the impact of saturation evangelism. (I remember the first time we did this in a "dark county," in Baxley, Georgia. We were on the air every day on twenty-seven stations in south Georgia. I could drive through those little towns, stop for a haircut and find a group of men waiting around a radio in the barbershop for the Voice of Prophecy broadcast. There was a banker and a drugstore owner who met every day for lunch to listen to the program together.)
The saturation includes a vital role for the laymen of the local churches. We early began to use the Bible-marking concept on the air with our daily programs. A Bible is delivered to homes by local Adventist lay men. Then, for eight weeks on the air, my father goes through the Bible with the listening audience underlining key passages.
The work of the VOPEA has grown to the point that recently we called three new evangelists to join our staff: Daniel Guild, Byron R. Spears, and Fordyce Detamore. Musicians Gordon and Phyllis Henderson and Organist Norm Nelson were called to augment the Voice of Prophecy music department in the special area of crusade music.
Now the VOPEA has designed a definite strategy for each crusade, working a year or two in advance. The whole package is called Focus on Reaping.
The VOPEA, we believe, is just the be ginning of a great thrust across America. We believe it will inspire our workers to follow through with the mass communications programs that the denomination has to follow up the contacts from our broad casts and telecasts.
When a man holds a crusade and calls it "Wings of Healing," or "Prophecy Speaks," et cetera, it may not be nearly as effective as if he identifies his crusade with the name of some nationally known program, on which the church has spent large amounts of money to make its name recognized across the nation. By working together, he benefits and the large programs benefit. This concept includes Faith for Today and It Is Written as well as The Voice of Prophecy.
This is why we have organized the VOPEA. Local pastors, holding meetings right in their own parishes, can work through it and use the name of the Voice of Prophecy.
If a team from the VOPEA staff is brought in, it is always by invitation of the local conference. We have told the brethren that we cannot plan a crusade unless it has the strong approval of the local pastor. We must have that! These crusades are planned many months ahead, so we have asked that a pastor not be transferred during the planning or immediately after the crusade. We must work with the same pas tor and the new members must get to know the same pastor who was involved in the evangelistic program.
All this is a matter of teamwork. The Voice of Prophecy and each local Seventh-day Adventist pastor are an evangelistic team! This happens through the VOPEA. We must work together, because it is the time the time for a great surge of proclamation of the gospel of Christ across America! May we all be a part of that surge!
