As mentioned in Part I the use of a computer system for a church wide mailing was a new and unheard of endeavour in 1965.When I was taken to the IBM centre which we contracted to do this task for us I was shown a line of computers that stretched some 30 feet long and 6 feet high. The close to 2 million names, addresses and birthdates were all entered via punch cards. There were many errors and a near full time person worked for months just to make the corrections
In the year prior to
the actual Offerings I worked to establish and support the effort’s
organizational structure. It was wonderful to identify and support a vast cadre
of outstanding laymen (and they were all men) around the country. I spoke
at District Conventions from Edmonton to New York to Orlando to Los Angeles to
Little Rock and many in between.
Co-workers Dave Stein,
Robert Hopmann, Max Heinz and Donna Behnken were capable and marvelous co-workers.
Marty Koehneke kept us strong and exemplified faith and courage.
As soon as the
offering mailing began to roll in we discovered a significant problem. The
return envelopes had poor sealing wax and some envelopes returned open-so we
did not know if we loAst any contributions. We fixed that.
Many congregations did
a great job of celebrating members’ birthdays and we received wonderful stories
of grateful expressions. However, we were deeply disappointed at both the rate
of return and the size of the average gift. At the end of the effort we had
raised some $15 million
Some time after the
effort the official magazine of the LCMS declared our work “a disastrous
debacle” (or something like that) because it failed to reach our goal of $40
million. I have a different view. Those $15 million of 1965 have a 2019
equivalency of some $120,000,000. A significant moment came to me several years
later. The Chinese Headmaster of Concordia Lutheran School in Taiwan came to
embrace me with the words “Sir, I cannot thank you enough for your fund raising
efforts. Because of EBENEZER we were able to build our entire school-complete
with dormitories for live-in students. We are now one of the premier schools in
all of Taiwan teaching students English and the Christian faith.” And because
of the money we raised many others throughout the world can still daily exclaim
“EBENEZER. The Lord has helped us hitherto.”
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