Dear friends,
Thanks to your help, we have made great headway on a mountain of debt, but it continues to stubbornly stand in the way of hundreds of Charis students. They need housing and until the debt is completely gone, I will be unable to build it. Together we are walking through a huge financial challenge.
Now, I know most of you have not been with Jamie and me for the past fifty-one years, so I want to give you some perspective. Whenever I face a financial giant like this, I look back to encourage myself in what the Lord has already done. It's like David remembering the lion and the bear before facing Goliath. So, before we face this financial giant, let's look back together at the miracles that have brought us to this new day of opportunity.
January 3, 2020, marks the completion of our twentieth year of television broadcasts. That's 5,200 television programs we've aired on what has grown to include 435 individual stations and 11 major networks. Our media buyer estimates the Gospel Truth program has the potential reach of over 3.2 billion people all over the world.
These programs are being heard in Spanish, Urdu, Armenian, and Russian, with the Russian broadcasts airing across eleven time zones to millions of other Russian-speaking people all around the world. We've received testimonies of two Imams who have been born again through the broadcasts, and are now teaching our materials in their mosques. How awesome is that! Praise the Lord!
Some of you may not remember or have never heard that the Lord spoke to me supernaturally at 2:50 in the morning on July 26, 1999, and told me that I would just be starting my ministry the day my first broadcast aired on TV on Monday, January 3, 2000. I had already been in ministry for thirty-one years at that time, but the Lord told me that if I had died before my first television broadcast, I would have missed what the Lord called me to do. Everything up to that point was preparation.
That has certainly proven true. Our ministry's impact more than doubled from January of 2000 to January of 2002. Then I had the second most impactful encounter with the Lord of my life on January 31, 2002. The Lord clearly spoke to me through Psalms 78:41 that I was limiting Him by my small thinking. This rocked my world.
I started taking the limits off God, and the results have been nothing short of miraculous.
We had 28 employees back in 2002 and one international office. We now have 16 offices worldwide with 650 employees. We were in a little 14,000-square-foot building, and now we have 616,000 square feet of buildings located on 493 acres of some of the most beautiful property in the world.
Our phone center handled 20,000 calls during the entire year of 2001 right before my revelation about not limiting God. Now we handle over 40,000 calls per month or nearly 500,000 calls per year. 2019 produced over 770,000 total contacts to our ministry and that's not including those who came to our website. We also averaged nearly three quarters of a million visits to our website each month.
We have given away millions of free CDs, DVDs, books, USBs, and pamphlets, plus most of the materials on our website are free. Only eternity will reveal the full extent of the millions of lives that have been touched. It's beyond our ability to count.
We have had over 8,000 Charis students graduate in the last 25 years, and we have over 7,000 students enrolled in Charis now. That's 15,000 world changers and counting.
All of these things are not my accomplishments; they're OUR accomplishments. This is the Lord's doing, and it's marvelous in our eyes (Ps. 118:23). Jamie and I are acutely aware that none of this could have happened without you, our partners.
