State of the Ministry

Before I dive into presenting the state of the ministry, I believe it would be fitting for me to go over the results of our annual “Envision the Vision” banquet. On behalf of Pastor Kingsbury and the entire RU Nation, I want to thank all of those who have sacrificially given of their time and resources for our cause. Your benevolence never ceases to amaze as you so willfully give of yourselves for the cause of Christ. The visions, or goals, presented at the banquet were as follows: We sought to raise $69,000 for the Ruth Project (New Women’s Discipleship Home), $30,000 for our Spanish ministry, and $40,000 for our Institutional ministry to collect a grand total of $139,000. Well, my friends, God has blessed us once again! At the time of this writing, we have received $135,542 in funds and pledges. We are just $3,458 short and I am more than confident that we will receive this and more as gifts continue to come in. All glory rightly belongs to God!

There are some people who recognize that Reformers Unanimous is a growing and fruitful organization that often faces financial struggles that come with the territory—I have heard such struggles referred to as “growing pains”. Conversely, there are other people who believe that the ministry of Reformers Unanimous has all kinds of money and is, in fact, quite liquid. As a way of better educating you on where we are, in all actuality, as ministry financially, and at the same time dispel any rumors that may exist, allow me to just lay out the numbers for you.

This past year, we earned 1.2 million dollars from the sales of our products. In the last couple of years, we have seen our sales revenue increase by 1 to 2 hundred thousand dollars each year. This is very encouraging; however, we believe that we can do better. I will explain in detail later what steps we will take in 2009 to reach this goal.

Charitable donations are typically one of the biggest sources of income for a not-for-profit organization. That being said, we desperately need to improve our donor development. This past year we collected four hundred thousand dollars in donations. I praise the Lord for every cent, but I feel that we need to greatly improve this element of our finances. It is important to note that historically, almost half of the monetary gifts that our ministry has received annually are from two events. These two events are the Super Scrub Car Wash and the Envision the Vision Banquet. As you know, these two events are our only large-scale fundraises that we execute each year. I believe that we are guilty of the fact that “we have not because we ask not”.

One of our ministries financial strengths has always been the housing ministry. This past year, we received just over seven hundred thousand dollars in income from our schools of discipleship. The source of this income is two-fold. First we receive the tuition fees for the students that reside in our homes. Secondly, we receive the wages from the students that we are able to employ externally. We do receive a good sum of money in donations designated specifically for the housing ministry, but these donations are logged in our books as donation income. Keep in mind, that our housing ministry is also one of our largest expenses; it is very costly to operate this element of our ministry. This year is, in fact, the first year that our housing ministry did not lose money. We were able to get the books to balance and came out even.

So we see that in the past year Reformers Unanimous received $1.2 million in sales, $400,000 in donations, and $700,000 in housing income. These figures add up to a total revenue received of 2.3 million dollars. Praise God! Who would have thought way back in 1996 that we would be bringing in almost two and a half million dollars annually in just twelve short years! God has blessed our mission beyond anyone’s expectations—certainly those of Pastor Kingsbury and I.


Pastor Kingsbury is a stickler for financial stewardship as is evidenced by the fact that His church still does not have a new building. Despite having the large majority of the funds to complete this expansion, Pastor Kingsbury is committed to waiting until the Lord has fully provided. Likewise Dr. Kingsbury and I are committed to operate Reformers Unanimous in a similar manner. We do not like to be in the red. Although sometimes we operate at a loss, Dr. Kingsbury will not allow a loss to accumulate year after year without implementing some significant changes to control our expenses.

With some adjustments made this year we’ve cleaned up some of the struggles we were having in the expense category; however, our expenses are still way too high and much work is yet to be done to get this problem under control. Our cost of goods sold for this past year was 720 thousand dollars. As I previously stated, we received 1.2 million dollars from the sale of our goods. So these figures show that we made a profit of $480,000. However, as you will see, this profit did not get too far; rather, it was reinvested directly back into our national ministry.

I briefly touched on the fact that our housing ministry broke even financially this year. We praise God not only for that fact, but for the remarkable fruit that the housing ministry continues to produce. I cannot say enough about what Brother Paul Lay and his team have done in our homes. With expenses of $700,000 however, we hope to incorporate some intuitive means of cost cutting to help us spend less money to disciple each student. We want to do this, however, without sacrificing any of the quality or compromising any of the standards that have proven to make our discipleship homes so effective. Also deserving credit for the success we have had in our housing ministry is Steve Schupp. Bro. Schupp has done a remarkable job at managing the day-to-day operations of this complex and delicate facet of our ministries, and I can tell you first hand, that is no small task. God has certainly brought to us the right man for the job.

As you know, at Reformers Unanimous one of our main goals is to reach out and help as many hurting people as possible. In order to do this, we must have a large National ministry element. Brother Burks, as the head of our National department, has done a tremendous job starting new chapters and ministering to our existing chapters. This year we observed as our missionary program was launched and has flourished in its early stages. That being said, it is this element of our ministry that is most expensive. The expenses for the National ministry totaled just over 1 million dollars last year ($1.03 M). While that seems high, we feel that the money put into the national ministry will, in due time, prove to be a profitable investment.

Doing the math, our total expenses for this past fiscal year were 2.45 million dollars. As I have already stated, our total revenue for the same time period was $2.3 million. Therefore we can see that the ministry actually lost 150 thousand dollars last year. The majority of this loss is attributed to our efforts in the national ministry as we continue to invest in our growth. However, I believe that we, as a ministry, can do much better at controlling costs.

In the fiscal year of 2008, the vast majority of our $150,000 loss has been carried on the backs of our most gracious vendors. Pastor Kingsbury has seen it fit that we partner with a handful of Christian vendors who are willing to work with us in such a way that helps us to maintain our growth and inventory levels. These vendors do this by being very patient in waiting for payment for products that they provide for us. These companies view us as a long-term customer and have therefore been willing to extend us such favor. That being said, it is imperative that we maintain a good Christian testimony by paying our debts to our vendors as much as possible and as often as possible. It is our goal for 2009 to get out of the red and have all of our vendors completely paid off by the end of the year.

That, in a nutshell, is the state of the ministries financial condition. Since our inception, God has seen fit to improve our financial position each year. That being said, God has worked through the efforts of many diligent people to see that this occurs. We have been satisfied with what the Lord hath done, but we are continuously seeking the Lord for ways in which we may expand, and otherwise improve our ministry. The following points that I will outline are what we believe the Lord would have us do in the upcoming year to enable us to reach as many hurting people as possible.

Our goals for the year 2009 have been set with the expectation that the Lord will continue to bless and do great things with our ministry. The area we want to tweak the most is our national ministry. Under the leadership of Brother Burks we hope to accomplish the following things in 2009. First, we want to increase the sales coming out of our existing chapters. We aim to do this not by increasing the amount that we sell to each person, but rather to increase the amount of people in each chapter. Ben and I have been developing a strategy that we feel will help each individual local chapter increase its attendance. We understand that our sales revenue will be greatly dependent upon the amount of people we are able to reach in the next year. The biggest change we will be implementing to see that this occurs is the institution of our missionary program. The missionary program is designed to not only form new chapters, but also to work alongside of our existing chapters to reach as many hurting people as possible in their respective areas. The renewed focus on strengthening our existing chapters is actually an idea that Pastor Kingsbury has recently stressed. He has said, and I agree, that we as a ministry cannot allow our financial well-being be contingent upon our ability to charter new chapters. Eventually, as we look down the road, we will run out of geographical areas to start new chapters; hence, our new focus of helping our chapters to improve their individual outreach. Another way to look at this is that we will ultimately run out of suitable churches to host an RU, but I can promise you that it will be a very, very long time until we run out of hurting people in our existing regions of operation that we may minister to.

Secondly, we are not only looking to increase sales revenues, but we also want to maintain our margins. What does this mean to you? It means that we do not want to raise the prices of our products that you and your chapters need. One of the ways that we could increase sales revenue is to increase prices, but we don’t want to do that. We want to maintain our margins. You may say, “But Steve, you just came out with a catalog where you slash prices everywhere-- a Joy Belle CD that used to be 13 to 15 dollars is now $7.50!” Yes sir, you’ve got it! We want to continue to be able to stimulate sales by reducing retail prices and bringing you special offers, and there is only one way in which we can viably do this. That is for us to significantly cut our cost of the goods that we sell. My team and I are in constant pursuit of ways to supply you with our products for less money; it is for this reason that we continue to ask that you not copy our clothing, not create your own awards program, not create your own advertising programs, and otherwise opt to do things your own way. When chapters deviate from the specified processes that we ask for them to do, it not only harms that specific chapter, but all of the other chapters as well. How you ask? Well, when we lack the income that a normal sales structure would generate, it greatly hinders our buying ability as a ministry. Our vendors base their costs to us on the quantity of product that we are able to buy. If we, as a ministry, have the funds available to begin buying in greater quantities from our vendors, our cost of goods sold will be greatly reduced. And I can assure you that any savings that we are able to receive in our COGS is directly reflected in the retail prices that we sell at. On the occasion that we are forced to raise prices, this is the primary reason that it can be attributed to.

We cannot lower our cost of goods at a faster rate then the ministry and sales revenue grows. As the ministry continues to grow, we anticipate our cost of goods sold to go way down. As a matter of fact, in 2009 Brother Mike Miles has been tasked with the job of slashing cost of goods 15% across the board. Granted, some products may be a little higher and some a little lower. The goal is, however, to try to bring that in line and to increase the margin. We will couple this margin increase with the increase in sales that Brother Burks’ department is working to accomplish as previously mentioned, and drastically improve the financial outlook of our national department.

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The housing ministry, as I said, was very efficient in 2008. That being said, we are excited about what we believe that the Lord has in store for this aspect of our ministry in the upcoming year. Dr. Kingsbury and I feel that we absolutely need to expand the ministries of the Men’s and Women’s Schools of Discipleship. Let me tell you why. First, our homes are always full. There are dozens of hurting men and women nationwide who we are forced to turn away because we lack the space to house them. Secondly, we have observed small versions of our housing ministry popping up all over the United States. Although, in most cases, the people operating these facilities are friends of our ministry, some of them may not always do things correctly. Because of this, we are concerned that if we do not at least train and develop the management of these facilities they may have problems and open themselves up to litigation. Furthermore, we feel that we have, through years of experience and much trial and error, developed a system that is highly consistent in its results. For this reason, we want to be able to work with as many people as possible in our residential facilities.

Along these lines, we have devised a strategy to enable us to maximize the number of residential students we may accommodate. First, we want to complete project RUTH and relocate our Women’s Home to this new property. We saw last night at Envision the Vision the specifics of what exactly this newly acquired property will afford to our Women’s residential housing ministry. That being said, with the relocation of the women to this new location it will free up the former Women’s Home, the Mulberry House, for usage. We want to develop this facility, at little or no cost, into a suitable residence for our graduate students. Let me explain why. Two years ago we could hold 70 men in our Safford Men’s Home. Of these 70 men, ten were graduates of our program and enrolled in the graduates program. Today, in the same home, 27 of our 70 beds are filled by graduates. Many of these graduates are now staff members of our ministry and our now, essentially, being paid to sleep in the same bed that they paid to occupy while coming through the discipleship program. Therefore we are experiencing a significant decrease in the number of men that we are currently discipling in our undergraduate program. The number of men in the program is down from two years ago when we were at 60 to the current number, 43. So we see then that we are not only discipling fewer new students, we’re also receiving less revenue in return. In other words, from two years ago we are short the income that would be supplied from 17 additional students. Slowly but surely we have watched as our Men’s School of Discipleship has transitioned into more and more of a staff housing facility—and this should not be. It is for this reason that we want to relocate our graduate students to the Mulberry facility.

The long-term vision for our graduates program is to merge it with the North Love Baptist Bible College. The North Love Baptist Bible College already has 100 students currently enrolled, and it is in only its second year as a full-fledged Bible College. The majority of the students enrolled are graduates of our homes, and also active North Love church members. As we begin to grow, we’re going to see opportunities for directors to come to the college for a semester or so, or perhaps some summer courses to receive some sort of certification. The possibilities with the Bible College are both exciting and inexhaustible. A student may choose to work toward a basic Bible certificate or possibly a degree in our missionary training program. Whatever the case may be, all kinds of creative options will be available for those who desire advanced training in Christian service. As we continue to see a rapid increase in the demand for our graduates program, and for advanced discipleship, Pastor Kingsbury and I share the vision to see North Love Baptist Church eventually take and increasing amount of ownership over this element of ministry. Why? Because I do not want to have the graduates program grow so large that it forces me to take my primary focus from our Schools of Discipleship and the men and women in the housing program. So the idea is for these men and ladies, upon graduating from the schools of discipleship, to be transitioned into the local church and be further discipled through the Bible college and on a smaller scale, from Reformers Unanimous. And in the very near future, we intend to offer them housing in our Mulberry facility.

Another problem we are seeing with the housing ministry is that we are being forced to deny more and more people admittance into our Schools of Discipleship on the basis of lacking the financial support. Although right now we have an overabundance of applicants to our homes that can afford to pay, and the only time we have any vacancy is immediately following a graduation where we lose about 15 students. That being said, it will not be long until our homes expand and we gain the capability of housing more students. When this happens, we want to be able to keep all of the additional beds full at all times. One way we can see that this happens is to develop a housing scholarship program. This is the only way that we will be able to minister to the multitude of hurting people who really don’t have the resources and likewise they have no family members or a church that is capable of investing in their recovery. Jesus sought to help the “least” of us and so shall we. Tony Richardson has recently been working diligently on devising this program and I am excited to launch it in the next few months.

Similarly, we want partner with like-minded organizations that would be willing to donate to our Men’s and Women’s homes. Of course, we recognize the potential dangers of this, and Pastor Kingsbury watches over this process rather carefully; however, there has not been much to watch over thus far. There are a multitude of like-minded brethren that offer grants, trust, funding, and other forms of support. People frequently ask us why we don’t pursue faith based initiatives. I can tell you that it is not as easy as one might think, and it is oftentimes a dangerous avenue to take. When you are being funded by an outside entity, oftentimes with their gift they expect to be given an element of control over the operations. That being said, there are, in fact, a lot of Christian organizations that share the same goals of our men’s and women’s schools of discipleship. Like us, they wish to see addicted men and women return to work, return to society, restore their families and restore their citizenship. I have also tasked Tony Richardson with seeking out organizations that might fit within these parameters. Pray that he experiences some success in doing so in the upcoming year.
Additionally, one of the most important things we need to do is to develop endowments for building expenses and maintenance. This is something that has been lacking and led to a gross depletion of the general funds of our ministry. What we are seeking, and believe is a realistic possibility assuming we take the proper measures, is something along the lines of a million dollar endowment. This would generate one thousand dollars a month in interest that could be dedicated to our buildings for the costs maintenance. An example of why we so desperately need something like this occurred just the other week. Unfortunately, we had an appliance go down at the men’s home that hit our finances for slightly more than $5000. That week we paid no vendors, for all we could pay was the payroll and the bill to replace the faulty piece of equipment. It is this type of thing that puts a halt on our progress and takes us weeks to recover from. If God would provide an endowment of sorts that would allow our building expenses to be funded from the overflow of that investment it would be a tremendous help.

Now I want to zero in on some of the specific designs and ideas that we believe we ought to head toward and will be asking our people to do in the next year. We have some weaknesses in our ministry relating to the areas of communication and correspondence. We feel that our correspondence with our chapters and its directors, as well as our individual students has been too much, too often. For years we failed as a ministry to communicate adequately with our people, but now we are over communicating in the sense that we are double and sometimes triple mailing the same piece of information. This is wasteful and time consuming and we will seek to remedy this problem immediately. We’ve got to find a more consistent and cheaper way to communicate with you. To see that this happens we will slow down our phone calls as well as cancel and consolidate mailings. This will help us to save a considerable amount of money.
We feel that we can accomplish this goal without creating a void in communication as long as we are able to drive people into specific communication portals to receive pertinent information. We want to lead and encourage people to hear and learn updates from the quarterly Founders Reports that will be sent out on a more consistent and faithful basis. The Founders Report will become an extremely important and relevant document; if you want to know what is going on, you will have to find it in this report. Second, the bi-monthly RU-N-Touch will begin to be a primary source for ministry updates. All applicable news and information will be reported through this avenue on a bi-monthly basis to the R U nation. Thirdly, I am going to task Ben Burks to begin producing monthly web forum postings to communicate all imperative monthly updates and training information. We want to make the forum a place where the RU Nation can go to have all their questions about the ministry, its operations, and relevant news answered. Finally, I am going to ask Brother Will Fowler and our marketing team to create Weekly E-News letters. These letters will be supplemented by Bro. Burks with any special information.

Also, I want to see that we begin offering weekly specials on our web site for the products that you purchase and then, in turn, sell to your students. We want to implement things that will help our chapters to reduce the cost of operating properly. One way we can do this is by increasing the margins on the local chapter book tables. This will leave our chapters with more resources available for outreach and awards. We want to do all of this to help take the burden off the local church and create a viable system whereby the local chapters may fund themselves.
Pastor Kingsbury invested almost no money in his chapter here at North Love for the first six out of ten years. This was because of my willingness, as the director, to go out into the community and raise money to the best of my ability. We would like for you to do the same for your preacher. Neither you, nor I, want to see your chapter become a burden, but rather be a blessing to your churches and preachers.

I’ve been told that the daily blogs are a blessing. The Bible Blog has evolved to become more spiritual in nature as opposed to informational. This is because we desire to keep the relevant truths of the simplified hidden life in front of you as much as possible. However, because it can take me up to two hours to complete one blog, it has become apparent that I have bitten off a bit more than I can afford to chew, so to speak, in this area. Although I would like to do more, I am going to commit to releasing two blogs per week.

Also envisioned for the last quarter of 2009 is the introduction of training webinars. Brother Will Fowler’s department, in cooperation with Brother Burk’s department, hope to bring you advanced training webinars that will be broadcast live on our website. In time, we hope to be able to bring you downloadable applications where you may view a webinar at whatever time is convenient for you. As you know, in the past we have had regional training conferences held across the United States that served this purpose—to train our chapters on how to operate as efficiently as possible. The problem with this method was in the fact that we would overload our training delegates with information, effectively forcing too much material into a day and a half window. We have seen that this “data dump” method has led to a problem with retention of the things we are teaching. One of the things I would like to do in the short-term is to utilize our missionaries to discover what your questions are so that we may put together some answers to commonly asked questions and host a webinar online to clarify these issues. At the end of each webinar we hope to have a tool in place whereby you may be able to ask an administrative host of the session any questions that you may have. By observing other industries, we have seen that this has been a successful platform that we can implement into our own ministry. The issues that we are faced with today are much different compared to the issues that occurred in the infancy of our ministry, thus necessitating continual improvements in our technological infrastructure.

Our goal has always been to help anybody we could. We have always helped addicted men and women, both in our local chapter outreaches and in our residential facilities. We’ve helped the incarcerated through our jail ministries and we have helped the children of our students and our workers. The Kidz Club program has been used nationwide to great effect. Additionally, we’ve ventured to help addicted teens through our Teens N’ Transition program and had much success. That being said, we want to do more, and we feel like God wants us to do more. However, we want to stay within our expertise and we don’t want to endeavor into an area where we are not invited or led by the Spirit of God. We do not want to push our ministry on other parts of the church, but at the same time we don’t want to help addicted people exclusively, we want to help more people—we want to help EVERYBODY. We just plain ole want to help men, women, incarcerated, children and teens whether they’re addicted or not! We believe that our discipleship program designed for the addicted is just as equally applicable and effective in discipling apathetic Christians! With that in mind, we also have a design in place and a strong desire to form a lay leader-discipleship ministry. Pastor Kingsbury and I began brainstorming on this idea three years ago, and we believe that we have a curriculum that will help Christians overcome apathy.

I feel strongly that God would have us to become more useful within the body of Christ. Right now we have the following new mission statements for each of our ministries. Our addictions program mission statement has been changed to, “we help addicted adults find freedom”. Our Men’s School of Discipleship’s mission statement is, “we help men who hurt”. Regardless of whether these men have been hurt or they have hurt other people, we want to help these men. God did not call men to hurt--God called men to help! The Women’s School of Discipleship’s statement is worded slightly different from the men’s, “we help hurting women”. There are a lot of hurting women out there. We have women in our home now who have never ingested a drug in there entire life. Most of these girls are younger (18,19, and 20 years old), and they’ve never been exposed to addiction or the mess that surrounds it. The problem with the majority of this type of student is that they are, for a myriad of reasons, absolutely miserable. These girls just hurt, and because of this somebody wants to put them on all kinds of medications and seek out help that only serves to treat the symptoms of their problem. In this case, what typically happens is the preacher or the laymen or the father hears about our ministries and says, “Let’s try this instead”—Praise the Lord! We have seen a few women come home from Bible College discouraged and without the money to go back. We see that they are often frustrated and have failed to transition well into the schools that their parents and preachers sent them off to. With nowhere else to turn, they come here for a semester and experience remarkable results.

Our statement for the Institutional Program has evolved into, “we help believers behind bars”. With some of the inmates we first need to lead them to Christ, but there are a lot of saved people in jail. After all, haven’t you heard that everybody finds Jesus in jail? However, the sad truth is that most usually forsake their faith on the way out of jail. What we aim to do, primarily, is to help believers while they are behind bars.

The Kidz Club has developed the slogan, “we help kids grow God’s way”. God has a specific way that he wants our kids to grow and of course, while they are on our watch, we are going to see that they are instructed accordingly. The Teens N’ Transition slogan is, “we help teens in transition”. You may ask, “What exactly does that mean”? It means that there are an inordinate amount of kids in our Christian schools that are transitioning into the world and they’re not ready for it. That being the case, these kids still can’t wait to get into the world, and it is here that we want to help those kids. Many of these adolescents are not fitting in. They can’t preach, they can’t sing, they don’t play basketball or soccer—it seems as if there is nothing that we can encourage them to pursue. But just because they lack the gifts to fit in easily with a peer group doesn’t mean that they are doomed to fall through the cracks! This is where Teens N Transition can really help a child discover himself. On the other end of the spectrum, Teens N Transition seeks to work with those teens that have not been fortunate enough to be raised in Christian homes and have not had the luxury of a Christian education.

Our youth pastor, Aaron King, runs our chapter’s TNT here on Friday nights. He has succeeded in bringing in scores of kids that look as worldly as can be, but week after week they take steps in transitioning closer to what you would see in a teen program on Saturday night—a program involving only Christian school kids! We have observed as Pastor King has successfully mixed public school children with the children from the Christian school, and we have seen the Christian school kids be a tremendous source of positive peer pressure on these largely unchurched public school children.

We have a new mission statement for Reformers Unanimous as a whole, “we help anybody”. We don’t help everybody, but we will help anybody because we believe that only the Truth makes free. There is only one truth, and the Bible says that it can help anybody in this next year.

Speaking of name changes, we now have finished what we call the Gaining Remaining Fruit Discipleship Course. This consists of the Strongholds course, the Behold course, and the Uphold course. You may be curious why we are now calling our discipleship curriculum the Gaining Remaining Fruit Series. We have chosen to go with this name to try to bypass the stigma that comes with the words addiction and strongholds. We have seen that often times it is this stigma that keeps us from bringing in the apathetic Christians from the church that stubbornly feel that they are free of any and all addictions. We understand that for every 100 students that go through the Strongholds course, maybe 35 will continue on into Behold, and for that reason it may be difficult to make this name transition in our curriculum.

We are going to encourage churches to take the Gaining Remaining Fruit curriculum and use it as a discipleship program that can meet on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday or even Saturday evening. This hopefully will attract more people out of the church and help to revitalize scores of apathetic Christians. With this program, we are going to ask churches to consider using a Talk, Talk, Talk or a Listen, Listen, Listen format similar to that of our Friday night class. This program will not be geared to the addicted, but we expect that we will see many of the Friday night class participants join nonetheless. We feel that this will be a great way to integrate new RU students into the church body. Additionally, this will go a long way to help the many RU students who desperately need a second night of discipleship during the week. The church discipleship program will be run in a similar manner to Friday nights; however, our third talk instruction will be focused primarily around the truths found in the text of Umbrella Fella, Tall Law, and Battleship. This concept is still being perfected so we will see where it leads us to in the future. The Strongholds, Upholds and Beholds courses are designed to be a 2 year program for adults, a 3 year program for teens, and a 4 year program for children.

Brother Jeremy Jones, who is our lead designer, has a fantastic team background. That being said, Jeremy (Skin and Bones) Jones is going to take the 3 volumes of the Gaining Remaining Fruit series (Strongholds, Upholds, Beholds) and work with me as well as our youth pastor, Aaron King, to develop a customized 3-year program for teens. This program will be suitable for use during the summer months, or it can be used during the school year, or even in Christian Schools. This program could be used in a myriad of ways; the possibilities are almost endless. Brother Jones will be using his skills to help us design this curriculum in such a way that the same truths are presented, but in a way that is more conducive to the teenage viewpoint.

Dr. Crowder and his staff will continue to write for the children’s ministry in a manner that reflects the principles taught at the adult level. We are in the process of re-working the Fruits of the Spirit books to make them more exciting for children. When this is complete, our Kidz Club department will begin designing material reflective of the Uphold and the Behold Study Courses. All of this should enable us to have a viable 4-year ministry for children that could be available on Wednesday nights during church or in Christian Schools in addition to its usage on Friday nights.

I am convinced that the gaining remaining fruit series: Volume one, the strongholds; Volume two, the Uphold; and Volume Three, the Behold as well as The Daily Journal is a phenomenal package capable of helping anybody. With that in mind, what we hope to see in 2009 is our ministries beginning to filter into other ministries of the church. God’s plan was to form Reformers Unanimous as an addictions ministry, but it is clear that He has been leading us to broaden our horizons; hence our goal for 2009: to diversify to the point where we can truly “help anybody”. And that, my friends, is the state of the ministry.