July 2024
Dear A Word From The Lord Ministry Friend,
Supporting Our Ministry for Today and the Future
Your continued support of A Word From The Lord ministry, through your prayers and financial contributions, is critical in these times. In my video, I mentioned the comments of people for whom our Devotionals and broadcasts today mean so much – I call this our “baseline ministry”. Below, I present some statistics that backup these written and in-person support testimonials. Also,...
July 2024
Dear A Word From The Lord Ministry Friend,
Supporting Our Ministry for Today and the Future
Your continued support of A Word From The Lord ministry, through your prayers and financial contributions, is critical in these times. In my video, I mentioned the comments of people for whom our Devotionals and broadcasts today mean so much – I call this our “baseline ministry”. Below, I present some statistics that backup these written and in-person support testimonials. Also, my video mentions the “Gospel Gap”, which I define below. Most in the Gospel Gap resist going to church and encountering the Lord’s Word, even through traditional audio and video faith-based media. However we have a somewhat unique opportunity to leverage our infrastructure, capabilities, and my fifteen years of weekly sermons to extract targeted One-Minute Messages that seem to resonate with the Gospel Gap.
I invite you to read on for more information, but I want to encourage you to contribute by clicking HERE to donate now. You are making a secure donation through our partner the National Christian Foundation -- NCF (or you can mail checks using the information at the end of my letter). Your prayers and financial support keep our baseline ministry in fulfilling Jesus’ Great Commission to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19) considering that “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” (Romans 10:17). Additionally, your contribution now permits us to continue defining how A Word From The Lord can participate in addressing the Gospel Gap.
Our Baseline Ministry Performance Today
In my global travels, people from all walks often seek me out to tell me how much our Devotionals mean in their lives. For example, one American has developed and leads a global small Zoom group, with one person assigned for each day of the week. They use the Devotional audio and Scripture References as the base for their joint discussions and prayer time with the Lord. This Zoom group has grown to include participants from several states and countries across the globe, with daily time zone scheduling being a challenge!
Some statistics provide you with a snapshot of our baseline ministry’s performance. Since we began podcasting in April 2018, we have had more than 800,000 intentional downloads of our devotional podcasts (e.g., Spotify, Apple Podcasts, daily emails). Podbean, our podcast publisher, tells us that this download volume places us in the top 10% of all US podcasters. Additionally, our radio broadcasting locations and time slots provide opportunities more than 20 million annual contacts with the God’s Word. Our total annual costs, for all our development, production, podcasting, and broadcasting, are less than $0.004 per contact. With this efficiency ($0.004!), we remain faithful stewards of your support.
Our Opportunities to Address the “Gospel Gap”
While our baseline media ministry needs your continuing support, its content and infrastructure have permitted us to identify the components of the “Gospel Gap” (i.e. people that either have never heard the Gospel, have heard the Gospel but are indifferent to its message, or have heard the Gospel and hate God’s message and those who deliver His message). The Gospel Gap constitutes about 35% of US adults today, and it is growing. Our baseline ministry capabilities provide an opportunity to address significant segments of the Gospel Gap by using our existing content delivered directly to the Gospel Gap using media’s new and rapidly evolving digital targeting technology.
Today, we are at a crossroads in our dissemination of the Lord’s Word to those in Gospel Gap. As a monthly test during 2022, we targeted some Atlanta demographic segments in the Gospel Gap. Every month, we used the incredible digital targeting capabilities of our partner iHeart Media to stream 202,000 One-Minute Messages some segments of the Atlanta Gospel Gap. Incredibly, 97.4% of the recipients listened to the entire message -- 97.4%! iHeart media told us that a “listening rate” of about 86% would be considered successful even in secular targeted digital advertising!
However, our baseline operating funding did not permit continuing or expanding this significantly successful test, which cost $1,600/month, into 2023. We have developed plans which would permit us to roll out our approach to Gospel Gap targeting across the US; but these plans would require a significant increase in committed support. Also, we cannot let these opportunities to expand the ministry take our eyes off the performance of our baseline ministry.
Contributing to Our Ministry
We need your support for both today’s successful baseline ministry and, hopefully, to pursue opportunities for directly addressing the Gospel Gap. Will you help? Now is the time to do it!
Please make your secure monthly recurring donation, for one year, through our partner, the National Christian Foundation (NCF). You can contribute by clicking HERE – just follow NCF’s instructions after clicking. Also, you can visit our Website at www.awordfromthelord.org for more information about our ministry; and you can contribute using the Website by clicking “DONATE” on the Website.
If you do not wish to contribute online through NCF, you may support us by check and mailing A Word From The Lord, P. O. Box 636 Monroe, GA. 30655. For all contributions, we are a 501 [c][3] charity for your tax purposes.
In the love and service of Jesus,
+Foley
Dr. Foley Beach
Bishop and Chairman of the Board, A Word From The Lord, Inc. info@awftl.org
