Canadian Chronicles Chapter 2 - Ramping Up

Rob, Elaine, Julia and Cher, shortly before
moving to Canada. 

Cheryl and I had been on staff with SU in South Africa from 1985 to 1990 in a town called East London. We had inherited from my predecessor a full complement of SU work which included weekly discipling groups in most of the English speaking elementary and high schools. We ran a variety of camps and holiday clubs (VBS) across the area and work had begun in the African schools in 1985 where we had camps and schools work developing. We also started an outdoor education camp in the middle of a small game park which gave us access to a wider group of youngsters. Along with that came opportunity for promoting our more gospel focused camps during the school holidays. With apartheid still firmly in place, SU in South Africa was ahead of its time in that across the country we were running multiracial camps called “Summer Specials”. This was new for SU, parents and campers and there were lots of stories to be told as we learned how to work together across the racial divide. It was fun but not easy as we worked with a variety of languages and at least two quite different cultures side by side. In among all this activity daily Bible reading was promoted to all age groups and SU guides were being used widely among the English-speaking Christian population.  

One of the pluses in our ministry in South Africa was that our children, Elaine and Julia grew up with gospel being enjoyed all around them as they moved with us from camp to camp and VBS to VBS. Their greatest heroes were the volunteer teenage leaders who helped us run these activities. By the time they were 9 and 11 they were seasoned campers and could lead and run pretty much any kind of activity we might have asked them to.   

Around mid-1989 I began to feel it was time to consider a move out of South Africa, where the political situation seemed intractable and hopeless. After some investigation it turned out that SU Canada needed the help of a Business Manager. This wasn’t my primary interest, but with my background as a Chartered Accountant I felt sure that I could do the job and there would be lots of opportunity to volunteer in other areas within SU in which I could help build the work. I visited the Toronto area in August of 1990, when I was offered the job by John Booker the then General Director.

John and Marg Booker did a great job of making us feel
welcome and getting us settled in Canada. 

 

I was now ready to start my job with SU Canada. The Pickering office was newly established a year or two earlier and I had never worked in such plush surroundings in a Christian ministry situation. I was a bit dismayed though when I learned that the accounting system was still all being done with manual ledgers. I had to brush up on my Bookkeeping 101 skills, but it did not take too long until we moved it over to a computerized system.

I learnt very quickly that SU Canada was a different animal to SU South Africa. In South Africa the work was about 90% focused on fieldwork ie outreach and discipling of young people, and 10% on Bible reading. In Canada it was pretty much the mirror image of that. Bible reading guide circulation had been steadily declining for years in the face of many other options and competing products. There were four or five beach missions going in Ontario and one in Manitoba.

SU has a wide range of Bible Reading material
covering all age groups

SU Canada was struggling. The circulation of Bible Reading Guides, once the backbone of what SU offered in Canada, had been declining for years. There was one remaining children’s worker, who was retiring in the year we arrived. The Chairman of the Board was due to retire within a year, with no obvious replacement in sight. John Booker, the General Director was discouraged and considering stepping down. He confided in me, early on, that he felt that taking me on to the staff was his last shot at getting things going well with SU Canada. Having come from a strong and thriving SU work in South Africa I felt sure that God had called Cheryl and I to Canada to help turn things around in SU Canada. In retrospect I see that God had other plans in mind.

In April 1991, soon after we arrived, Alan Cairnie, a retired government worker, who had taken up consulting for charities and other organizations and was a long time SU supporter,  approached John Booker and indicated he was concerned about SU and offered his services to help. This resulted in a bout of activity by the Board, John and I, and key volunteers, resulting in a Three-Year Plan in October 1991. I was particularly pleased that the three-year plan included a solid emphasis on developing the Children and Youth side of the work, which in my opinion was the heart of what SU stands for. In my opinion, Bible reading grows out of working with young people, not the other way around.  I was delighted that we were beginning to focus our effort where it was needed most.

When we arrived at SU, June Donaldson was on staff but retiring soon and was the Children’s Worker. Under her leadership the various beach missions were happening. In addition, she was overseeing the Quest Club for children, run by Nancy Ford, a volunteer, using the Quest and Key Notes. This was a pen club which corresponded with kids. from across Canada, who were using the Quest Bible reading guides for their daily devotions.  June approached Cher and I in the spring of 1991 and asked us to lead the Southampton Beach Mission which was SU’s flagship children’s activity and had been running for about 50 years. Having only been in the country a couple of months and never having directly run a beach mission we were a bit reluctant to accept but thought, “let’s give it a shot”.

Using the South African model as our template, we knew we needed the support of local churches in Southampton. Cher spent some time calling local pastors to invite them to a meeting and we took the long drive up to Southampton to gauge their support and encourage the churches involvement. We had a pleasant enough meeting with them, but the initial response to our call for volunteers and support in other ways, was somewhere between disinterested to non-committal. Eventually a couple of churches offered help with producing meals for our team which was a big help. No one objected to us being there, which was a plus. Cher and I, with June’s help started recruiting a team and set out learning how to run a beach mission. When the time came in July, we had a team of seven or eight ladies and me. This was not ideal as, in children’s work, boys do best with some male role models. We stayed in the house of a local SU supporter, who had kindly offered us the use of her home for the week. The local churches produced two meals a day for us, which was great. Attendance was not bad and we had a good time on the beach most days with 45 to 50 kids under the only shady tree on the beach.  We also initiated a teens program, which involved a bunch of wild games on the beach with 10 to 15 teens in the afternoons with a bit of a devotion thrown in as part of it. One of the novelties for us for the week, at the end of the day’s work, was swimming on the beach at 9pm, watching the sun go down, over a calm Lake Huron. Up until this point, our experience of large bodies of water, was a South African beach with big waves breaking onto the shoreline. We had made it through unscathed with big plans percolating for the following year.

Cher and I knew nothing about puppets
but we did manage to gather a crowd
to learn about them. 

We were now beginning to find our feet a bit and having lived through a year of SU’s calendar we began to initiate a few things from our South African experience which we thought might be helpful. In January of 1992, we organized a Leader’s Retreat at the Salvation Army center at Jackson’s Point. This was for all current or potential leaders of SU activities coming up in the Summer of 1992. It was a sleepover, which always adds to team building. I vividly remember the weather closing in on us as the retreat wrapped up and having to make a rather careful drive home.

Cher and I were looking for ways of giving SU more of a profile among churches and the Christian public as regards the children’s ministry. It seemed to us that lots of children’s work was using puppets to communicate with kids. Along with June Donaldson, we decided to run a Puppet Workshop in early April of 1992 in which participants would each make their own puppets and then give them some creative ideas on how to use them. We invited in a couple of “puppet experts” to present the workshop and were delighted when we had about eighty people turn up.

De Bron Conference Centre, Holland

In May of 1992, the SU International Conference was held at De Bron in Holland. I was nominated as one of the SU Canada representatives. The plan was for Cher to accompany me, but at the last-minute Julia, contracted mono and Cher was not able to come, which was a pity. The conference was attended by three or four hundred attendees from over a hundred countries. Each evening, there were representations from different Regions in the SU world. There was a lot of hilarity when SU USA and SU Australia, tried to claim that each country was larger than the other. They kept coming up with “fresh evidence” to bolster their claims, accompanied by much derision and laughter. One afternoon I was taking a walk along the nearby canal with a couple of other folks. Walking in front of us were two African men, from the Congo. They were observing the ducks in the canal and were having a very animated discussion in French. One of them turned back to our group and asked us; “Who do these ducks belong to?” Our answer was, “No one. They’re wild”. The next question was clearly from their background and context; “Well why isn’t anyone catching them and eating them?” From their perspective this was clearly the obvious thing to do.  Cross cultural work is not for the fainthearted. This story illustrated for me how the same set of facts can be so differently construed. The SU International conference was an eye opener to learn about all the different ways in which SU was seeking to achieve its two goals differently among the world’s global cultures and contexts. It also began to give me an understanding that Canada is not South Africa, and even though we speak the same language and enjoy a basic western culture, the context is different and so solutions and approaches may not be the same.

We returned to Southhampton Beach Mission the next year in July 1992 with a much bigger team, which stayed in the Anglican Church.  We had recruited George and Audrey Anderson. George had been our pastor in East London, South Africa, but his real claim to fame was that he had been a SU staff worker for several years prior to that, so knew the ministry model we were using. Rose and Roy joined us on the team and Durval and Mary Ann Medeiros from our church in Ajax. Each morning the team split to run two kid’s programs one in Southampton and one in Port Elgin about 20 kilometers away, but where they also had a popular beach. We also ran a family focused and teens program in the afternoons. Cheryl and I had one hilarious incident. We were explaining a game which went rather aptly by the name of Slaughter. It involved needing to put the “ball” in the “bowl”, within a confined area, while the other team tried to prevent that happening – no holds barred. No matter what we said or did, the teens were hearing our accents say ball and bowl as the same word. We finally got through, but we realized afresh that the English language is a many splendored thing. That was the year that SU worldwide was celebrating its 125^th anniversary so we ran a final wrap up party to celebrate Canada 125 and SUs 125th at the same time.

Alan and Nan Cairnie, doing some
 kitchen crew work at Camp Ke-Mon-Oya

During the front end of 1992, we heard about a Christian camp, Camp Ke-Mon-Oya, near Apsley, that was looking to be taken over by a “worthy ministry”, that shared its objectives. This opportunity got the blood pumping faster in my veins. If there was any part of Christian youth ministry that turns my crank it is Christian camping. During my time with SU in South Africa, most major SU centers of the country had been acquiring or developing Christian camps, including the area we were in. Having one’s own campsite opens so many possibilities. I was a bit cautious though as running campsites is capital intensive and requires a different skill set to regular SU work. I approached the owners and we began to get to know each other. They invited me to join them for their training week to understand their philosophy and how the camp was run. Their whole approach was remarkably close to my own experience in South Africa. Was it possible that God was opening a new avenue of ministry for SU in Canada?

My job was on keeping the SU administration going, but my heart was on growing the fieldwork. I was realizing more and more though, that Canada was not South Africa. The situation was quite different. There were multiple ministries in Canada offering what SU alone did in South Africa ie camping, schools work, Holiday Clubs/VBS and Bible Guides. Schools work in Canada fell under IVCF, but Christian work in schools had almost been eliminated. At the end of that summer we decided to continue with Beach Missions as no other ministries were filling that space. We also decided that we would keep the discussion going with Camp Ke-Mon-Oya, and see what transpired, even though we did not have enough financial backing to seriously entertain the idea. As it turned out ultimately we decided that owning and running a Camp at that juncture would have stretched us beyond our financial and staff capacity. It was not too much later that we were delighted to hear that Young Life, who do excellent work with teens, had bought it.

Board members formally appointing Rob as General Director
Visible in the picture (left to right): Alan Cairnie,
Rob Cornish, Claude Simmonds, Michael White

In September of 1992 John Booker, the current General Director announced his retirement from SU and after stepping in as Acting GD the board appointed me to the position in January 1993. I was formally welcomed to the position at a Board Retreat at Camp Ke-Mon-Oya a few months later.

My load was now spread much wider than I had been used to, especially with having to think country wide and not knowing the country too well yet. The SU Board at the time was being chaired by Alan Cairnie. Alan did a great job of transitioning SU from one director’s leadership style to the next. Other Board members I remember at the time were Claude Simmonds, Ross Reid, Ruth Russel, and Michael White. Later additions were Nancy Smail, Paul White, June Wynne, Harold Murray, and TV Thomas.

SU is US one of our slogans,
captured the idea that SU
is primarily staffed by volunteers. 

In the office I appointed Nellie Cotnam to take over the reins of Administrator and Elaine Martins became Office Manager with Holly Blair continuing with looking after the subscription and ordering system. Nancy Ford used to come in a few days a week to run the Quest Club and did a wonderful job of it. Peter Burton was our man in the warehouse. His job was an all or nothing affair. When the SU notes arrived from UK, he would leap into action for about six weeks while he single-handedly packed and mailed about 18000 SU notes per quarter. The second six weeks of every quarter Peter would not have as much to do. I dreaded the day when Peter got sick as his was a pressure job. Well of course the time came when Peter announced that he was moving on. At that time, the budget was tight, so I asked Elaine to round up some volunteers from local churches, something we had never done. Well lo and behold from then on, each quarter we arranged a great group of 10 – 15 volunteers, from local churches, who came for 2 – 3 days in a row and we got the job done along with a lot of good fellowship. Each day we would have devotions and pray for the readers of the notes going out that day. All we had to do was feed them.

We were very much in experimental mode, looking for needs in the community that fitted with our SU goals but that were not being met by other ministries. At the De Bron Conference there was much discussion about SU doing Family ministry. Taking a leaf out of this book, we decided to try working with single parents and their children. In the early summer of 1993, we ran a Single Parent Family Camp at Camp Ke-Mon-Oya. This went down well, but it was a stretch for us as very few of the attendees could pay their own way and it was difficult to cover costs. Nevertheless, this was a ministry option we decided to pursue and in fact ran a second camp at a different campsite a year later. We could see that the camp was meeting a need, but we didn’t have the financial means to sustain it and dropped the idea.

I had been lobbying the Board for some time to implement a pilot project in Durham Region, where we lived and where our office was. The thinking was based on the South African model whereby decentralized geographic areas, pursued the objectives of SU within their own context and situations. Each area was financially independent, had their own locally recruited Committee to oversee the work and had a lot of latitude to pursue their own ideas and approaches. The Board agreed that we would make this the focus of our efforts moving forward, without losing our current emphasis of supplying Bible reading guides across the country. Once we had the Durham Region Pilot Project (DRPP) functioning well, it would act as a model which we could then use to apply to other areas of this massive country. Nancy Smail agreed to become the Chairperson of the DRPP and we recruited a committee around her.

We entered 1993 with the DRPP becoming our primary emphasis for the youth side of our ministry. After 1992 we stopped running the Southampton/Port Elgin beach mission. We felt the crowds and responsiveness were not there and we did not have the resources or people to spread our wings that far, in addition to, generating activity in the Durham Region during the short summer months.

Elaine, Julia and Elizabeth Castelli.
Summer buddies in 1993

One of the surviving beach missions from across the country was in Manitoba, being run on Lake Winnipeg. Elizabeth Castelli, a student at the time, was one of the team who remained interested in continuing. We decided to invite her to join us for the summer of 1993 as an intern for her to see how we were doing things in Durham and to be an extra pair of hands in running our Durham summer program. She lived with us for three months and was a great hit with our girls.

SU Sports, led by Bob Johnson - a big hit

John Booker had initiated discussions with Bob Johnson about running a baseball camp in the Durham Region and had run the first one while I was the Administrator. Bob was associated with Athletes in Action, an arm of Campus Crusade for Chris, now Power to Change. However, Bob also began operating under SU’s banner under the name of SU Sports. Bob was a real go getter, well connected in the sports world, and ran the first few summer sports camps without me being involved much. What pleased me greatly was that for the first time we were seeing young folks lining up to attend camps at which the gospel was being solidly presented. The camps were using the SU Camp Notes for the daily small group devotional time, along with encouraging them to sign up for receiving the ongoing Quest notes.  Eventually Bob left to go full time with Athletes in Action, but the idea was born and SU Sports is now a thriving and dynamic ministry.

Declining circulation of SU notes was an ongoing challenge. We were one of several good daily devotional guide options available to the public and it was hard to gain new readers, especially in an age when daily bible reading is increasingly going out of vogue. Many of SU’s “competitors” were available for “free”. Most of our loyal users were alumni from old beach missions or camps from way back. Or possibly they were immigrants from other countries where Scripture Union was strong, but we were not building new readers from the bottom up. Every year, our SU Notes readers were aging and dying off. What we were offering did not seem to capture the imagination of a new readership. Soon after I arrived at SU, the decision was made by the Board to offer the SU notes on a donation basis rather than a paid subscription basis. This was a financially risky decision, but it was hoped that people would be willing to donate more than they would pay for a subscription. As things turned out the outcome was a bit of a mixed bag and difficult to measure as to its success or not. In 1995, we decided to return to the certainty of paid subscriptions.

We tried several ways to attract new readers. We attended trade shows, home schooling conferences and so on, all to no avail. Our BRRs (Bible Reading Reps) in churches were our most faithful anchors for our circulation. Linda van Leeuwen, who was one of our beach mission team members, joined the staff part time with the sole purpose of contacting BRRs and looking for new ones. Despite our best efforts it did not help much. 

Sandanks Beach Mission Team T Shirt

We continued with trying other locations for Beach Missions. Sandbanks Provincial Parks, in Prince Edward County, was our next target area. The rationale was that it was only about an hour and a half east of Durham Region and felt very much like a natural fit for our growing base of Durham Region volunteers. Some of our key volunteers were young couples, like ourselves, who saw a beach mission as a fun way to spend a working holiday with their kids. Tim and Sophie Wright, Ron and Joan Giesbrecht, and Brett and Carol Thompson became some of our core leaders. From 1993 to 1995 we ran a program each year, starting at the West Lake beach and ending up at the main beach. This was a brand-new venture, so it was a lot of work exploring how to get it up and running. Our team lived in a local church and forayed onto the beach during the day. We ran hoe downs and campfires in the evenings with a reasonable attendance. I remember one night doing a gospel presentation around a campfire but was being heckled by a teenage boy. Eventually I pulled a $10 note out of my pocket and asked who would like it, “no strings attached”. Well the young heckler could not believe his luck and took me up on the offer and came down to receive it. Before I handed it to him, I asked, “this is yours for the taking, no strings attached, but is it yours yet?” He said “no, because I don’t have it in my hands yet”. I then explained that Jesus is offering us a gift of much greater value, but we must receive it before it is ours. He left $10 in hand, looking thoughtful. Who knows where that story ended for him?

Coming out of our contacts made at the Sandbanks Beach Mission, a local rural church asked us to help them run a VBS the following summer. Nancy Smail and I drove up one evening in the spring of 1994 to meet their team do some training for the upcoming program that summer. My car at the time was a Hyundai Pony. It drove fine but was a real rust bucket. For a couple of weeks prior to our trip, the car had been hesitating and stuttering. It needed the points adjusted, and it was on my list of good intentions to get it done, but I just had not got there. A few kilometers after leaving the church, in a dark rural area, the car stuttered, stalled, and then cut out. I had enough momentum to pull off on the side of the road. No amount of cranking on my part would persuade it to start. It was dark, we had no tools or light and we were stuck. The thought crossed my mind, “spending the night alone with Nancy, in this car is not going to look good”. Nancy much more practically cried out, “Oh Lord, please help us”.  Well lo and behold, the next thing we spotted a set of headlights approaching us. As he got closer, the driver of the car, a young man, for some reason crossed the road and drove up alongside me. With a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he said, “do you need any help?”. We explained the problem. He pulled over, approached our car, and said, “lift up the hood”. And then the most remarkable thing happened. In the complete and utter darkness, he put his hand under the hood, fiddled for a couple of minutes and then said, “that should work. Try and start it” I tried, the car fired up and we were good to go. Our rescuer then said, “you’ll be fine now” and cigarette in hand took off down the road. Nancy and I, dumbfounded, looked at each other and wondered if the Lord had sent a smoking angel to help us. To this day, I believe this has been my only encounter with an angel.

In line with our DRPP strategy, of becoming the “go to” Children’s ministry in the area, we also began to look for churches in Durham, who needed a bit of encouragement and help to run their own VBS program in partnership with SU. We persuaded our own Ajax Alliance Church to run a program and a great week was had in the summer running a “Community Celebration” program. This was good for the congregation to be actively engaged in outreach and a few kids came to the Lord which makes all the work worthwhile.

In the fall of 1993, I finally took a visit to the western provinces off of my list of good intentions and did a hopscotch dash from east to west starting in Manitoba, followed by Sasketchewan, Alberta and finally British Columbia. I was meeting with SU supporters and Bible Reading Notes users. It was a fruitful trip. In Regina, Saskatchewan I stayed with Annabel Robinson and her husband. Annabel was a professor at the university. She had sent in a very astute comment on some of the SU Notes on some fine point of theology and I was determined to meet her. It turned out that she had been an avid reader of SU Notes since her youth. I recruited her to be a writer of Notes, and much later, beyond my time she became a Board member. I then moved on to Alberta and stayed with Harold and Jacqueline Murray. Harold agreed to become the SU Rep for Alberta and later joined the SU Board, and ultimately became the Board Chair.

Lynn and Rod Ellis - good friends from our
early married years in Durban, South Africa

I then arrived in British Columbia and ended up on Vancouver Island, where I stayed with Lynne and Rod Ellis. They were friends of ours in our early married days in Durban, South Africa. Rod had been the Curate at our church. They were now pastoring a church in Victoria on the Island. During my stay there I discovered SU had a committee which met from time to time. This was a pleasant but totally unexpected discovery. Rod and Lynne and I went out for a meal and I was sharing my vision of establishing and expanding the pilot project concept across the country. Lynne’s response was, “well why don’t I set up a pilot project on Vancouver Island and then we’ll have one going in the East and one in the West”. Taken together with the fact that there was already a committee in place, this seemed like a word from the Lord. We decided that I would propose the idea to the Board. I returned home feeling that my foray out west had been very fruitful.

The Board were supportive of the Vancouver Island Pilot Project (VIPP) idea and I was back on the Island, a few months later in early 1994, where we ran a meeting to officially launch Lynne as the Area Director with the local committee to support her. At that meeting I made a speech, excerpts of which are below:

“… the purpose and nature of the pilot projects is as follows”

·        Small is beautiful

·        Defined geographic focus

·        Autonomous

·        Financially viable and self-supporting

·        Flexible and creative

·        Relevant to local needs. “

I then went on to “show” an imaginary slide show which depicted various true SU Canadian stories we had experienced in recent times:

·       “This is a picture of a young girl, about 10 years old. Her name is Sharon. She is reading the bible using the SU Quest Notes to guide her. She is totally absorbed and wishes she could do more than one days reading at a time. The Quest Notes were a gift from her Granny at Christmas. Her parents are thrilled that they have finally found something to encourage Sharon to read the bible every day.

·      Here you see Nan Ford sitting at her desk in the SU office. She is a volunteer and comes into the office two or three times a week to run our correspondence club for the Quest and One to One Notes. Nan is frowning because she is trying to figure out how to answer a question from a child who thinks that God was a bit unfair because He was threatening to punish all of the Israelites even though there must have been some of them who were living good lives.

·       Here we see Billy holding his baseball bat poised to hit a home run at the annual baseball camp. Last year we had over 100 campers attending and receiving professional coaching from Christian ex major league players. Billy is dreaming of being a major league player himself one day. He’s also thinking about the challenge he received that morning when the coach had said that for all the thrills of playing major league baseball, nothing could compare with the thrill of following Jesus.

·       In this slide you see Roseane and Maxine. They are both quite different. Roseane is a petite 12-year-old and Maxine is mature lady, into her 40s. They are both smiling broadly. They have just finished counselling a child each, who have just committed their lives to Jesus. It happened at a church based VBS which SU initiated last year. This is a first. Neither Roseane nor Maxine had ever led anybody to the Lord before."

And so, by early 1994 Lynne was launched, and we had a second pilot project. Lynne is a very dynamic, creative, and talented individual. I was sure that whatever transpired under her leadership would be good. The year had got off to a good start.

It was not all a bed of roses on Vancouver Island. I did get into trouble with Lynne’s committee on that visit. They pinned me to the wall a couple of times about “You people from the East just ignore us in the West”. It was my first time observing this kind of thinking. I was surprised. After all I had come a long way to see them and felt the last thing I was doing, was ignoring them. There is no accounting for those East/West tensions, I guess. It did alert me to this sensitive issue which I had previously been blissfully unaware of. Shortly thereafter we appointed June Wynne from BC and Harold Murray and TV Thomas from Alberta to the SU Board. This certainly did result in a more representative Board, which was an important step forward for the SU Board which up until then was comprised only of Ontarians.

Foreground: Eduardo Ramirez (America's Region)
David Jones (USA), Rob Cornish (Canada)

SU Canada is part of the SU America’s Region, which includes North, Central and South America. In early 1994 I attended the Regional meeting in El Salvador. My Spanish improved dramatically over the course of the four or five days we met. I enjoyed my first exposure to Latin America. All the North Americans attending were careful about what they ate. As it happened, I was the only one who did not contract the dreaded stomach bug. I surmise that maybe my African roots had given me a level of immunity the others did not enjoy. I enjoyed the fellowship. Once again, I was struck by how every country was doing its own thing, within its capacity, and context to achieve SU’s overall goals. I was further encouraged, in the Canadian context, to spread our wings, be creative and see what worked and what did not in our search for the silver bullet of SU ministry in Canada.

In the summer of 1994, we were busy again. The DRPP ran our second Single Parent Family Camp, two VBS programs, our second Sandbanks Beach Mission and a SU Sports baseball camp. Lynne was ramping up her program on Vancouver Island.

Earlier in the year I had initiated the Lamplighter Program. This was a “monthly giving program”, which we promoted to our wide base of Bible Reading Notes users. I had borrowed this idea from SU South Africa. It had gone down well, and we gained about 500 financial supporters who committed to giving regularly. This put a valuable foundation underneath our finances and bought us the capacity to begin to do some of the new things and take on some of the staff that we were beginning to do.

Rob and Cher - by the end of 1994 we
had much to be thankful for.

There was much to be encouraged about, but Cher and I were nevertheless feeling the strain. Cher was doing the finances for SU, in her part time position, which really had become a full-time position. She was also looking after the girls, managing the home, and generally keeping the show on the road. At the end of 1994 I wrote in our Christmas newsletter, “It has been extremely hectic, to the point sometimes when Cher and I have been tempted just to walk away from it. However, we have not, and we are still hanging in there”. Nevertheless, the time had come for Cher to take some pressure off us as a family. The decision was made that she would stay at home and I appointed Nellie Cotnam as our full time Administrator.

Despite, Cher and I feeling stressed, by the end of 1994, we had much to be thankful for. Our Quest Club was continuing under Nancy Ford’s leadership. Linda van Leuwen was beginning to contact the Bible Reading Reps in churches. The decline in circulation of our adult bible reading guides seemed to be slowing down. We had two Pilot Projects, supported by keen committees. Bob Johnson was a real going concern with SU Sports and had plans to expand. We were connecting with churches and helping them to run VBS programs. We had an excellent Beach Mission team in place and ideas on how to expand it. Somehow, we had grown the budget and miraculously balanced it each year. We were a going concern, despite being very stretched in all directions, I was satisfied with where we had got to. The future for SU looked hopeful and I was grateful to the Lord for His blessings in this regard.