It wasn’t an Easter open house with thousands of people, but it was still a blessing for us to receive a few of our friends from out of town last Saturday.
Young Foundations
We started the tours of the VGR building at 9:00 and the last tour went through at about noon. The first stop was in our bistro area, where we learned about the Young Foundations department through a video presentation. There was an update on the Still Waters construction, summary of the different banquets and youth gatherings around the world, and some interesting facts.
Press
Then, the tour moved to the pressroom, where we heard an overview of the printing operation. We have printed in about 70 different languages, and more than 50 of those languages are printed here in Jeffersonville. We also print in India, Russia, Ukraine, and China.
• The Harris M200 web press prints the black and white pages on the inside of the Message books. It can print about 48,000 32-page books every hour, and in that hour, it goes through about 3,200 pounds of paper. Our record for a ten-hour day is 522,000 books.
• The Heidelberg six-color press prints the magazines, book covers, and any special announcements. We even print our letterhead and envelopes on this press. All colors are generated from a mixture of four colors: cyan (blue), magenta (red), yellow, and black. Since we have another two spots for colors, we can also put a coating or a special color in there too. The coating is what gives our magazines either a glossy, matt, or soft-touch look. This press can print about 10,000 sheets an hour, and there are four book covers per sheet, so we can get about 40,000 book covers per hour if running at full speed.
• From the Heidelberg, the books and magazines then go for a quick stop at the cutter and then on to the folder. There is a special brother who works on the folder named Mike Pister. Brother Mike was hired 45 years ago by Spoken Word Publications and has continued his service to the Bride here at VGR. He never misses a day.
• The Collator. If you have been on tour at VGR, then you know the unmistakable sound of the collator. This is the machine that puts the books and magazines together, staples, and trims them. Then they are put into boxes and sent to the shipping department. We run from 8,000 to 10,000 books through the collator every hour.
Shipping
The next stop on the tour was the Shipping Department. With everything that goes on at VGR: printing, overseas offices, YF, Still Waters, websites, etc., we might not think about sending all this material around the world. However, shipping is the largest department at VGR, with 11 employees. We have shipped directly to more than 170 countries, and over the past five years, we have shipped over 4 million pounds of material. Last year alone, we shipped out 6.5 million Message books, along with numerous tracts, CDs, MP3 players, and even some office furniture and computers.
Public Relations
The Public Relations Department was next. Public Relations has a lot of different duties with the Catch The Vision publications, tracts, custom Bibles, special publications, branham.org website, and themessage.com website. The main emphasis of the presentation was on themessage.com and the effects it has had over the past few months. Every day, about 150 people visit that website for the first time, which can only be a result people witnessing about the Message. We are constantly receiving questions about Brother Branham from a wide variety of people, including a Catholic priest, a female Pentecostal preacher, an Episcopal priest, a Pentecostal pastor, a woman who was searching for the Lord and stumbled onto the website, and many more. In short, all the work that you are doing out in your area is working. Keep it up!
Missionary
The tour then went to the Missionary Department, where we learned some interesting facts about the VGR work overseas. The main purpose of the Missionary Department is to keep up with the daily activities of the foreign offices and meet their needs with Message material, office needs, vehicles, personnel, etc. Here are a few missionary statistics:
• We now have 54 offices, 29 distribution centers, and thousands of lending libraries worldwide.
• There are about 200 overseas employees.
• We have new offices in Colombia, Malawi, Tanzania, and Congo.
• Brazil has about 800 churches and 70,000 believers.
• Zimbabwe has about 1,000 churches.
• India has about 100,000 believers.
• Pakistan, a staunchly Muslim country, has about 3,000 believers.
• Nigeria has 920 churches and about 80,000 believers.
• The Democratic Republic of Congo has about 15,000 churches and well over a million believers.
Audio
The last stop was at the Audio Editing Department. Here are a few facts:
• There are 1,205 sermons, which is about 1,900 hours of English audio.
• Countless hours have been devoted to finding new sermons and locating missing portions of sermons we already have. Over the past few years, we have gone through more than 25,000 reel-to-reel tapes, trying to find any missing audio.
• We have 44 different language translations in audio, which is about 3,000 sermons, and 10,000 hours.
• New technology has enabled us to edit sermons much faster than before. What used to take days, now takes us only a couple hours.
• We have 17 overseas recording studios.
• The translators who record in the Jeffersonville studio stand behind the same pulpit that Brother Branham preached from at his Tabernacle. It is the same one that floated to the ceiling during the 1937 flood and protected his Bible laying on top.
We appreciate all those who made the effort to visit us at VGR. This building is dedicated to your service and we count it an honor any time we receive a visitor from among the Bride of Christ.