Subject: A call for the Bethany family to fast and pray
To: All Bethany
From: Dave Hicks, the BI Board, and the BI L-team
October 24, 2005
A Call to Fasting and Prayer for the Future of Bethany
This past weekend we have had the Bethany International Board on campus and want to take this opportunity to put out an appeal to all of Bethany to pray and seek the Lord.
We are in very unique times and are seeking the Lord for guidance so that Bethany is prepared in the years to come to continue to fulfill its vision and purpose.
In the Board meeting we focused on our situation as an organization. This past year we have sought to reduce costs and increase income. Many of us have put so much into this process and we are very thankful to all of you who have so willingly sacrificed to make Bethany’s future healthier.
We’ve seen real benefits from consolidating our campus – synergies with BCOM, BIM and GO100, as well as real reduction in costs.
While we’ve been working to balance our budget, we’ve seen so much of God’s grace around the world, both through the fruit in the work of our own missionaries and also through the establishment of the GO100 schools around the world. We are seeing hundreds of international missionaries trained on a yearly basis and sent out to disciple the world’s least-reached.
On the operational side, we had identified land on our campus that is not needed for strategic ministry and could be developed and sold to create an endowment for our ministries. With our land development plans, we were well on the way towards developing a balanced budget for Bethany for the first time in several years.
This has been an incredible past three weeks. We’ve received amazing communications on three fronts, two positive and one negative. We want to tell you about these and ask you to seek the Lord about their implications.
The negative development is that our negotiations with our property developers have come to a point where their offer is now 50% less than what we had expected it to be.
We have worked for a couple of years to get definition on our property development plans on the east side of our campus. Now we have come to a place where we feel we need to evaluate how we go forward with this.
Positively, one of the very good friends of this ministry, an attorney who does many land deals as a regular part of his professional life, has come to us with a key piece of information. He has been in dialog with other professionals who tell us that if we were to sell the entire 63 acres we would receive up to twice the appraised value of the land. Just three years ago we received a very healthy appraisal, and several months ago when we had the property reappraised we heard that the property could be worth substantially more than that first amount! We have not yet had an offer at twice the appraised value, but we expect to get some sort of validation in the near future as to the worth of the property.
The second piece of key information is that one of Bethany’s major donors has acquired a piece of property that was formerly a nursing home with about 115,000 square feet of building space and at least 20 acres of available land. He is offering this land as a potential donation to Bethany if we would like to accept it. The only downside is that this land is not in the Twin Cities – it is eight miles south of Duluth on Interstate 35. It is a gorgeous piece of property situated on a hill, with marvelous views of forest for miles in three directions. This property would fit our needs, though the building would need some renovation, which the donor may also help us with.
If we were to move to Duluth, we could actually make the move rather quickly, likely being in the new facility as early as 6-9 months from now.
The BI Board has been meeting this past weekend and is trying to process these three pieces of information. The Board has concluded that we do not have enough information and we do not yet have definitive guidance from the Lord in what direction we are to proceed.
We wonder, in all of this, whether God is putting a challenge before us that will cause us to respond in a radical way to his call before us. Bethany is a Great Commission organization, and we exist to delight God’s heart and extend his kingdom by training and sending servant leaders to disciple the world’s least reached peoples. We need to ensure that whatever way that Bethany is organized, it is positioned in a way that ensures that we can carry out our vision in the most effective way possible.
This is not just about finances. This is about opportunity. One of the greatest opportunities that our leadership and the Board see is the opportunity to reconnect with the values that the founders of Bethany developed in the early days of the Fellowship. We need to re-embrace the core values: vibrant community, servant hood, the message of the cross, a deeper life, and missions. This is something we are seeking to do, whether we move or not!
When we think of the word “Bethany” we all tend to think of this land and this place. But Bethany is not primarily about the property; it is about the people, the values, and the mission of Bethany. Where we carry that out is important, but the place we reside can never be the most important element. The important element is not a piece of dirt, but an embracing of God and his purposes for us.
Should we continue with our present property development plans? Should we sell our entire campus and accept our donor’s offer of land south of Duluth? Should we sell our entire campus and look for land/facilities elsewhere (urban or rural in the Twin Cities area) where we could put up purpose-built facilities to assist us in our Great Commission purposes?
We don’t know yet.
As the Board has met this past weekend, two stories from the scriptures have come to us with special relevance: first, the mistake that Joshua and the Israelites made by not inquiring of God when the Gibeonites came to deceive them into believing that they were not people of the land. We do not want to make that mistake. Secondly, when King David told the prophet Nathan that he wanted to build a house for God, Nathan initially said, “Do whatever God has put within your heart.” But then the more specific word came through Nathan that it was to be Solomon who would build the temple. We want to ensure that God has every opportunity to specifically speak his word to us, to guide us definitively into the path that he has laid out for us.
Dave Hicks, the Board, and the L-team have initiated a week of prayer and fasting to seek God’s guidance. We believe that the Lord can speak through our entire worldwide community, and so we are engaging every corner of the Bethany world in this process of seeking the Lord.
Please be in prayer and communicate to us anything that you feel the Lord speaks to you about via one of the following:
website: https://secure.bethanyinternational.org/feedback/
anonymous email feedback@bethanyinternational.org
or dave.hicks@bethanyinternational.org
May God give us all direction as we turn to Him during this time of fasting and prayer.
Dave Hicks, Bethany International CEO
The Bethany International Board
The Bethany International L-team