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What is Shepherd Ministries? |
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Shepherd Ministries started in the late 1980 with our own need to feed
continually on the Good News in order to bring "fresh news from heaven" to
the churches we were pastoring. Many of the excellent tapes we fed on
came from "The Lord's Own Tape Ministry", directed by Daniel and Becky Beutler. Many of the messages were so good we made copies to share withothers. We began to build a library of Golden Treasures.
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Copying tapes from one tape recorder to another was tedious and time consuming. I "bought"
a high speed tape duplicator. I had to find ways to make it pay for itself, so I contacted the Full
Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship and Women's AGLOW chapters in a nearby city. They had
been praying for some one to tape their meetings! I was in business.
I soon discovered that I had a very good money maker on my hands. Many a night I came
home from an FGBMFI or AGLOW meeting with enough money to buy groceries. A CFO camp
let me tape their camp. We ended up with money enough to take a few days vacation! And the
best part of it was that a real tape ministry was developing as we were enabled to share the
tapes.
We could see that God was blessing and prospering our small tape ministry, so I prayed
and dedicated the tape ministry fully to God, asking Him to prosper it more in every way. I
told God, "I'll do with this tape ministry anything You want me to do." Little did I know that this
was exactly what God was waiting to hear.
One night at a prayer group I heard myself say to the people, "You can have all the tapes you
want at cost!" I hadn't planned to say that, and when I heard the words I thought, "That's
generous of me!"
Imagine my surprise at the next meeting of the prayer group when I heard myself say, "You can
have all the tapes you want for free!" When we got home my wife, Helen, and I prayed about this.
The answer was definite. We were to begin giving the tapes away, both to those who requested
them, and to those to whom we were led.
Since we started giving all the tapes away and were depending on free will donations, we
incorporated as a nonprofit organization so that we could give tax credit. Since then we have
added thousands of tapes, and expanded into video tapes and video production and editing.
In 1998 we became the official tape archive of the Camps Farthest Out, which is the main
arm of this ministry today.
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