75th Anniversary - Demand Soars

During 1978 Paul Allen, Ernie’s son started to work in the office helping his father with correspondence. All of the Gospel tracts had an invitation “If you desire to know the Lord Jesus Christ as your Saviour please write with your name and address for the booklet ‘Pardon for Sin and Assurance of Peace with God’ by Rev. W. Patton”. At that time a lot of letters were being received mostly from West Africa requesting the booklet. It was quite common for 200 letters to be received in one day. Each of the letters had to be read and a decision made as to what to send. Many students in the schools and universities wrote - so if the address was a school we would send an extra 80 tracts in the envelope - so when the envelope arrived the student would share these with his friends. There was a lot of work involved addressing envelopes and filling them with the literature.

Late 1978 - early 1979 there was an international postal strike - the result was that no overseas letters were received for weeks. When the strike finished the post man arrived one day with four mail sacks full of bundles of letters requesting Pardon and Assurance booklets and other letters from churches, missions and evangelists requesting quantities of Gospel Literature. Paul Allen can be seen with some of these bundles of letters.

During 1977 - 78 Ernie built a small extension to the back of the premises in 285 Newtownards Road. He then decided to purchase a 1850 Multilith printing machine to put into the extension - this machine was able to print a page a little larger than an A3 size page. Most of the literature was printed in the Outlook Press but this was the time that Ernie decided to start printing his own literature.

He felt that the Lord was impressing on his heart to phone a young man and invite him to join the ministry to be a printer. Just a few weeks earlier this young man had felt unsettled in the work he was doing and had prayed that if the Lord had something else for him - that the Lord would open the door. When Ernie phoned Samuel Adams and invited him to join Every Home Crusade and to be a printer - Samuel knew that the Lord was answering his prayer. Samuel started working during the last week of August 1978. Samuel had never seen a printing press so it was a big challenge to learn how to print.

As Ernie had purchased a new 1850 Multilith machine, there came with the machine 3 days of training free of charge by Walter the salesman who sold the machine to Ernie.

Walter was an expert and for 3 days he taught Samuel all the basics of printing - oil (ink) and water don’t mix - at least when applied in the correct quantities - not enough water and ink was everywhere - too much water and the ink would not go on the page.

Samuel was left with the machine and gradually over a period of time he learned how to print - he was able to print 4 tracts on one page. Ernie also had a small guillotine for cutting the pages. He also kept the 1250 Multilith in the extension which was used for the printing of the monthly newsletter - on pink paper.

The newsletter produced a lot of manual work and the small team had to take two pages - staple them together - then fold the pages to fit the envelope - envelopes had to be filled - then glued - and postage stamps applied. As there were several thousand envelopes to be filled it could take the team up to 3 days to do all this work.