Ask the Editor - What happened to Lawless?

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday June 3rd. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: And I’m Paul Butler.

Say, Nick, before I get to this month’s "Ask the Editor," I’d like to “Ask the Host.”

You already know what I’m going to say, because you and I talked about this before lunch with the students a few days ago. But I do hear from listeners who want some sense of whether the new donor drive succeeded for May.

EICHER: Well, Paul, appreciate the heads-up. It kind of gave me some time to prepare the numbers for you!

So, yeah, it’s a reasonable question because in the new donor drives, we don’t post our online goal the same way that we do for our calendar year-end and fiscal year-end drives.

And in truth we don’t even set an online goal.

What we do instead is we aim for incremental improvement.

So to measure that, we have to start with a baseline. And because these new donor drives go back only to the fall of 2020, we don’t have a long history and we do want to make apples-to-apples comparisons.

So we can compare last November with the previous November, and this past May with the previous May.

So with that as a backdrop, I can tell you we did decline November 2021 vs. November 2020 in terms of new donors—and that gave us reason specifically to pray that God might work to turn that positive in May.

And I’m happy to say God answered that prayer!

He gave us an increase of 18.8 percent this May over last May! That’s almost 20 percent, and a real sign of good health, because the greater the number of individuals helping to carry the funding load, the more sustainable the whole project is. It’s just great news all the way around and it’s great going into the fiscal year-end drive. So thanks for asking!

BUTLER: Well, that sets the table for the first “Ask the Editor” question for this month because I did receive a letter from a listener and WORLD donor who wrote to share her distress with the way we handle donation requests. She says, in her view, that we spend too much time expressing the need.

She also said, and I’ll quote here: “[T]he repeated requests for money make[] me feel frustrated and unappreciated. I believe that you do truly appreciate our gifts, but this is rarely stated during your giving drives.”

So let me start by saying, thank you for your gifts! We are humbled that you have chosen to support our work of Biblically objective journalism. You make our daily program—and all our additional podcasts—possible each and everyday. And any with that last part: Any feeling that any listener has that we don’t appreciate his or her gift—we never want inadvertently to communicate that! We stress this in our staff meetings that we honor your gifts by practicing good stewardship and by working as unto the Lord.

But thanks for writing. It is a useful corrective, I think, to make certain that even as we communicate to you our ongoing financial needs … that you also know if you’ve already given during the course of a drive or have given in the past that we deeply appreciate you.

EICHER: We do, and they are deeply appreciated.

BUTLER: Now, last item: We’ve received a lot of emails this week like this one—

I’ve been waiting to hear an update on Lynn Vincent and the Lawless podcast. I’m concerned about the quick halt to the podcast, which didn’t seem to be planned.

I miss her and hope she’s doing okay.

Thanks,

Lisa

For those who have been praying for Lynn—thank you! We are all grateful for your support and your concern for her. Lynn is the primary researcher and force behind Lawless so when she had her small stroke a few weeks ago, we knew we had to hit the pause button on the project.

She’s doing well. We talk frequently, but her doctor said she really needed some concentrated rest and anyone who knows Lynn, knows that that prescription brings with it the worst side effects for a driven personality like her!

As far as we can tell, Lynn is now symptom-free. In fact, in a follow-up MRI, doctors could not see even the tiny pixel they saw the first time around. Was it so small they missed it? Or did God answer prayer? We’re not sure, but either way, it’s great news.

In other great news, we are back to writing and producing the final episodes of Lawless Season 1 and will be back with Episode 6 later this month.

Thanks again for the outpouring of love and support for Lynn, Lawless, and the WORLD Radio staff.

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