Tim Wildmon
AFA president
March 2007 – One day in late January, I was driving to work listening to the radio. As some of you know, AFA owns and operates a Christian radio network of almost 200 stations across the country. It’s called American Family Radio and can also be heard online from anywhere in the world at www.afr.net. I was listening to one of our on-air personalities, J.J. Jasper, talk about the success of the movie Facing the Giants, made by Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia.
Facing the Giants is a wonderful story about a high school football coach and his trials in life. You may be thinking, “How could a movie made by a church be anything but second rate?” Well, trust me, it’s not. It’s first rate. Especially the story, which deals with real life issues while demonstrating to the viewer that God works in the lives of people who earnestly seek him.
AFA put out an e-mail alert about Facing the Giants and sold 17,000 copies in just a few days. That tells me that many people are hungry for good, wholesome movies with a positive message. Obviously Facing the Giants does not have any profanity, sex or gratuitous violence in it or AFA would not have recommended it.
This also reminds me that the Internet is having a major impact on how people communicate. It has been a real blessing to our work here at AFA. Here’s how.
As you know, AFA is an “activist” organization. We see social and moral problems in the culture, and we take on as many of them as we can and do so from a Christian perspective. And when we get into a battle, we try to win. But one of the big challenges over the years has been getting the information about the issues into the hands of our supporters like you.
In the past we could only take on one issue at a time. We would write a monthly letter about a particular issue, have the letter printed, mail it and hope the issue was still relevant by the time it reached supporters’ mailboxes.
And although we still communicate by mail, the Internet and e-mail allow us to get the ball rolling very quickly. We can contact millions of people in a matter of hours. In the last three years, AFA has been very effective in winning battles with our Internet activism. In fact, AFA has become the largest pro-family group on the Internet with some 3.4 million people having joined our e-mail action alert team. They are the first wave of AFA responders to each issue.
If you have access to the Internet, you can become a member of the first strike team bysigning up at www.afa.net. It will only take a couple of minutes. There is no fee. If you don’t have the Internet in your home, you can encourage others to join.
The e-mail alerts played a big role in getting the attention of Wal-Mart after the company had made at least two substantial financial gifts to groups that were promoting homosexual marriage. When we – all of us together – wrote, called and sent e-mails to Wal-Mart, the company realized they were on the wrong track and changed their corporate policy to no longer make financial contributions to groups that advocate same-sex marriage. This was a huge victory for our side! And it was the result of 3.4 million people speaking with one voice. The opinion of that many people packs quite a punch in the marketplace as well as with elected officials.
One thing I have learned over the years here at AFA is that we Christians had better be prepared to engage in the culture war for the long haul. The war is about the future of our country and what kind of America we will hand over to our children and our grandchildren. The people who subscribe to a secular humanist worldview – including many who are anti-Christian in their beliefs and actions – are tireless in their efforts to remake our country in their own godless image. I am talking about groups like the ACLU, Planned Parenthood (the largest abortion provider in the country) and many in the entertainment and news media.
What I would like to see happen is for our numbers to grow from 3.4 million to 5 million during 2007. I believe it can happen. I still believe there are many patriotic, God-fearing Americans who don’t know about AFA. I believe many of them would join our team if only they knew about our work. I am asking you to help us by going to www.afa.net and signing up for the alerts and then passing them on to your friends and family. If everyone reading this will take this simple action, it will go a long way toward increasing our activist list to 5 million people.
Consider what we have already done, then think about how much more good we could do. 
