As many Seventh Day Baptists and other subscribers are aware, there have been several issues with the distribution of the Helping Hand for the current quarter (March-April-May 2015).  We have received numerous reports of churches which have either not received any copies or have not received their full subscription amounts.  In addition, many churches have reported that the condition of the copies they have received have been poor and that damage has occurred in transit.  We have tried to give updates on the status of this matter (on February 19 and March 2), but the updates haven’t brought the issues to an end.

In response to the problems that have arisen, we investigated the issues, first with the company contracted to prepare the publication for mailing, then with the postal service.  We have confirmed that the parcels were correctly packaged for mailing, and that the issues are with the United States Post Office.  More information about where specifically the problems occurred have been hard to come by.  Inquiries to the USPS have not yielded any information about the location of the missing issues of the Helping Hand which have not yet arrived at their destinations, but USPS officials have confirmed that the mailing should have taken about two weeks and that the issues left the Madison, WI post office on February 13th.

Unfortunately, this leaves us with a significant problem.  We do not print nearly enough extra copies of the Helping Hand to allow for mailing of duplicate copies to all those subscribers who have not received their full subscription amounts.  At this point, the copies remaining here at the Center in Janesville would not begin to abate the shortage.  The only remaining option for us is to make this entire issue of the Helping Hand available by PDF, which you can download below.  The downloadable file is our Large Print edition–if you would like to print it smaller, when you print it off, you may select to print to pages per sheet and that should reproduce something like the standard publication.

Obviously, we regret the difficulties this quarter and apologize to those whose devotional schedules and Sabbath Schools have been disrupted by these issues.  We are actively working to ensure this doesn’t happen again by what means we can, though we are in some senses yoked with the US Postal Service, so there are no guarantees.  We are working with our mailing service to try and insure to the extent we can that this debacle does not happen again.  We are grateful for the patience and grace of Seventh Day Baptists throughout this time!

No decision has been made yet about how this will effect the billing for this most recent quarter, but we are working to find an equitable solution so that subscribers will be billed fairly for this quarter (if at all).

We encourage all churches to inform us about the number of copies of this quarter’s publication they have received as well as the condition of those that have arrived if they have not done so already.

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience and interruption in service.

You may download the Large Print PDF of this quarter’s Helping Hand here.

(As a reminder, the Kindle version of this quarter’s Helping Hand is available here.)

–Submitted by NickKersten on Mon, 2015-03-16 12:42