When the first preparation Sunday came, almost the whole church gathered for instructions. At this time I set up two objectives for the Christians to attain. First, they must try to get a total of ten thousand unbelievers,—not Christians of other churches,—to attend our meetings. Second, out of this number they must try to get at least fifteen hundred decisions for Christ.
The first thing needed was money. Where could we get it? War means money. Without money you cannot wage a successful campaign. I said to the congregation:
“I don’t know how much this campaign will need in all, but I think we must have at least fifteen hundred yen ($750) to begin with. It will be cheap indeed if we can save fifteen hundred souls with fifteen hundred yen, which means only one yen a soul. Now for this fifteen hundred yen you must not look to anybody else but to yourselves. This is your campaign, and you must pay for it. This morning at the beginning of the preparation I ask every one of you to give as much as you can for this campaign fund. If there is any one among you here who says he has no money to give, I advise him to sell his clothing and buy a sword, as Christ told his disciples on the eve of a great conflict.”
Then I distributed paper and pencils among them, on which to write the amounts which they were willing to give. When those papers were gathered up and counted, they brought the result to me, and I found exactly fifteen hundred and four yen.
Then the people said, “This is not the work of man, but of God.”
To attain these great objectives the next thing was to advertise the meeting in various ways. Newspaper advertising was, of course, the first, and then many big advertising boards were set up in the crowded quarters of the city. Besides this, three hundred and fifty thousand posters or handbills were printed, and each member of the church distributed five hundred of these during the campaign days. Even the Sunday-school scholars, numbering over three hundred, were enlisted in this work. Each of the younger children distributed one hundred posters, and the older ones three hundred. Last of all, every church member was requested to find twenty unbelievers who would promise to attend the campaign meetings. These we called the “pledged hearers.” This plan of finding the “pledged hearers” before the campaign opened worked out very well, as the church people were thus brought into direct personal contact with most of the people who came to our meetings.
With this training and these objectives we began the campaign February 5, 1919. But unfortunately we failed to attain our first objective. There were two reasons for this: One was that on the very first morning of our campaign all the city papers made a public announcement from the headquarters of the Police Department, strongly advising the people not to attend any kind of a mass meeting on account of the terrible influenza, which was then raging throughout the whole city; the other was such a big snowstorm on the fourth night that all the city trolley cars stopped running.
But in spite of these hindrances about eight thousand people came during the six nights. Of these about two thousand were Christians, so the unbelievers, who were the real object of the campaign, numbered only about six thousand, a little over half of our objective.
Mr. Kanamori’s Decision Card