ENGLAND—The Philadelphia Church of God regional office in Edstone reported in the first week of April that it has received the highest single-program response on record for the Key of David television program in the United Kingdom. The April 3 program, “The Most Important Book Since the Bible,”advertised Mystery of the Ages, by Herbert W. Armstrong.

Fourteen student workers and United Kingdom-Europe regional office staff, including Mr. Stephen Flurry and his daughter, Vienna, have answered 279 telephone calls, texts and online requests, exceeding the previous record set by the March 13 program, “The Crisis at the Close” (266).

These scores of requests for Mystery of the Ages have been forwarded to the regional office’s mail department, which is responsible for shipping books, booklets and other publications to interested individuals across the United Kingdom, the Continent and beyond.

The Edstone Mail Department

The UK-Europe office’s mail department includes one staff member and three volunteers who work to move literature out of inventory and into the hands of subscribers, viewers and listeners within one week from the time the order was received.

Mail department manager Richard Howard supervises the department, implementing Royal Mail standards and pcg business rules, recording and analyzing mail data, and coordinating volunteer work. He also answers inbound calls and helps coordinate the European site for the Church’s annualFeast of Tabernacles; this year located in Enfield, Ireland.

Howard’s mother, Kathy, has worked in the pcg’s UK office in some capacity since 1994. In fact, she has been working to send out Church literature since the 1960s, when she worked for the Ambassador College Press in Radlett, Hertfordshire. Today, she volunteers her time entering and processing literature requests in the department’s database.

After processing 82 text message requests from the April 3 program, Mrs. Howard cut the full mail order on Monday afternoon, sorting requests according to titles and size of literature, then printing packing slips for the other two mail volunteers.

Leavesden congregation members Jossie Clarke and Rasika Perera pack most of the mail for the department, volunteering an average of five to six hours per week.

After the main Key of David mailing ships on Monday afternoons, Mrs. Howard continues to process and pack additional mail orders throughout the week, sending out at least one more mailing by Wednesday or Thursday.

Perera said the amount of mail has drastically increased. “Monday is a full day for us now,” she said, estimating that the amount has increased about 20 times since the program began airing on cbs Reality. “There is quite a lot more mail now; it’s exciting.”

The volunteers divide the packaged literature into three piles: one for the United Kingdom, one for Europe, and one for the rest of the world. According to Mrs. Howard, before the regional office moved to its new location in Edstone, the “rest of the world” pile (which includes Africa, Australasia, the Middle East and North America) was the largest mail category. Now, the United Kingdom is the largest by far. Mrs. Howard counts, weighs and bags each pile, then pays the postage invoice online.

Bagged and ready to go, the nearest able-bodied man (usually Christopher Eames, whose office is inside the mail department) hauls the 24-pound mailbags to Edstone’s front door for the Royal Mail, which arrives to pick up outgoing shipments every weekday afternoon at 4:15. UK-bound literature from the Monday shipment arrives in letterboxes within two or three days. Mail bound for France, Germany, Spain and the rest of Europe arrives in five to seven days.

Regional office manager David Howard said that “the phone rings like crazy” now at the regional office in response to programs and advertisements on television, online and in print, and as a result, there are “tons more mail bags than ever before.”

“The Freeview television market in the UK has really opened up opportunities for God’s Work to broadcast His truth that simply were not there even a few years ago,” Mr. Flurry said. “The television program in the UK gives us the opportunity to distribute hundreds of books and booklets each week, and at a relatively low cost.”

Richard Howard said that when the mail department moved to Edstone, the staff planned for expansion with an extra set of bookshelves for a second mail-packing station. “We’ve got storage conveniently right downstairs,” he said, referring to Edstone’s 5,500-square-foot cellar. “So we are in a lot better position to better expand further.”

Since late 2014, the pcg has increased its focus on its work in the United Kingdom, acquiring the Edstone campus and starting the weekly Key of David broadcast in the fall of that year. The UK-Europe regional office mail department moved from Northampton, Northamptonshire, to Edstone in January 2015; since then, it has shipped more than 25,462 books and booklets to 180 members, prospective members and youths, 232 co-workers and donors, and 2,613 subscribers.

In 2015, the office logged a 60 percent increase in literature requests over the previous year. Literature requests for the first quarter of 2016 are up 90 percent over the same period in 2014. Philadelphia Trumpet subscriptions in the United Kingdom and Europe are also rising: up 46 percent since the mail department came on line at Edstone 14 months ago.

“If you just take January and February of last year, the first eight programs of last year, all totaled, there were 220 requests for literature,” Mr. Flurry said on his Trumpet Daily Radio Show, “[W]e beat that by a mile just this past weekend. If you take the first three months of last year: 13 total programs, the first quarter of 2015, there were 543 requests for literature. And we’ve gotten almost that many … just in the last two weekends. So some really exciting growth there.”