sent back to the factory for repairs, construction was complete by July 1979, and ICT's cable channel 8 was officially subsumed by the new KCIK ("Christ is King") on August 1, 1979. From the start, the station provided secular entertainment and sports, alongside Christian shows including The 700 Club and The PTL Club. KCIK was not an instant success. By 1981, Missionary Radio Evangelism was facing financial troubles, citing poor local support, and courting buyers for the television station. Rock Church, a ministry based in Virginia which had a national program on the Christian Broadcasting Network, entered into negotiations to purchase channel 14. It sought to run the station with a bilingual Christian lineup to reach viewers in El Paso and across the Mexican border in Ciudad Juárez. However, negotiations did not go well. Rock Church's pastor, John Gimenez, was brought in as manager by MRE at the start of December. However, KCIK's board soon realized this was a mistake because it represented a premature transfer of control to Rock Church without an application, forbidden by the FCC, and he resigned within hours of his appointment. Ultimately, the Rock Church bid fell apart when the church could not finance the station's operating costs and because it did not desire to take on the station's liabilities. De Rance, Mulderrig, and Cox years Missionary Radio Evangelism, still facing indebtedness and what it termed as "cash flow difficulties", continued to find a buyer, and the De Rance Foundation, a Catholic organization from Milwaukee, acquired 20 percent of KCIK in 1982 with an option to purchase the rest. It was the first broadcasting property owned by De Rance and marked the station's transition to a full-time secular independent. De Rance acquired the remainder in 1983. The new owners moved to bolster programming, even airing Nightline when KVIA-TV dropped it from its schedule. After a shift in strategy to further deemphasize religious programs, in 1986, KCIK-TV signed up as a charter affiliate of Fox, an arrangement its general manager called a "no-lose situation". Because Fox offered little programming at the outset, the station still considered itself an independent with a stronger "independent look". After a high-profile failure of its Catholic television programming elsewhere at its other broadcast property, KIHS-TV in the Los Angeles market, the De Rance Foundation began its retreat from broadcasting. Having paid $5 million for the station in 1982, it sold the