MissionFundraising.com/JimWaltersOnline.com

Mission Support and Church Fundraising Resources

Archive for March, 2009

Welcome!

Welcome to MissionFundraising.com and JimWaltersOnline.com

New price on all of our eBooks: $9.97

I’m Jim Walters, a pastor and avid supporter of missions. On this site, we are providing a whole bunch of Mission Support and Church Fundraising resources. Some are free, others cost just a little bit. We hope you find what you’re looking for, and that you find these tools useful.

You can find out more about me, and how I’ve come to learn a little bit about fundraising by reading the About The Author page.

You can take a look at the handbooks I have to offer by going to the Products page. I even have something you can download for free: “Top Ten Youth Fund Raisers.” Just fill in your name and email address at the upper right-hand corner of the website, and you’ll be on your way!

Be sure to scroll down and view the blog posts. These often have good, insightful information to help you learn and keep focused on your task: fundraising for mission support, church planting, etc.

Check back often because we’re just getting started. Let me know how these items work out for you.

Jim Walters Jim@JimWaltersOnline.com

Been there, done that!

My family and I have served as full-term missionaries in Papua New Guinea, and as short-term missionaries (15 months) in Haiti. In each case, raising the finances seemed to draw all (or at least, most) of our focus.

We always hear from others, “Money is the least of your concerns. When God decides it’s “time to go”, the funds will come in.” Some may find these words “encouraging”, others may find them “trite”. Some may say, “Yeah, well, you kind of have to say that…that’s what missionaries always say.”

Well, now you can hear it from “the horse’s mouth”: it was true for us, in every case, including the furloughs in-between terms. I remember our finances were “short” just over $350/month in “promised support.” We had only days to go before our mission organization would “pull the plug” and say we missed the deadline, and we’ll try again in 6-months (based on open training dates). With just days to go, a colleague at my job walked up to me and said he and his wife wanted to support us. I was happy to hear that another “small brick” would be put in place; another chipping away of the huge boulder that seemed to stop us. I asked him, “How much do you think you’d be able to do?” His reply shocked me, and humbled me: “We’d like to give $375 per month.”

You must remember, this was not coming from a church with hundreds of people and a bountiful budget. It came from one family! This mission support promise put us “over the top”, and we were on our way! Glory to God.

If and when God wants you to go, you will GO!

-Gary Skrobot

The World is Waiting

The opportunities for short term mission trip work are better than ever.  A good friend of mine is heading out with a team of 12 to Aizerbaijan, to preach and teach the Russian-speaking residents in the capital city of Bakur.  It turns out that it is legal, in this mostly Muslim country, to preach/teach within a home of a non-Muslim ethnic Russian. So the Russian speakers, like the Macedonian of old, have invited these guys “to come over and help them.”
 
The catch is, travel costs are higher and everyone’s savings are lower.  The answer to that is not to cancel the trip, rather, it is to work “smarter” and enlist a broader circle of friends to help underwrite the trip.  This will get more people involved (and thus praying) in the work. Also, it’s the purest form of missionary work, since the term “missionary” comes from the Latin “misseo” (I send) and is a direct translation of the Greek “apostello” (”I send out for a purpose”).
 
Jim Walters

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