discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University
discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University
discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University
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245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 184<br />
184 Mobilizing the Local Church<br />
personal spending in order to free up more money for global mission. Believers<br />
need to encourage each other to live with great intentionality in employing all<br />
their resources—time, money, gifts, and abilities—for the task of world evangelism.<br />
In His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said the use of money revealed the<br />
focus of people’s passions, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be<br />
also” (Matthew 6:21). Implied in that passage is the principle that the need for<br />
believers to give far exceeds the mission enterprise’s need to receive such giving.<br />
Many Christians will say they wish they could give more money to <strong>missions</strong>.<br />
Tragically, <strong>missions</strong> offerings too often get reduced to bothersome intrusions in<br />
busy church activity calendars. At the mention of a special <strong>missions</strong> offering,<br />
church members scramble to see how much can be spared from their bank account<br />
or from whatever amount of cash they are carrying at the moment. Sadly,<br />
what they wind up giving is often less than they would like for it to be.<br />
One way of enabling people to give to global mission in the way they would<br />
like has been a program called Faith Promise. That system of giving originated<br />
with Canadian pastor Oswald J. Smith who called on believers to make yearly<br />
commitments of what they believed the Lord was asking them to give to world<br />
evangelism. In the faith promise concept, <strong>missions</strong> giving—like the tithe—comes<br />
off the top of a person’s income rather than being scraped together from leftover<br />
money at the end of the month. The faith promise system has been successful because<br />
people find they give more to <strong>missions</strong> when they do it on a weekly or<br />
monthly basis rather than through one or two big offerings in a year.<br />
Churches that raise money for world evangelism through faith promise<br />
plan an annual <strong>missions</strong> weekend. During that special event, a special speaker<br />
(usually a missionary) will challenge people to commit to what they feel God<br />
wants them to give to world evangelism during the following year. These commitments<br />
are usually paid out on a weekly or monthly basis. People are urged<br />
to step out on faith, to go beyond what seems humanly possible and to make a<br />
faith promise. Often, in a moment of praise, the total of these promises will be<br />
announced at the conclusion of the commitment service. Occasionally faith<br />
promise has been promoted with the idea that God is going to provide extra<br />
money to be given, the implication being that if God does not provide the extra<br />
money, nothing needs to be given to global mission. That is a distortion of<br />
the concept.<br />
While faith promise time serves to gather financial commitments, it is also<br />
an opportunity for a local church to host a missionary or a missionary family<br />
as special speakers. It is also a chance to educate those who are being asked to<br />
fund a mission program as to where the <strong>missions</strong> money raised in that church<br />
will be going. It is even a good time to teach a new global mission song or two<br />
to a congregation.