Friday 24 April 2009

Mission

I'm part of a small team at church tasked with bringing a suggestion to the church of a number of organisations for the church to support financially with our tithe. So, we are thinking of various different types of things to support, and then once we've got a big enough pool of suggestions we'll sit down and have a think about what would be good to support.

There are some individuals that we support as a church already that we'll continue to support (it would probably be a bit unfair to just drop them, haha). There's also some individuals that we've discussed supporting but as we might not end up supporting them it's probably a good idea to not mention them! But here are some of the ideas we've had so far:

- The Haggai Institue (See previous post)
- Grace Baptist Mission (the missionary organisation linked with our denomination)
- A CU movement in another country (or UCCF in this country!)
- Caring for Life
- Pilgrim Homes
- the charity that the NWA offering went to this year that works to stop human trafficking (haven't got the name to hand)
- an organisation working the persecuted church (e.g barnabas fund or open doors)


Let me know if you have any experience of any of these or any that you would recommend/not recommend. I'd love it if you could suggest to me any other individuals/organisations that you think would be good for us to support.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Scott, we've done a similar thing here - refocusing effort on five particular ministries. Got some other thoughts which are better not posted....give me a call if you're interested to know how it's all worked. Number's on our church website - www.yateleybaptist.com

Scott Thomson said...

Thanks Adrian for this, and sorry that I didn't get in touch - I read the post too late.

If anyone's interested, we ended up deciding that to represent a breadth of Christian work, we wanted to support groups in 4 categories - Mission in the UK, Mission Abroad, Social Action/Care (couldn't think of a name!) and the Persecuted Church. We decided that as God has blessed us financially we could support a larger number of organisation, which gave the added benefit of ensuring we are praying about more stuff that's going on away from Hartlepool - we find it all too easy to become insular up here in the NorthEast!

The 7 we ended up supporting are:
- UCCF
- The Philip Project
- Justice and Care
- Pilgrim Homes
- Open Doors
- the Javeds: a missionary couple working with GBM in Bradford
- the Swansons: a missionary couple in Cypruss.