Tag Archives: support

When Do You Leave?

Leave a reply

It’s the first question we get from just about anyone who knows (a) our names and (b) that we’re missionaries: “When do you leave for Germany?”

ImageIt’s also probably the hardest to answer, even though the answer is simple: we leave when we are fully funded, when churches and individuals have committed to give enough support to cover our entire monthly budget for at least one term (five years, in our case). It’s an answer Anna and I have given so many times that we feel we must surely be turning blue in the face by now.

But it’s not an answer that seems to resonate. Maybe we as a culture are fond of clear deadlines. Maybe most of us (with what I can’t help thinking of as “real jobs,” in unfavorable comparison with my own) think of work, even ministry work, as basically a contract in which the employee is given a clear start date when he or she is hired – that is, you start when you’re needed, at the pleasure of the one hiring you. For missionaries with some agencies, no doubt that’s closer to the case, and they can leave for the field less than fully supported if the ministry demands it. But there are good reasons for doing it the way our agency does.

The most basic of those reasons is a very obvious reality: our support base is in one country, our work in another, faraway one. Raising support is a task that requires making personal connections – you can communicate well enough from the field, especially nowadays, but it’s essentially impossible to meet new potential supporters and nearly as difficult to turn potential supporters into actual supporters by phone or email. And a second reason is like it: missionaries who have to raise their own support never really get to stop raising support. People lose jobs, encounter unexpected expenses, or just lose interest or forget; church budgets crash because of splits or economic downturns. Support goes away more quickly and often than it accumulates.

Take these realities together, and you can see why it would be a pretty bad idea to send us to the field without even once reaching 100% of our funding. We’d likely never hit 100% ever again, and while we would be able to set a clearer start date and get into ministry earlier, we’d be setting ourselves up to have to leave the field unexpectedly, arguably a much worse outcome than a delayed start.

Still, it’s irksome to have to answer that dreaded FAQ honestly, and that shows more about our hearts than about the realities of mission work. I want to give people a deadline so they’ll know the time to give is now; I want to give a deadline so they’ll believe it’s important for me to be on the field sooner rather than later – so they’ll know I’m important to the team we’re joining. I want to give people a deadline because I’m tired of raising support, and I want to will an end into sight; I want to give a deadline because I want to have the answers.

Mostly, I want to give people a deadline because the real answer is “When God wants us to go,” and that’s an answer that requires me to kill my desire to be seen as important, to be seen as successful, to be seen as having it together. And of course that’s what I need more than anything, which is perhaps the wisdom lurking behind requiring full funding before we can go to the field.

So: when do we leave? When God wants us to go.

-Ben

First Impressions

Leave a reply

We spent a week last month in Berlin, the first time either of us had been back in Germany in nearly four years. It was an opportunity opened up to us by my brother’s decision to get married in France over Easter weekend – since we were in Europe anyway, it was (comparatively) a hop, skip, and a jump over to Berlin from the Paris area.

ImageMost missionaries in our agency do a trip like this – the shop term is “vision trip” – long before they’re as close to moving to their field as we are. Having lived and worked in Berlin before under the same team leader we’ll have this time around, we committed to our new work sight unseen, even though we’d never really been to the part of the city we’d be serving in, nor had we met our German partner (actually, our team leader hadn’t even met our German partner when we started raising support!).

Even though the trip was great, it’s been bittersweet to be Imageback. We see our support raising as a ministry to the people who are sending us, and we feel better able to do that now that we have at least a few first impressions of the place we’ll call home and the people who will be our co-laborers there. At the same time, it’s just hard to have been there and not know when we’ll return for good – we must be supported at 100% of our monthly budget (we’re at nearly 80% as of this writing) to move to Berlin, so we can’t set a date before that point.

Still, it’s good to be able to share a few of those first impressions with you:

  • We’re going to be living and serving in western Europe this time. That wasn’t the case before, even though we were in the same city; we have relocated from the former East to the former West, and the feel of the place is different in a way that’s hard to pin down. It’s relatively conservative and religious, although that needs to be measured by Berlin standards – it means that “only” something like half of the roughly 80,000 residents are professing non-Christians. (That’s not taking into account the likely majority of self-identified Christians: those who were baptized as babies and therefore pay the church tax but who haven’t darkened the doors of a church since their baptism.)
  • Lichterfelde is just nice. It’s green, quiet, with more kids than many parts of the city, a pretty canal running through the middle of it, and some rather ornate old villas that lend a real charm to the area. There are a lot of positive words I’d apply to a lot of Berlin, but “charming” wouldn’t spring to mind in many other areas.
  • The larger area isn’t monolithic, though. Go a mile or two north and you’ll find yourself in Steglitz, a downtown strip of conspicuous consumption. Go the same distance south and you’re in a huge public housing project, a poor, immigrant-dominated area that feels surprisingly inner-city even though it’s on the very southern edge of Berlin.
  • Our ministry partnership is exciting, with a pastor who lines up well with our team theologically, is in real need of hands to help bear the ministry load, and hopes to grow his church in maturity as well as in numbers. (Not to mention that he’s married to a Texan, meaning he’s aware that salsa should not be ketchup and that the leaves of the coriander plant are edible too.) It’s clear that there’s a place for us, and that’s encouraging.

ImageOf course, our encouragement also means we’re itching to be there, so if you haven’t yet, mosey on over to our support page and take out a chunk of the last fifth of our monthly budget.

-Ben

Where Does the Money Come From?

1 Reply

As you can tell from our nifty Berlin-TV-Tower-shaped support thermometer over there on the sidebar, we’ve raised about 70% of the recurring support we need to move to Berlin. We tend to field a lot of questions and also pick up on various perceptions (and misperceptions) about where our support comes from (or is supposed to come from), so I thought I’d try to break down the numbers a little bit and show what our support base really looks like. (Disclaimer: I have no idea how typical we are among missionaries in general. I have a feeling we’re not unusual among those from our agency, but these numbers are our own.)

Here’s what the numbers show:

  1. Most of our support comes from individual donors, not church budgets. We receive support from four churches; only two of those are in our denomination. Together, they account for 32% of our total monthly support need, less than half of what we’ve raised so far. While we are making an effort to seek support from as many churches as possible, it seems reasonable to project that a solid majority of our regular giving will come from individuals. As of this writing, we have 59 pledges from individuals – that’s about 15 individual supporters for every supporting church! We know that we are at least somewhat representative in this respect: while our agency reported a 3% overall increase in missionary support from 2012 to 2013, support from churches dropped 8%.
  2. “Small” pledges add up. New supporters are sometimes apologetic about how small their commitments are, but pledges of $50/month or less account for 37% of the individual support we’ve raised so far. Of course it’s easy to get excited about big pledges when they show up, but it’s important to understand that “every little bit helps” isn’t just a platitude. We wouldn’t be nearly as far along as we are without dozens of people giving at these levels. Every person or family who gives what they can is a partner, somebody who is affirming our calling and investing their resources in us, and that means a lot.
  3. We need a big team. This follows directly from the last two points: we are supported mostly by individuals, and while some of those are able to give at high levels, the overall average is a little over $60/month. If that stays consistent, then we’ll still need about 50 more individual supporters (fewer if we are picked up by some churches at higher levels).
  4. Recurring is recurring. We love year-end giving, we really do – but while it can save the day when budget shortfalls loom, it’s not that helpful for getting to the field in the first place. In theory, if our support account fills up with enough one-time giving, that can be prorated over a five-year term to cover our monthly budget, but that means our account would be drained by the time we are back in the States between terms. What’s crucial for us is commitment, whether that means giving every month (or quarter, or half-year) or promising that a certain part of your year-end giving will go to us every year. Of our 59 individual supporters, seven have made annual pledges, which are together worth $350 of our monthly budget.

We spend a lot of our time lately beating the drum of our need for people to commit to ongoing support, and I think that can be intimidating to people. Who knows whether the monthly pledge I make this year will be sustainable five years down the road? People lose jobs, gain dependents, incur unexpected costs – James 4:13-15 comes to mind. What we are asking when we ask for support is an act of faith, a commitment that only divine providence will allow to be kept. We trust that God has called and equipped us to be sent, and we trust (and hope you will trust) that He is likewise calling and equipping you and many others like you to send, regardless of what the numbers look like to our dim, frail eyes.

-Ben