Suggestions for how to Give More to Missions

by David Cox

(1) Do not look at missions as a percentage of your church's income but rather as a mission you wish to accomplish. Live with your missionary as he ministers. Follow his needs, his disappointments, his victories. Want to have a substantial part of his ministry and the heavenly blessings of what he is doing.

(2) Take a multi-faceted approach to raising money for missions - Take a percentage and then encourage people to give one time donations above that amount to a particular missionary, and if possible for a particular need. Think of what your missionary needs, and anticipate it, and meet those needs.

(3) Try methods of little bit here and there - Here you can take an approach of cutting back on something in your personal life in order to give an extra $5 or $10 per week. If a church of 100 does this, they may be able to raise an addition $100 to $250 a month for missions.

(4) Probably the best method of raising more money for missions is to preach regularly on missions, and to weekly bring to the attention of the congregation specific missionary prayer letter situations and pray publicly and earnestly for them. All too many pastors have made missions a taboo for them. They hand off the missions things to junior staff members which communicates to their people that it is not important to the pastor (thus not to the people either). There are few or no mission conferences and missionary presentations, and no special projects come to the congregation's attention. This is why missions giving is weak and feeble.

(5) Make an attempt to do something significant for missions. Too often a church can push a million dollar building program, but they cannot buy one of their missionaries a new car. Why? One is necessary but the other is not?

(6) Filter your missions giving to only mission causes that you are able to fully put 100% behind them. Frankly, things really stink in missions. Mission boards can raise millions of dollars for homeside mission headquarters, but individual missionaries get the scraps. Everything thinkable has turned into a missions cause. Keep your missions giving pure, only giving to causes that are directly involved in evangelism and church planting. Take up one time offerings for other causes but keep them from stealing your missions funds.